Video Walls & Tech Projects

LUSH Shinjuku Facade | LUSH Japan | Shinjuku, Tokyo

Project for LUSH Digital and LUSH Japan opening the largest LUSH store in Asia.

Located just outside Shinjuku train station - one of the busiest train stations in the world - LUSH Digital worked on a collaboration with LUSH Japan to create a digital facade spanning four floors of the five-story building. Since this screen was the only one of its kind in the world, custom built to fit the dimensions of the curved windows it sits behind, this was by far the toughest project I’d ever undertaken. The biggest challenge here was figuring out how to deliver content to the screen whilst it was being built and installed. Despite being made up of four separate screens, it operated and received content as if it were just one; meaning I had to create a video that included sections of video for all four screens wrapped up into one file. This meant the screen had its own unique aspect ratio, its own pixel resolution and brought with it many issues. We wanted to create content that seamlessly blended into the building and flowed naturally when elements moved from one screen to another. Where many screens of this nature go wrong however is that they don’t account for gaps within the screens - If we simply made a vertical video and pushed that content to the screen, it would either appear stretched, warped or elements moving from one section of screen to the section below it would ‘jump’ and distort the image. I solved this problem by working with the architecture blueprints of the building. By calculating the physical dimensions of each screen, I was able to say that X was equal to the width of each screen and Y was equal to the height of each screen. This allowed me to calculate the physical dimensions equal to the pixel resolution of each screen. I was then able to calculate the physical distance between each screen and apply a pixel resolution to that space. By then adding up the resolution of each screen combined with the resolution of each gap, we had a ‘super-resolution’ to work with and could emulate the effect of the screen at a much smaller scale. However, the software that runs the facade is unable to account for the gaps between each screen so I created an After Effects template that allowed us to overproduce the content at the ‘super-resolution’ and then have After Effects auto-delete the data in the gaps for us so we wouldn’t have to do it manually each time we made new content. So the exports we had looked odd but once blown up full scale on the facade itself, worked perfectly and blended into the building as desired.

As for the content on the screen, we created a playlist of videos that alternated between the store’s branding, unique visual art and adverts related to products and services available in-store such as spa treatments, skincare, haircare and more.

LUSH Munich Flipdisc | LUSH Digital | Munich, Germany

Project for LUSH Digital using a 7 meter Flipdisc installation above their Bath Bomb range in a new flagship store located in central Munich.

LUSH’s Tech Warrior department built this unique Flipdisc unit to sit within their new store as an art installation and an alternative to a traditional screen often used in retail as it uses far less power than a traditional screen and is much more environmentally friendly. This project posed many challenges but was ultimately great fun. The screen is made of 18,816 tiny discs; each one being black on one side and white on the other with a magnet sat behind telling it what colour to display. Each disc represented one pixel and every animation we created had to be pixel perfect to avoid any kind of rough edges around the lettering. To solve that issue I created multiple custom typefaces that allowed us to create each design pixel perfect before animating.

LUSH Concept Spa - New Spa Experience | LUSH Japan | Shinjuku, Tokyo

Project for LUSH Digital and LUSH Asia bringing a whole new Spa experience to LUSH’s Japanese customers.

The 4th floor at the Shinjuku flagship store featured five different screens; two mirror screens, one touch interactive Spa menu, a three-piece split screen and a touch interactive three-piece split screen. The screens are located in five separate areas around the floor to help guide customers on this unique new experience. The first mirror screen features a simple text animation greeting customers in 4 different languages; reflecting the customers image whilst asking them “How would you like to feel?”. The second mirror screen once again reflects the customer’s image but this time makes use of visuals taken of the different treatments available; allowing the customer to feel like they’re part of it. Screen three is a touchscreen interactive menu that allows customers or staff to browse through each of the treatments themselves; each treatment featuring a short hero video to help give the customer an understanding of what’s included in the package they’re looking at. The fourth screen posed a tougher technical challenge; we had three 60” tv’s mounted in portrait mode and created an edit utilising imagery of all the different treatments - This allowed us to target different information to different screens whilst also being able to manipulate images across all three screen at once perfectly in sync with one-another. The fifth and final screen was another three-piece split screen, however, this time with added touch interactive capabilities; this screen is for staff members to use during consultations with customers, allowing those customers to choose the type of mood they’re in and how they would like to feel during their treatment.

LUSH Tsim Sha Tsui Billboard Advert | LUSH Asia | Hong Kong

Project for LUSH Asia to advertise the opening of a new Naked shop in the local area.

Coinciding with the launch of one of LUSH’s Naked Shops in Hong Kong, I collaborated with the LUSH Asia team to concept and create an advert designed to fit this odd shaped visual billboard. The team wanted to show the use of ‘naked’ products (products that require no packaging) whilst having something that could instantly be recognised as LUSH. We opted for bright pink bath art whilst showing a diverse range of models using their product.

Note: I was unable to travel to Hong Kong during this project due to ongoing protests in the region. Images provided by colleagues in the area.

LUSH Raspberry Pi Screen Boxes | LUSH Digital | London, Liverpool, Munich, Tokyo

coming soon.

LUSH Lens Kiosk | LUSH Digital | London, Liverpool, Munich

Project for LUSH Digital developing on their existing LUSH Lens platform to take it to shops.

LUSH Lens is a feature built into LUSH’s iOS and Android applications that allows users to scan products in-store in order to find out more about the product such as its ingredients, how to use the product and more. Tasked with creating a buzz around around the launch of a new range of gifts, I concepted a physical install to shops that would allow customers to digitally unbox the gifts in-store and give them all the information they could need regarding the products inside. Working in collaboration with LUSH’s Tech Warrior department, the team effectively ported over some of the code behind Lens and trained a new model to recognise the gifts. We refined the concept and landed on what became the end product; a customer would place their gift on a marker, a camera would detect which gift has been placed which then triggered an iPad and television to display relevant information. The screen would play a video unboxing the gift whilst the iPad would pop up with more detailed information that a customer could scroll through. We created 14 product videos and a screensaver - something that would play when a customer wasn’t interacting with the Kiosk.