Stories forge connections. They connect us to people, to places, to things, and in doing so, they lay the foundation for ideas to come to life. Stories give our human potential not only a trajectory, but a shape. In other words, they are the blueprint we use to build and rebuild the world around us – it’s stories that help make the intangible tangible, that enable us to create something where there once was nothing.
Revery partnered with Unity to develop a series for the launch of Reflect, a Building Information Modeling software suite that allows users to interact with their ideas in real-time. We found our entry point into this project through story – how Unity was powering the next generation of creators to shape the world around them. How do we give our ideas physical form? Why do we push ourselves to create? And, how do the tools we use in the process expand the scope of our storytelling?
“It would be fair to say a lot of architects have an itch to create something… It’s quite exciting to create something that wasn’t there before.”
– Phil Bentley
With P+HS Architects as our subject, Revery delivered a pilot episode for a content series that explores how Unity Reflect not only enables P+HS to collaborate with their clients like never before, but also positions them to unlock an entirely new future. Our goal was not only to build empathy between Unity’s product and the viewer, but to inspire the next wave of potential storytellers – whether they tell their stories in software, in buildings, in any discipline at all.
We captured this episode on a lightning-fast end-to-end timeline, with both a local in-person crew and remote production support. We hit the usual pandemic-era snags: we location scouted remotely, we had to capture some of our interviews remotely, and – with Unity in Montreal, our client partners in Leeds, UK and our core team on the West Coast – we were working across three time zones. In other words, we had to imagine the story we were telling before we knew how to tell it.
But in some ways, this fit: P+HS is in the business of creating something out of nothing, and so are we. We are always shaping the world through stories, and yet stories can be malleable, flexible, able to take the shape of the world around them. Our project with Unity was a reminder that, even with the most defined foundation, a story can be built into any form – even ones we’ve never seen before.