Commissioned by the Museum of Liverpool.
China's First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors ran at Liverpool's World Museum from February to October 2018 — the first time the famous figures had travelled to the north of England. The exhibition featured ten life-size, 2,000-year-old warriors alongside more than 180 artefacts from Shaanxi province, drew over 600,000 visitors, and generated an estimated £78 million for the local economy. Alongside the physical artefacts, the museum also hosted a virtual exhibition produced separately by another studio.
We were brought in to design and produce the online advertising trailer for the show. The brief was to capture something of the army's scale and mystery without relying on literal recreation.
What we did.
The concept took its visual cues from traditional Chinese ink and watercolour painting — soft edges, drifting pigment, forms that emerge and dissolve back into negative space. Rather than render hard-surface warriors, we treated the army as something closer to memory or apparition: cavalry forming out of mist, dispersing, reforming. It felt more honest to the experience of standing in front of the real thing — figures that have outlasted dynasties and still feel half-present, half-ghost.
The piece was built in Cinema 4D using X-Particles, with extensive fluid simulation work to drive the smoke and ink behaviour, and rendered in Arnold. Smoke is treated as a fluid in simulation, so much of the development time went into shaping the fluid dynamics — getting the painterly dispersal to read at the right pace, with weight and drift that felt brushed rather than computed. The green palette gave the whole piece a slightly otherworldly quality, leaning into the archaeological and the supernatural in equal measure.
