Reflections from Bright Side’s Early Festival Research

While working on early-stage strategy for Bright Side, the question I keep hearing is:
“What exactly are we trying to illuminate?”

It sounds poetic, but it’s actually very practical. Bright Side specializes in immersive visual storytelling, and most of its past work has focused on cultural landmarks in Scotland—castles, ruins, heritage buildings. But as we begin to think about expanding into broader European or even international markets, a structural question surfaces:
What happens when those sites no longer belong to us? Where do we send our light then?

So, we turned to festivals.

Festivals are emotional amplifiers.

They rearrange how people move, feel, and relate to public space.

They’re not as contained as exhibitions, nor as narratively rigid as theater. They’re freer, more open, a little chaotic—which makes them ideal for unexpected lighting, temporary spatial moments, and shared memory.

We started researching three main types of festivals: heritage-focused, science & education, and brand-sponsored events like wine or beer festivals. They might seem unrelated, but they all share something in common:
They’re full of things waiting to be illuminated.

Take heritage festivals, for example. Cities often open up old buildings that are usually closed to the public. These spaces have stories, structure, and a quiet need to be reactivated. In this case, light isn’t decoration—it’s a form of intervention.

We were skeptical about wine festivals at first, thinking they might be too commercial. But it turns out, they’re powerful sensory spaces. Taste, scent, ambient sound, spatial rhythm—and the narrative embedded in “vintage,” “terroir,” and time—all of these align beautifully with immersive storytelling.
If wine carries memory, we can make that memory visible.

As for science festivals, they lean heavily into interaction and public education. They’re about participation and accessibility, which makes them ideal for using light, sound, and space to turn abstract knowledge into emotional experience.

But this isn’t just about finding more clients.

It’s about rethinking the way we collaborate.

We don’t want to just respond to briefs. We also don’t want to overshadow anyone.
What we’re aiming for is this: Can Bright Side design a dream space within a festival?
Maybe not the biggest stage—maybe it’s a tunnel, a wall, a light path. But it’s crafted in our visual language, with our narrative rhythm, and it stays with people.
Something that quietly says: “This was designed. This was felt.”

Ideally, it’s a space that makes the organizers, the brands, the audiences feel like:
This dream—was worth lighting up.

Right now, we’re mostly in research and framework mode. We’ve gathered some useful numbers—heritage tourism in Europe is growing steadily at 3.5% per year; wine tourism is rising even faster, nearly 12% annually. These festivals aren’t just cultural events, they’re high-value brand touchpoints.

But more than data, what excites us is the possibility that stories can actually unfold in these spaces.

Our next step may be choosing one festival type to prototype with—maybe Christmas markets, maybe a wine event—and building a testbed experience model. We’re asking ourselves:
What emotional curve does our light want to follow?
Can it be quieter? Wilder? More memorable?
Can we escape the purely “executional” mode and start creating those rare, lasting moments people carry with them?

Light doesn’t just illuminate surfaces. It reveals where it’s worth pausing.

Searching for Where the Light Lands / JUDY's BLOG💗 by is licensed under a