Making an Augmented Reality Documentary Film

In 2022, I made this augmented reality documentary film for Adobe, following Neon, a design studio based in Berwick-upon-Tweed, as they moved beyond their usual large-scale sculptural work into augmented reality for the first time. Neon are known for architectural and site-specific pieces, and the film follows what happened when they started building work that only exists digitally.

“While we predominantly build architectural and sculptural projects, we’ve recently been exploring how we extend our work into augmented reality.”

That shift, from physical material to digital space, runs through the whole film.

Finding Inspiration on the Northumberland Coast

Neon’s studio sits on the Northumberland coast near Berwick-upon-Tweed, and that landscape feeds directly into their work. The wide skies and open coastline around the studio come up again and again in how they talk about scale and space, and it was clearly part of what shaped this project too.

“We’re lucky enough to be based in one of the most beautiful parts of the UK. The spectacular Northumberland coastline is a fantastic place to spend time, take it all in, and gain inspiration for our new projects.”

Bringing Ideas to Life with Adobe Aero

Neon built the piece using Adobe Aero, a tool that let them move from sculptural thinking into a fully realised augmented reality project surprisingly quickly. Watching that learning curve happen in real time, from no experience of the tool to a finished piece, was one of the most interesting parts of filming.

“We love Adobe Aero for its simplicity. We were able to move very quickly from no knowledge to creating a fully realised augmented reality project in very little time.”

What struck me filming it was how differently Neon talked about scale once they were working digitally. A form that would be impossible to build in steel or timber becomes straightforward once gravity and material cost stop being a factor, and you can see that freedom shift how they were thinking as the project developed.

A Shared Lantern Festival

The project grew out of the idea of a lantern festival, an event where people gather to make a wish for the future. Neon wanted to translate that shared moment into something people could take part in from anywhere, using augmented reality to let people launch their own virtual lantern into a shared three-dimensional space, wherever they happened to be watching from.

Access is usually the limiting factor with Neon’s work. Their sculptures are large, site-specific and tied to a particular place, so most people only ever encounter them if they happen to be nearby. Augmented reality removes that constraint entirely, and that was clearly part of the appeal for them.

Filming Neon

Filming this project meant spending time with people who normally think in steel, timber and scale models, as they worked out how the same instincts applied to something with no physical form at all. There’s a moment in the film where that uncertainty is genuinely visible, testing an idea to see whether it holds up once you can actually walk around it in the space, rather than judging it from a screen.

It’s a smaller, quicker project than some of the larger installations Neon are known for, but it captures something real about how a creative practice adapts when the tools underneath it change completely. Watching an architectural studio pick up a new digital medium and get genuinely excited about it, rather than treat it as a marketing exercise, was what made this worth filming.

About Neon and Adobe Aero

Neon is a design studio based in Berwick-upon-Tweed working across large-scale architectural and sculptural commissions. This augmented reality documentary film was commissioned by Adobe to document Neon’s first project built in Adobe Aero, its augmented reality design tool. You can find out more about Neon’s work at neon.org.uk, or about the tool itself at adobe.com/aero.