Giggs - The Homecoming, GALA festival
Festival announcement film and social campaign for GALA '26. Director and AI Creative Director. Produced with Iconoclast.
One postcode, one icon, one lifetime. GALA was announcing Giggs as a headliner in Peckham Rye Park, a local hero returning to the streets that made him, and the film had to feel like it was made by those streets, not about them. So Peckham isn't the backdrop. It's the witness. The film travels through Giggs' memories in the spaces they happened: an estate walkway that becomes a corridor of memory, a market that never stops moving, the park folding in on itself, a Street Fighter II bout playing out on the pavement where it actually happened. Raves and a Rude Merc 190E work as portals between time periods. It's not a chronological timeline, it's a story retold, and hidden inside it are easter eggs only real fans, friends and the people who built the legacy with him will catch. That's the point. The film was made for the audience who recognise the corners.
The visual language is cinematic street photography shot through the devices that documented the era: Sony Ericsson, Nokia, iPhone 4, archive grain. As much Channel U as BBC News as rave DVD. Winter in South East London did the grading for us, steel blues, concrete greys, sodium ambers, wet asphalt, with the AI lighting philosophy kept found-first: shape the practicals, keep the shadows honest.
Underneath it sits the same Latent Ethnography system built for City2City. Deep research gathered Giggs' story, his references and his Peckham across two decades, organised inside the AI so every generated moment belongs to its time. The generative approach let us move through spaces no shoot day could reach, a one-take through a life, while holding the balance between hyperrealism and cultural memory.
Delivered as a 9:16 master and multiple vertical cutdowns for the announcement, launching the GALA '26 presale. Peckham, SE15. First round tickets sold out in under 24 hours and the hero film reached 750k views in the same period
One postcode, one icon, one lifetime. GALA was announcing Giggs as a headliner in Peckham Rye Park, a local hero returning to the streets that made him, and the film had to feel like it was made by those streets, not about them. So Peckham isn't the backdrop. It's the witness. The film travels through Giggs' memories in the spaces they happened: an estate walkway that becomes a corridor of memory, a market that never stops moving, the park folding in on itself, a Street Fighter II bout playing out on the pavement where it actually happened. Raves and a Rude Merc 190E work as portals between time periods. It's not a chronological timeline, it's a story retold, and hidden inside it are easter eggs only real fans, friends and the people who built the legacy with him will catch. That's the point. The film was made for the audience who recognise the corners.
The visual language is cinematic street photography shot through the devices that documented the era: Sony Ericsson, Nokia, iPhone 4, archive grain. As much Channel U as BBC News as rave DVD. Winter in South East London did the grading for us, steel blues, concrete greys, sodium ambers, wet asphalt, with the AI lighting philosophy kept found-first: shape the practicals, keep the shadows honest.
Underneath it sits the same Latent Ethnography system built for City2City. Deep research gathered Giggs' story, his references and his Peckham across two decades, organised inside the AI so every generated moment belongs to its time. The generative approach let us move through spaces no shoot day could reach, a one-take through a life, while holding the balance between hyperrealism and cultural memory.
Delivered as a 9:16 master and multiple vertical cutdowns for the announcement, launching the GALA '26 presale. Peckham, SE15. First round tickets sold out in under 24 hours and the hero film reached 750k views in the same period