Creating the opening experience for Dell Forum 2025
How a story inspired by Ndlovu Youth Choir brought live performance and a digital world together.
An event opening has a difficult job: turn a room full of arrivals into an audience ready to engage. For Dell Forum South Africa 2025, we built that moment around Ndlovu Youth Choir, combining their live performance with a cinematic story inspired by their journey from rural Limpopo to the global stage.
It was our second consecutive year creating the opening experience. The brief was clear: create a moment that would command attention and set the tone for an event centred on technology, transformation and AI.
Finding the story in the song
We knew from the outset that Ndlovu Youth Choir would be part of the performance. Our first creative decision was to choose a song with the emotional range and energy to carry the opening. After exploring options with the client, we selected The Greatest Show.
The song gave us a theatrical starting point. The choir’s own story gave it a human centre. Our task was to connect that story to Dell Forum’s focus on innovation by creating visuals that would support the performers on stage.
A journey through a neon savanna
Creating avatars for the entire choir was beyond the project’s scope, so we focused the narrative on one young protagonist: a dreamer on the path to becoming a performer. His transformation gave the audience a clear thread to follow.
The story began in a rural village. A mentor guided him into a stylised AI realm, imagined as a neon savanna where African landscapes met a futuristic visual language. Textures and landmarks from Limpopo, including the baobab tree, anchored the world in a recognisable sense of place.
The mentor eventually transformed into an elephant, a symbolic reference to the choir’s name, Ndlovu. That transformation linked the digital spectacle back to the live performers’ identity.
Building a world that could perform
With the narrative established, we wrote the script, broke it into scenes and shots, and worked with a storyboard artist to develop the visual treatment. Mood boards defined the village, characters, elephant and AI landscape, giving the production a consistent direction before animation began.
Young Man
Female Elder
Djembe
Opening Sunrise
Village
Drummer
Neon Savanna
Movement needed the same attention as the imagery. We captured a real djembe drummer’s performance through motion capture, transferring human rhythm and physical expression to the character on screen. This helped the animated performance feel connected to the music.
Once the animatic and visual direction were in place, we modelled characters, built environments and assembled the shots in Unreal Engine. The digital world took shape scene by scene, with the live performance guiding the audiovisual experience.
Using AI within a directed production
We used a hybrid production approach. Some shots were rendered directly in Unreal Engine. We started others as still frames from Unreal, then enhanced and animated them with AI to create more complex cinematic moments.
This approach let us extend selected shots beyond what we could achieve natively within the production timeline. The script, storyboards and established visual world gave those AI-assisted sequences a clear creative framework.
Bringing the story to the stage
The finished audiovisual sequence was designed to work in sync with Ndlovu Youth Choir live on stage. The screen carried the protagonist’s journey while the choir supplied the human presence and energy at the heart of the opening.
For Brand Avatar, the project demonstrates how digital characters and AI-assisted filmmaking can serve a live event’s story. The creative idea shaped the production choices, from the drummer’s captured movement to the elephant transformation. Together, they gave Dell Forum 2025 an opening built around music, cultural identity and a sense of possibility.
