Celestia

The story we wanted to tell

The experience follows a human arc: awakening, becoming, transformation, belonging, and radiance. It begins with the birth of light and moves through moments of wonder, inner turbulence, renewal, connection, and transcendence.

Celestia was designed for people of all backgrounds. Its themes are universal: creation, legacy, struggle, resilience, community, and belonging. The experience creates space for each visitor to find something personal within a collective moment.

At the centre of the creative approach was one of Normal Studio’s core ambitions: to tell stories that make people feel. The story guided the structure of the experience, the visual progression, the relationship to the architecture, and the way music, light, and atmosphere were used throughout the show.

The Space

Saint John’s Cathedral was treated from the start as one of the main characters of the experience. The building served as a source of inspiration for how the story was designed and how it would unfold in space.

The current cathedral was completed in 1911 after a fire destroyed the previous building in 1903. Designed in the Gothic Revival tradition, it carries more than a century of architectural, musical, and spiritual history. Its height, stone surfaces, stained glass, arches, acoustics, and sacred details shaped the creative direction from the beginning.

In Denver, the challenge was to respect the spirit of Saint John’s Cathedral while opening it toward a contemporary immersive language. The result is an experience that feels rooted in the space, rather than imposed onto it. Projection, light, music, and spatial sound were used to reveal and amplify the architecture, allowing the cathedral itself to become part of the storytelling.

Pushing our Technological Pipeline

Celestia pushed Normal Studio’s production pipeline to a new level.

The project required a full architectural projection mapping experience inside a cathedral. The scale of the building, the height of the nave, the complexity of the surfaces, and the acoustics of the space shaped every creative and technical decision.

To meet this challenge, the team developed a precise virtual twin of the cathedral. This allowed us to anticipate how content would interact with the architecture before arriving on site, and to make more informed creative and technical decisions throughout production.

The visual workflow combined After Effects, Unreal Engine, Notch, TouchDesigner, and Vertex media server. The show was composed across 12 scenes, with Unreal Engine used for previsualization and spatial review, including VR review of content in context. NDI helped the team stream and evaluate work more fluidly during production.

Notch played an important role in the real-time content pipeline. It was used to create procedural effects, particle systems, dynamic masks, lighting-driven motion, and complex 3D animation elements that could be tested and refined with speed. This gave the team more flexibility during production and helped reduce bottlenecks that would typically require heavier rendering workflows.

The goal was not to make the technology visible. It was to use it in service of the story, the architecture, and the emotional experience.

A producer-led partnership and a defining step for Normal Studio

Celestia was developed through a partnership between Normal Studio and Paquin Entertainment Group. Together, we shaped an experience that could live inside a specific place while carrying a universal story, adaptable to each venue but emotionally consistent at its core.

This collaboration allowed the project to grow beyond a traditional service model. Normal was not only delivering visual content; we were defining the experience, the format, the creative direction, and the production approach. Celestia represents an evolution in how we position ourselves: as creators and producers of immersive experiences.

The project introduced a new level of complexity and ambition for the studio. It brought together many capabilities we had developed over time: visual content creation, real-time workflows, technical design, spatial sound, light design, architectural mapping, and on-site integration.

Celestia pushed our tools, our workflow, and our team to the next level. It also confirmed something essential about Normal: our ability to combine creative sensitivity with production strength, and to deliver highly complex immersive experiences without losing the human emotion at their centre.