Taking Flight

Australia’s Night Noodle Markets are a destination for the exotic. Visitors converge on the event each year to try foreign and familiar foods from cultures around the world. A gateway into the culture of regions across Asia, the event presented a perfect opportunity for Hong Kong’s signature airline, Cathay Pacific, to showcase the diversity of their brand. However, in the noisy environment of a live festival, finding a way to draw the link from food to culture would be paramount.

Soaring above the markets, Taking Flight was an interactive light installation providing visitors with an iconic place to gather and eat, while treating them to a spectacular show of light and sound. Created in partnership with Traffik Marketing, its goal was to create a lively, vibrant digital marketing activation that would allow Cathay Pacific to ‘own’ the Night Noodle Markets, both in the real world and across social media.

At the heart of the interactive artwork was a series of 30 second compositions by musician Ben Romalis, each representing a distinct culture and region. These pieces were then used as the inspiration for our visual programming of the corresponding light performance. The cultural acoustic accents of each composition – from the drums of sub-saharan Africa to the distinct plucked instrumentals of Thailand – also performed a storytelling role, helping to connect each performance to the place that inspired it.

Using the Cathay Pacific brand colours as our colour palette, we then created the visual performance through moving silhouettes mapped onto the 3D LED matrix. Despite the limited resolution of this approach, we strove to design animations that reflected the cultural tone of each destination – the rising red sun of Japan levitated to calm instrumentals, while the busy nightlife of Hong Kong was visualised through a more erratic composition.

After initial success, Taking Flight was a feature sculpture and meeting place at Night Noodle Markets across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Through its social media integration, the light installation’s performance was initiated over 12,000 times across these activations, reaching over 1.2 million people around Australia in just a few short days.