Vivid Sydney
Lighting of the Sails 2024
For Vivid Sydney 2024, we collaborated with artist Julia Gutman to transform her textile-based practice into a large-scale animated work projected nightly onto the Sydney Opera House.
The result was a richly detailed, narrative-driven experience that translated handcrafted materials into a living digital artwork — seen by millions across the festival.
Large-scale projection and generative animation system
The brief
The Lighting of the Sails is the centrepiece of Vivid Sydney — one of the world’s largest light festivals, drawing millions of visitors each year.
For 2024, the brief was to translate Julia Gutman’s deeply tactile, textile-based artworks into a projection that could hold its own at architectural scale — while preserving the intimacy and emotional depth of the original work.
The experience
A dreamlike narrative unfolds across the sails, following a protagonist through a surreal landscape constructed entirely from fabric — denim rivers, satin terrain, stitched figures and layered textures.
The work blends myth, memory and identity, reinterpreting classical storytelling through a contemporary lens while staying grounded in physical materials.
Projected nightly as the centrepiece of Vivid Sydney, the experience transformed the Opera House into a living canvas — simultaneously monumental and deeply personal, viewed by millions across the festival.
The build
Custom AI-assisted animation pipeline built using ComfyUI
Stable Diffusion XL workflows with custom-trained LoRAs based on the artist’s work
Style-preserving generative system to maintain visual consistency at scale
Cloud-native production and delivery pipeline for high-volume rendering and iteration
6K, 50fps projection output mapped precisely to Opera House geometry
To preserve the integrity of the artist’s practice, we didn’t use AI as a shortcut — we built a system that extended it, ensuring every frame remained true to the source material while enabling production at architectural scale.
