ROG First Light Exhibitions Digital Media

We are looking for an animation studio or motion design team to bring the stories of the Royal Observatory Greenwich to life across five galleries. This Lot is the visual heartbeat of the ROG First Light project, spanning a large-scale ceiling installation, projection-mapped historic rooms, immersive wall projections and a suite of screen-based explainers.

The work ranges from a Pepper's Ghost animation in the Lifecycle of a Star gallery to a precisely masked projection onto the original instruments in Halley's Transit Room. Briefs in this Lot are predominantly passive, with real-time generative and trigger-driven exceptions noted per brief. Content should reward both the visitor who pauses for two minutes and the one who passes through in thirty seconds. Visual coherence across galleries is essential.

We are looking for an interactive development studio, or a tightly structured consortium, to build the hands-on, visitor-driven heart of ROG First Light. This Lot covers a number of exhibits ranging from multiplayer digital games and touchscreen simulations to a live-camera reactive installation that distorts your own reflection through gravitational lensing.

The work is technically varied and genuinely ambitious. EXH31 Black Hole Mirror uses depth tracking and a real-time GPU shader to simulate a black hole effect on a live camera feed. EXH30 Black Hole Game is a multiplayer deduction game in which visitors infer the position of a hidden black hole by watching how stars move. SCD.AV.02 puts the visitor in the basket of James Glaisher's balloon. Every exhibit in this Lot asks visitors to do something, and to discover something as a result.

We are looking for a film production company to create the filmed and recorded content across the ROG First Light project. This Lot brings working scientists, historians and contemporary voices into the gallery on screen and through a headset, giving visitors a human perspective on the stories that the objects and exhibits tell.

The work includes short looping interview films with active astronomers explaining the transit method and astronomical sonification; a documentary piece at the National Physical Laboratory exploring contemporary atomic timekeeping; and Looking Back to Earth, a cinematic three-screen portrait installation presenting views of Earth from space as a moment of calm reflection at the end of the gallery journey.

We are looking for a specialist spatial audio practitioner to compose and deliver the acoustic identity of ROG First Light. This Lot covers five commissions: three large-scale multichannel soundscapes, a spoken-word audio point, and a short atmospheric installation inspired by the historic speaking pipes of the Observatory.

The soundscapes are not background music. GEF.AV.01 in the Time Department is the primary expressive engine of a ceiling-mounted light and sound show, and the lighting installation will take the composition as its creative reference. MOB.AV.05 spans three interconnected rooms of the Meridian Observatory, each with a distinct acoustic character and ceiling height, the atmospheric bed of MOB.AV.05a must contain a deliberate compositional dip timed to a star transit alignment cue issued by the Lot 1 animation contractor at picture lock. These are technically and creatively demanding commissions that require genuine multichannel spatial audio expertise.