Private Client Dinner · Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich · 26 Nov 2023
When the ceiling is the show.
Sir James Thornhill's Painted Hall — often called Britain's Sistine Chapel — was handed to Plan A for one private Van Cleef & Arpels client dinner. We treated the 40,000-square-foot Baroque ceiling as a canvas, time-coded it to a live orchestra, a ballet and a candlelit table that ran the length of the room, and ran the entire night from a single show booth.
The Venue
The Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich is one of the most photographed Baroque interiors in Europe — a sixty-foot, fully painted ceiling that took Thornhill nineteen years. Plan A was asked to honour it, then disappear into it. The brief: take a private Van Cleef & Arpels client dinner and, for one night only, turn the architecture itself into the show.
The 40,000-square-foot Thornhill ceiling was photogrammetry-scanned, sliced and re-projected edge-to-edge by eight high-output laser projectors. Across the night the map moved through five worlds — cosmos, garden, floral vault, ember and a faithful classic restore of the original painting — without ever breaking the Baroque geometry beneath.
8× high-output laser projectors, edge-blended across the full vault.
Resolume Arena — per-surface masks, time-code locked to show run.
Bespoke 3D content, scanned ceiling base + reactive passes.
ChamSys MagicQ + MIDI time-code from the show-runner.
Beneath the ceiling, a second rig held the room together. Column uplight on every Corinthian pier, pediment accent at the West Wall, hidden in-table LED that pulsed with the ceiling cues, and a stage key that lit a full ballet and orchestra under Thornhill's arch.
Recessed RGBW uplight on every column. Hidden niche pin-spots.
In-table LED line — colour-matched to the ceiling cue, candle-warm at idle.
Discreet front-key + back-light for orchestra, ballet and opera.
Zero rigging on protected surfaces. Free-standing truss only.
The entire night ran from a single show booth in the gallery: Resolume Arena drove the ceiling, ChamSys MagicQ drove the room, both locked to the same time-code as the orchestra and the speeches. One operator, one cue stack, one take.
What the room saw
"The ceiling didn't just light up — it moved with the music. Guests stopped eating to look up. For one night, Greenwich became somewhere else entirely."— Plan A · Show notes · 26 Nov 2023
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From Sharjah's mosques to Greenwich's painted ceilings — when the venue is the show, we're the studio you want on the night.
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