East City Films Joins the CoSTAR Evolve Programme

We’ve joined the CoSTAR Network’s Evolve programme. For us it comes down to one question: how do you take an immersive experience beyond its premiere and give it a sustainable life?

Most people see a VR experience at a festival and assume the hard part is done. The experience exists, job finished. In reality, that’s about 30% of the work.

Getting an immersive experience from a festival premiere to a sustainable touring life is a completely different challenge. You’re dealing with venue logistics, technical riders, installation costs, staffing, insurance, shipping, and the basic question of whether the economics actually work at each stop.

We’ve been touring In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats for over three years now, across festivals, museums and cultural venues in the UK and internationally. Every venue is different. Every install is a negotiation between the ideal experience and the practical reality of the space, the budget and the audience throughput.

That’s exactly what Evolve is helping us work through: how we scale what we’ve built – not just this project, but the model behind it.

The immersive sector talks a lot about the creative work. It talks much less about what it takes to keep that work alive and in front of audiences after the premiere. That’s the part we find most interesting, and it’s where we think the UK has a real opportunity to build something sustainable.

We’re looking forward to exploring all of this with CoSTAR Evolve over the coming year.