Photos from Oz: Christmas at Castle Howard 2025
3rd December 2025
We were back at Lightworks in Blackpool at the end of November for one of our favourite weeks of the year – DigiLab!
ITD co-Artistic Director Simon Wainwright, Lighting Designer Andrew Crofts, ITD Creative Engagement Manager Ben Mellor and artist Laura Spark were joined by eleven practitioners at the home of Blackpool’s Illuminations for a week dedicated to learning about projection mapping, enhancing creative skills and understanding more about bringing large light installations to life.
With creative backgrounds ranging from fine art and animation to creative technicians, theatre design and performance, our participants were each invited to approach the week of learning from their own unique perspectives in collaborative fashion.
Working in three groups, participants were given a letter written by or connected to a famous person as a jumping off point for creating their own short animation piece to be projection-mapped onto a scale model of popular Blackpool heritage buildings.
At the close of the week, the groups were able to share their fantastic creations with an audience of light festival producers from the area – and what creations! Beautiful, absurd, emotional, whimsical, funny; it was a joy to see the pieces come to life after days of hard work, experimentation and imagination.
As well as observing the work, the festival producers were also on hand to answer questions from the teams, giving advice on what it takes to get artworks shown and delivered at festivals and similar events. There was also the opportunity in the week for participants to make the most of the surroundings and take a tour around Lightworks, seeing where the famous Illuminations are created and housed.
As always, the week flew by in a glorious haze of creativity, feverish teamwork, lightbulb moments, a lot of laughs and a fair bit of inspiration found in cups of tea. A huge thanks to everyone involved in another brilliant DigiLab.
We were delighted to have photographer Ed Waring on hand to capture the groups in the final stages of working as well as presenting their pieces. You can see the full gallery below.
latest news
Support our work
If you have enjoyed watching a show or taking part in one of our activities, and would like to support our future work, you can make a one-off financial gift. Please click below.