Watch our seven-minute journey through Factory Fifteen, capturing 30 seconds from every year of the studio. Follow our evolution from an experimental design practice to award-winning filmmakers and a global experience design studio. We’ve always followed our curiosity, embracing new technologies, pushing creative boundaries, and partnering with some of the world’s most innovative voices in creative technology.

Megalomania: One of the central images from this beautifully melancholic film, shows the London Eye inhabited by informal dwellings referencing Tafuri’s reading of Piranesi’s ‘Carceri’, has been used in numerous architectural publications as a representation of a future dystopia, however, the architecture in the film signals the end of an determinism rooted in traditional physical certainties and heralds the start of a new era post-digital augmented spatiality.

Robots of Brixton: Kibwe’s award winning film uses robots to stand in for London’s marginalised and oppressed communities, beautifully detailed and realised, drawing from his own experiences as a black Londoner, a long time SF fan, and incorporating documentary news footage alongside stunning digital animation the film rightly achieved critical acclaim for its prescient description of the injustices of surveillance capitalism.

The Golden Age – Somewhere: Paul’s film about the domestic uses of post-singularity smart matter is much more than an exercise in technical virtuosity, though it is also clearly that, it is a beautifully realised evocation of both the powerful promise of future immersive nano-technologies alongside a prescient reminder that bugs and glitches will forever render us at the whims of bandwidth and user interface.

Written by Nic Clear

To mark our anniversary we’ve put together four special retrospectives covering our journey and work across design, experiences, film and architectural visualisation. Each one aims to not be a simple linear explanation of our work, but an insightful view into how we work within these disciplines and the key projects that have shaped that journey.

We marked our 15th birthday with a celebration at Village Underground, complete with the now-infamous Factory Fifteen Awards, honouring some of the most influential people in our story so far.

It was a huge privilege to celebrate Mat Townsend as MVP, SEW Architects as Best Client, Nexus Studios as Best Partner, Nic Clear as Best Mentor, and to present a very special award to Claire Pepper, Jono’s wife.

It was an emotional rollercoaster, and we’re deeply grateful to everyone who came and helped make it such a meaningful night.

In true FF style we ended the night with a musical masterclass with Claire Spooner aka Just Her getting the crowd going and then Electronic Music pioneer Max Cooper putting on his legendary AV show on for us till the early hours. Thanks for those that danced the night away in the heat till the end, we love you all.