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Project: The Netherlands Pavilion. Low Land, High Energy.

How does a country below sea level become a driving force in energy? A nation\u2019s mindset, staged in four acts, at a World Expo devoted to the future of power.

The Commission

After an extensive tender, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency entrusted Qualia Forge with the national pavilion whole: concept, design, and realization under one roof, as creative solutions agency. The audience: millions of guests from 115 nations, most giving it twenty minutes.

The bright entrance of the pavilion: white walls, black line drawings, and a red tulip-bulb welcome graphic.
Act one: Dutch invention, drawn in line.

Four Acts, One Waterline

  1. The mindset, drawn in line. A bright pre-show of Dutch invention in white, black, and orange, borrowed from the country\u2019s own design tradition. Guests arrive above the waterline, in full light.
  2. Below the waterline. The light falls to deep blue and violet, placing every guest symbolically under the sea. The change is felt in the body before it is understood.
  3. Light with depth. The heart of the pavilion: a multilayer holographic show, projected by Mann CG, our technology wing, onto layered transparent screens.
  4. Back to daylight. Hands-on exhibits and hospitality carry guests back up, holding one sentence: low land, high energy.
A corridor bathed in deep blue and violet light, with white line drawings of turbines on the walls.
Act two: below the waterline.
Projected energy bursting across layered screens in the holographic main show.
Act three: the holographic main show.

It Started with a Pencil

Before a single projector: the complete storyboard of the main show, more than eighty numbered frames across twenty-nine sheets, drawn by hand at Mann CG. Every sheet carries the exact screen geometry of the theatre, so a pencil line made in the studio would land, months later, on the correct plane of a building that did not yet exist.

How the Holographic Guide Was Made

The guide who carries the audience through the show is made of light on a transparent screen. He was filmed on a riser built to the exact height of the show stage, in a studio dressed to true black. There is no green screen: on a transparent surface, whatever is lit becomes image, and whatever stays black becomes air. What appears in the pavilion is a real performance, kept.

A performer mid-move on a black riser in a black studio, with soft light banks around him.
The capture stage: a black void, riser at show height.

Credits

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