Hadean at Cannes Marché du Film 2023 – It’s a Twiggy World

Hadean had a great outing at Cannes Marché du Film 2023. We were there to herald the release of A Virtual Walk Down Memory Lane with Twiggy, a live virtual experience that establishes a new precedent for how content for TV and Film is produced and experienced.

26 May 2023
Anthony Tomlins

Cannes Film Festival is the foremost celebration of the art of cinema. It’s an unabashedly glitzy affair, with the industry’s biggest figureheads gathering on the French south coast to pose for a photocall on the red carpet before mingling with fellow celebrities, tastemakers and innovators at its various events.

Creative Director Pierre-Olivier Carrier, CEO Craig Beddis and VP of Sales Mike Gunadi gaining A-list inspiration for their photocall poses. 

Filmmaking innovation with Film Soho

In the week leading up to its famous awards ceremony, the Cannes Marché du Film is a chance to showcase the latest in filmmaking technology and techniques. London-based pioneers of virtual production, Film Soho, hosted the ‘Cannes Next’ section of the Marché du Film, highlighting how advancements in virtual production are impacting the industry. 

The centrepiece of the event was the live filming of the final scene of a new documentary on British cultural icon Twiggy, directed by Sadie Frost, using Film Soho’s own V-Studios stage for virtual production. Here, within just 48 hours, the crew was able to set up the virtual production stage, film the scene with Twiggy herself, and edit it in time for a public screening. 

The project showed how virtual production can radically increase the speed and efficiency at which scenes making use of high-fidelity graphical effects can be produced, namely by making malleable virtual scenes available to directors, actors and crew in real-time using gaming engines. In this case, Twiggy was immersed in a photo-realistic reproduction of London’s Carnaby Street in the 1960s, rendered in Unreal Engine onto a huge LED backdrop behind her, as she recalled memories of her time there. 

A Virtual Walk Down Memory Lane with Twiggy, Designed and Powered by Hadean

The virtual recreation of Carnaby Street in 1968, where fans could get to know what made it the centre of British fashion at the time.

We were thrilled to partner with Film Soho, disguise, Epic Games and AWS, to create an interactive fan experience alongside the production.

Designed and powered by Hadean, the experience allows fans to see Carnaby Street through Twiggy’s eyes while engaging with a narrative quest based on her memories of the time.

It also helped fans to get to know more about the ongoing virtual production process, with a virtual recreation of the film set that included a cameo from Sadie Frost in avatar form, as well as exclusive behind-the-scenes live streams of Twiggy filming her part in Cannes.

The whole thing was hosted on the Hadean website using pixel streaming infrastructure from AWS, making it immediately accessible to fans of Twiggy and filmmaking around the world. 

The experience aimed to establish a new precedent for filmmaking by demonstrating how cutting-edge technology can revolutionise the way that big-screen content is produced and experienced. We are proud to say that it is the first project that uses metaverse technology to connect and immerse fans into the story and environments of a film during its production phase!

Check out the full case study here

Hadean at Cannes Marché du Film 2023

The day after filming, Film Soho and disguise hosted the Global Virtual Production Summit, a day of presentations from SMEs and partners providing innovations in the virtual production space. Our team was on hand to give a workshop on the development of the virtual experience, covering topics like: 

  • How it was able to achieve unique engagement with target audiences using dynamic elements plucked directly from the film.
  • Creative considerations that went into its design, including aesthetics, narrative design, gamification, mechanics, target audience, accessibility, and UI.
  • The significance of virtual production to the entertainment industry, and the exciting opportunities that it generates for audience engagement pre- and post-release.
  • How partnerships came together in the design and execution of the experience, and the importance of collaboration in the staging of innovative high-tech projects.

This marked our first foray into interactive experiences for media and film, and it was a thrill to be able to do it on the world’s biggest stage, alongside some of the biggest names in media and entertainment.

We look forward to more projects in this space, coming very soon. Stay tuned!


To learn more about the virtual experience, produced in collaboration with Film Soho, disguise, AWS and Epic Games, read the full case study here.  

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