Kazakhstan Immersive Expo
Client:
Kazakhstan Tourism Board
Production:
UNIT9
Role:
Creative Director (with Nemanja Askovic)
Year:
2019
Kazakhstan wanted to promote itself as a tourist destination. Not to the general public, but to the people who decide where tourism investment goes.
The audience for this experience was presidents, ministers, and international tourism investors. It needed to be extraordinary.
We created three bespoke installations inside a purpose-built visitor centre.
The Portal to the Future
A 12-metre immersive tunnel with four-minute projections across three walls, transporting visitors through four of Kazakhstan's most spectacular locations: Aktau, Borovoe, Charyn, and Turkistan, alongside future infrastructure plans for each.
The Interactive Timeline
An 18-metre table where visitors could navigate across 30+ destinations, exploring the landscapes, history, and unique character of each region.
The VR Flying Simulator
A motion-based VR experience that put visitors in the air above Kaindy Lake, one of the country's most breathtaking natural landmarks.
Awards
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FWA
FWA of the Day
How was it made?
Four crews, one country
The project started with a nationwide shoot. Four separate camera crews travelled across Kazakhstan simultaneously, capturing the country's most significant landscapes and destinations: the raw material for the tunnel projections, the interactive timeline, and the VR simulator content.
When one camera isn't enough
The tunnel's scale created an immediate technical problem: no single camera could capture footage wide enough to fill a 12 metre three-wall projection.
The solution was a custom camera rig with two cameras mounted side-by-side, their fields of view carefully overlapped so the combined footage could cover the full surface of the tunnel seamlessly.
Everything shot in the field had to account for that rig: framing, movement, and pacing all calibrated to how the footage would eventually be experienced at installation scale.
Making the audience feel the altitude
The VR Flying Simulator was built around 360° footage shot from a drone over Kaindy Lake. The edit came first: pacing the flight, choosing the moments, building the sense of altitude and movement through the cut.
Once the edit was locked, the motion platform was programmed to match it precisely: every tilt, banking turn, and descent in the footage choreographed against the physical movement of the platform so the body felt what the eyes were seeing.
Gallery
Zlaten del Castillo
Creative Director
London, UK
Brussels, Belgium
Available globally
All work shown with permission. All rights belong to the respective clients and production companies.