Building the set for Google at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is always one of the highlights of our year. With the exception of a couple of years that were thwarted by the pandemic, we’ve been on the beach with Google since 2014.

Cannes Lions is a landmark event in the creative industry calendar. It brings together the finest creative minds on the planet and we were asked to turn a section of beach beyond the Croissette into an interactive and playful meeting space to showcase Google’s latest initiatives.

This is the first year we have worked with Amplify on this project. We’re longstanding collaborators with Amplify and have delivered great work together since 2016. Their creative team came up with a scheme that provided a sleek wooden floor upon which were a series of fourteen structures, from stages, photobooths, bars, lecture theatres and meeting rooms.

Our task was to take their design, develop it for manufacture, take it through CAD, machining, fabrication, and finishing before it was loaded onto trucks for its journey south. Once in Cannes, we provided a crew of more than fifty people who worked around the clock to install the flooring and structures on the beach. Almost a hundred screw piles were first embedded into the sand to provide a secure foundation for the flooring and structures above. Installation of the flooring palettes followed, with the structures team chasing the flooring crew. The whole scheme was installed in seven days, including the lighting, audio and tech components that were provided by others.

The whole scheme was manufactured in just over a month and installed in just a week. It was testament to real collaboration across the whole team. From end-client Google to creative agency Amplify. We love these jobs because they fill our workshops with interesting activity. And perhaps also because we get to enjoy ice-cream for breakfast.

Re-use of this set across future years is a key pillar of this design which makes for a much more sustainable approach across the life of these Cannes activations.