Birmingham 2022 Handover Ceremony

Working with the creative director, we were asked by Culture Central to build a team to create, design and deliver the response for the commonwealth games handover ceremony.

Given the short time scale of 8 weeks we looked at creating a show to maximise the reach to engage young people whilst fulfilling the KPIs set out by Birmingham City Councils bid document.

We quickly decided it would be split across 2 continents and that we wanted to design something that was a one shot finale piece live from the City. Thus a small team would go to Australia, with a young non signed rapper, that we commissioned and then set out to create a first: designing a ceremony that occurred live in the next host city for the Games completely Live. This had the advantage of allowing more people to get involved. What we decided on was a lip-sync televisual rendition of the ELOs hit Mr Blue Sky. This amazing feat of cinematography, which we covered, in one continuous shot, live in Birminghams Victoria square has been dubbed by media and viewers alike, as one of the best handovers ever, being described on the Bbc as spectacular and exceptionally executed and organised. 

It also proved you don’t need to spend millions going to a host city with a big named artist but instead you can, with creativity and foresight engage a worldwide audience with a strong and well crafted idea using hundreds of young people and allow them to shine a light on their city.