How do you put fans inside an album?
VML, SubVRsive, EMI, Epic Games +WPP
In Short
EMI and Bastille wanted a one-of-a-kind immersive experience for the album Give Me the Future. Over nine months, our team concepted a live multiplayer concert in the metaverse, then rebuilt it as a single-player VR experience when the technology and scope changed. The version that launched on Meta Quest in 2022 was built on the worlds our team concepted.
My Role
enior UX Designer on VML's Experience Innovation team, working with another Senior UX Designer, our Design Lead, and SubVRsive's engineers, while senior leaders across WPP, SubVRsive, and VML set the project's major direction. I worked on concepting, narrative, level and UI design, 2D and 3D assets, and ran the project's retrospective.
Results
The released Meta Quest experience was built on the worlds our team concepted • Microinteractions, environment objects, and details I co-created made it into the release • My retrospective turned nine months of pivots into 14 findings for future projects
Stills from the trailer for the released experience on Meta Quest.
Beginnings
In July 2021, EMI asked WPP and VML to bring the concepts, music, and themes of Bastille's new album, Give Me the Future, to life. EMI wanted to connect fans closer to the band than ever before, and Bastille wanted a world's-first immersive release alongside the album. The album already had a world of its own: Future Inc., a company selling escape into an "Innerverse." So we asked: how might we put fans inside an album, not just in front of it?
An early workshop with VML, SubVRsive, and WPP framed the “How might we” questions that guided concepting.
Anchoring a Moving Target
The first direction was a live gig, captured in 2D and 3D and streamed into a metaverse. But the vision kept moving, from a walk-through concert to talk of full console gameplay, without a fixed budget or song list. With the team, we anchored the experience on four songs from the album, each with its own world. I mapped platforms, technologies, and operations side by side, so every new idea could be checked against what was feasible, viable, and desirable. That gave each idea a place to land, or a clear reason to cut it.
I mapped platforms, technologies, and operations side by side to test what was feasible, viable, and desirable.
Left: I helped structure the experience in stages, each built around a song from the album (illustration by Griffin Waldau).
Right: an overhead map of the game environment with an “on-rails” path.
When the Tech Fell Short
After the November shoot outside London, the 3D capture of the band came back below the quality bar, and the servers a multiplayer Meta Quest experience needed proved too costly to build in time. Rather than force the original plan, I went back to exploring with the team: new gameplay and narrative concepts, environments, and a UX approach for a single-player experience, with the band's footage on screens inside the world. The format got smaller, but the album's world stayed whole.
Bastille performing in front of custom LED visuals created in Unreal Engine. The performance was recorded in 2D, and 3D capture was attempted with LIDAR.
From Passive Event to Playable World
A single-player experience still had to feel alive, but final songs, audio, and bonus content arrived late or not at all. So I designed the pieces we could control: a lobby with a podium and song-select interface, a multi-stage interaction system, song title treatments, Future Inc. branding, and sets of 2D assets to fill the screens during playback. I sketched and tested them through hundreds of sketches and quick prototypes in Blender and Gravity Sketch. When content was missing, the world still had something to say.
I white-boarded game concepts after we pivoted from a passive event to a more active, gamified experience.
I created song title treatments, Future Inc. branding, and sets of 2D assets to fill the screens during playback.
I explored a VR hub interface in Gravity Sketch and Blender.
Directing the Build
As SubVRsive's builds came in, small problems added up: no clear way to exit mid-song, black screens, interactive objects people couldn't find, and placeholder content that had nothing to do with Bastille. With another designer, I wrote detailed feedback for each build, from lighting states and the lobby podium to hover states, an exit path, and album-specific content for every screen. Each round moved the experience closer to something a first-time VR user could understand.
Top: critique sessions over Microsoft Teams. Bottom: the view in VR, with colored boxes marking where graphics would go.
Results
In early 2022, licensing and rights delays paused our build, and Epic's internal team took over a simpler fly-through version. That version launched on Meta Quest in 2022, built on the worlds our team concepted, including microinteractions, environment objects, and details from ideas I co-created. "This is the next level of interactivity within music." Dan Smith, Bastille
Learnings & Lessons
At the end, I built and ran a two-day retrospective with VML and SubVRsive, and turned it into 14 findings with fixes for future projects. The biggest: no single owner of the creative vision, work that started before scope was signed off, a waterfall process forced onto R&D, and no direct access to the band. Worldbuilding and music-inspired storytelling are where I do my best work, and this project taught me to protect them by settling ownership and scope first.
