Step into a day of ideas, exhibitions and conversation with the designers, makers and innovators shaping worlds for screen, stage and immersive experience. Wrap up with after-show drinks, connecting and mingling with your colleagues and peers. Speakers to be announced soon.
Plan your day with engaging panels, workshops, and live demos, alongside an exhibitor showcase. Wrap up with drinks and networking. Sessions and speakers are being finalised and will be announced. Follow us on instagram for updates.
Join your industry peers for one day to gather, share and connect. Hosted at the renowned arts and design college UAL Central Saint Martins, Granary Square, Kings Cross, London.
Designing with intelligence: creativity in the age of AI
Artificial Intelligence is here. For many designers, it brings a mix of curiosity and concern. What does it mean for our jobs, our craft, and our creativity? What tools are creatives testing and how do we control the machine?
Thriving in the creative industry: building a sustainable healthy career
The creative industries can often demand long hours, constant availability, and resilience in the face of intense pressure. But truly thriving means building a career that is not just creatively fulfilling, but also sustainable for your wellbeing and life outside of work. Session sponsored by Solas Mind.
From sketch to structure: the art and craft of scenic construction.
This session puts the spotlight on the construction skills that bring set designs to life. You will hear directly from leading construction and scenic build teams as they share practical lessons from standout projects in film, theatre, and live events.
One world, many mediums: designing across screen, stage & immersive experiences
Today’s designers are looking for ways to build long-lasting careers that can thrive in a fast-changing industry. How do you balance creative growth with a resilient career path when the medium is constantly changing?
Crafting the story: props, costumes and human creativity
Discover how the UK’s prop houses and costumiers help bring stories to life through craft, knowledge and collaboration. Behind every convincing world on screen, stage or in live experience are skilled makers who understand the language of character, period, texture and detail.
Crafting a sustainable stage: exploring innovative materials in scenic art & prop making
For set decorators, designers, and makers, choosing the right material can make or break a project. As sustainability becomes a must, not a maybe, how do we keep our craft at its best while protecting the world around us?
Design authority in a digital landscape : VFX and production designer collaboration
Discover why designers must be at the forefront of the VFX pipeline, driving the visual strategy to optimise budgets and ensure that the digital world feels just as tangible and authentic as the physical one.
Part of your world: how stories escape the screen
As entertainment, experience and commerce continue to converge, successful stories now live across multiple formats. From stage adaptations and interactive exhibitions to immersive environments, experiential retail and must-have merch, storytelling is increasingly extended beyond the screen.
Tomorrow’s experience: the evolution of spatial storytelling
This forward-looking panel brings together designers working across immersive exhibitions, live entertainment, and venue environments to explore how the next generation of experiences is being shaped. How does the design process change when the audience is free-roaming rather than seated? What happens when projection, architecture and physical set all combine to create a single environment? And how do designers balance spectacle, storytelling and technology when the space itself becomes part of the narrative?
Exhibit tech innovation: explore the future of visual storytelling
The Emerging Technology Exhibition Display will feature cutting-edge innovations from leading visual effects (VFX) and mixed reality companies. This dynamic street-level showcase will highlight the transformative power of technology in visual storytelling.
The creative circular economy: sharing props, sets and costumes across screen, stage and events
Cardboard engineering on set and stage: trialling and building a new standard
The heart of making: exploring the Set & Scene exhibition
Ideas With a Home: The Elstree Immersive Incubator, turn your pdf into reality
In this open conversation, Adam Morley will introduce the concept behind the Elstree Immersive Incubator and explore how designers, storytellers and creative technologists can collaborate with studios, students and production infrastructure to turn ideas into real projects.
Thank you to our contributing sponsors for their support with Set & Scene in its inaugural year.
If you’d like your company to join us on this exciting journey we’d love to hear from you.
We are sponsoring Set & Scene because it celebrates the skilled craftspeople who bring designers’ creative visions to life. Across film, theatre and events, it is the makers – our carpenters, scenic artists, fabricators and technicians, whose expertise transforms ideas into reality. This show shines a spotlight on our crafts, championing the extraordinary talent behind the scenes that makes the impossible feel real. We are thrilled to finally have a platform to celebrate everything that our teams do.
At Solas, we continue to expand our wellbeing support across the creative sphere, so the chance to engage with such an inspiring community — one that spans film, TV, theatre, live events, and immersive experiences — was not to be missed. What’s exciting about Set & Scene is that it reflects the increasingly fluid movement of people and skills across industries, and it’s exactly within these cross-sector spaces that community is built. Community is so important, and making time to connect is what sustains us. We’re proud to be part of that.
UTA’s Production Arts division is a who’s who of behind-the-scenes artists who create new worlds for film and television. The team in London is excited to support the initiative of Set & Scene to bring together designers, makers, producers, and suppliers in a curated one-day programme of panels, live demonstrations, and networking opportunities. We share the goal of highlighting excellence in production design and scenic craft across traditional and emerging mediums.
The use of hand painted scenic backings may be considered as a dying art but those with the skills are as busy as ever in the film, theatre and tv industries! I am delighted to mediate this discussion at Set & Scene 2026.
We are very much looking forward to being part of the Set & Scene event this April. Huge thanks to Yosien Burke and Bimla Jackson for inviting the National Theatre to partner with them, and for bringing the TV, film and theatre industries all together for the first time to share how we can support each other to work more sustainably.
“We’re very happy to support Set & Scene as their content capture partner. From on-set creative capture through social to full campaign delivery, we work closely with productions to build campaigns that amplify their creative vision and connect audiences to the worlds they’ve created. Production design plays a vital role in that process, and we’re excited to support an event that celebrates the craft behind the camera and the people who bring those worlds to life.”
