How Framestore Brought a ‘Sex and the City’ Event to Life

Karl> I've been at Framestore for 18 years this summer. I started at Framestore as a runner after graduating from film school in London.  I got involved in the technology and engineering department and after a few years, we started our Digital Group. We now have a dedicated Immersive team that builds everything from apps to theme park experiences. We also experiment with emerging technologies. It’s funny as most people think Framestore just does film and TV projects but I’ve never done one! Not a lot of people know that we also do this sort of work.

Karl> Max are long standing partners of ours. Framestore has been working on episodic series like ‘His Dark Materials’ with HBO Max and now Max for years. We’ve also worked with their emerging technology marketing team for 10 years, developing immersive experiences that extend their IP. The Max Original series 'And Just Like That…' project began in October 2022, when Max approached us to say that series two was airing at around the same time as HBO Original 'Sex and the City’s 25th anniversary. Max wanted to organise an event celebrating this fact, complete with a big emerging technology installation. We began brainstorming ideas right away!

Karl> We were lucky enough to have a very open-ended brief. We knew that we were building an immersive experience within the event space – which would include a recreation of Carrie’s brownstone stoop and her apartment, a gift shop with merch, and even a cosmopolitan bar. 

To build the immersive experience, we began by talking to members of the show team about how to best convey the richness of the franchise over 25 years in something closer to 5 minutes. Soon, we realised that a great way to celebrate the show was to also celebrate the iconic clothes that Carrie wore. We thought: What better way to really show off the clothes than to make them 10 feet tall on huge LED screens during the event? 

Karl> We decided to build a huge 40-foot catwalk that anyone attending the event could walk through. We wanted fans to feel like they were walking straight into Carrie’s closet, where they would enter a dream-like experience that highlighted the characters’ best fashion from all seasons of ‘Sex and the City’ as well as ‘And Just Like That…’. Fans could see, feel, and hear the costumes of the series across eight ten-foot LED screens. There were also mirrors to take selfies within the space. It was like giving fans their own personal catwalk where they could experience 25 years of iconic fashion from the show.

Karl> When you’re working with emerging technology, it’s tempting to make it all about the tech. But for the ‘Sex and the City’ event, we had to be sensitive to the fact we were dealing with an IP that was set in the ‘90s. Technology doesn't play a huge part in that show, so we had to make our technology invisible.

Another big challenge was to think about the whole event experience. We decided on everything from how to guide fans through the space to what props and carpet we’d use. To help build it all, we also partnered with the XR experts at disguise to make sure our visuals would playback perfectly across all the huge LED screens in real time. And we worked with Antfood to create spatial audio so fans could be immersed in the experience. We also used AI tools to upscale the footage to 4K and slow it down to speeds as low as 30% of the original, letting us display footage at a higher quality on the ten-foot LED screens.

Karl> At Framestore, we’ve spent the last decade working on these sorts of experiences, whether that's partnering with Max or Secret Cinema or LBE in theme parks. But the past few years have really shifted things. After the lockdown, a lot of people wanted to spend more time with friends and family, experiencing their favourite films and shows in new ways. Being able to immerse yourself in an experience means you’re able to get more out of an IP that you love.

Karl> Working with the great team at Max is always a real pleasure for us, and this event was no different. Unlike traditional film and television projects, our artists were able to actually sit at the back of the event behind the LED wall and hear people enjoying the work they created. That was definitely a highlight - to be able to see and hear people’s reactions and to see the lines down Broadway queueing to get into this event. For me personally, another highlight was to be in the city itself. I still remember that my very first international trip with Framestore was to New York - I fell in love with the city instantly. Being able to launch a project with Max there so many years later was really special.