Qiddiya City

Qiddiya City is a world first: a master-planned sports and entertainment zone covering 360 sq km, currently being built amid the craggy sandstone cliffs west of Riyadh. When complete it will comprise a Formula 1-ready, 21-corner racetrack, the first Six Flags theme park outside of North America, a multipurpose stadium and a prestigious culture and arts center.

These monumental features will largely overlap within the city. Their proximity, combined with multidimensional entertainment that unfolds across all realms of perception, will power experiences that blend, blur and augment reality. 

To stir fascination among hundreds of millions of people for a place that doesn’t yet exist is quite a trick. The Qiddiya Investment Company looked for a partner capable of blending digital and physical storytelling to an uncanny degree.

We adopted groundbreaking virtual production techniques for a video campaign, conceived by our partner Droga5, that activates and feeds the public’s excitement for Qiddiya City. As much as anything in our collective decades of experience, virtual production (VP) redefines the art of the possible in digital media.

VP does away with costly, clunky green screens. Instead, utilizing a cylindrical LED screen around the stage, we were able to create a visual backdrop for a racecar driver passing through a hyper-realistically rendered Qiddiya City. VP opens up a realm of three-dimensional virtual space — a metaverse of film creation — that offers unmatched immersion for the actor, the crew and ultimately, the audience.

Qiddiya City’s first guests will be dazzled. We’d like to think, despite not utilizing any bulldozers, our mastery of VP helped build the dream that brought them there.