Client:Guardiagrele Opera
Date:2017 – 2021 – 2022 – 2024 – 2025
Location: Guardiagrele (CH)
Category: Live Experience
Tags: Live Visual
Since 2015, we have collaborated with the Guardiagrele Opera Festival to redefine the visual language of opera. Through video art and digital technologies, wedesign dynamic setsthat are not mere backdrops, but true narrative ecosystems capable of evolving alongside the music and direction.
Directed by Giandomenico Vaccari, we transported Donizetti’s opera “La Figlia del Reggimento” to 1960s America. The digital set design fused metropolitan atmospheres with Pop Art influences, transforming the stage into an interactive playground. The projections interacted in real time with the singers, integrating dynamic shots and urban architecture into a fully immersive experience that combined set design and lighting design.
For Rossini’s adaptation set in the 1960s, we explored the frontiers of generative artificial intelligence. Starting from the director’s vision, the Aelion team usedAI to recreate six rooms of a period Roman residence, reworking them in 3D to ensure stylistic consistency and visual depth. A perfect blend of cutting-edge technology and theatrical tradition.
Our work wasn’t limited to creating the visual content: we also managed theset design, arranging the necessary equipment and configuring the screen for the projections. The animated sets thus brought the performance backdrops to life, accompanying the onstage action and enriching the opera’s atmosphere.
In July 2022, at the Teatro D’Annunzio in Pescara, we designed the set for Giuseppe Verdi’s “Rigoletto“. Under the direction of Renato Bonajuto, we developedten different 3D animated settingsthat redefined the spatial context of the show. At the same time, we oversaw the technical implementation, installing specific rear-projection screens to ensure maximum visual impact.
In August of the same year, we created a video art performance, projecting it live on the facades of the houses that frame Piazza Orto Santoleri. The performance accompanied the opera “Les Enfants Terribles,” by Philip Glass, directed by director Aldo Tarabella and staged directly on the pavement, without a stage, in front of a selected audience seated on the steps next to the church, which simulated the terraces of an amphitheater.
We prepared motion graphic and video content, including footage from the previous days with the actors on stage, which translated the narrative structure of the work and its salient moments into video art.We used this content to produce architectural video mapping and a light show synchronized with the scenes.Mystical settings, cartomancy scenes and animated tarot cards illustrated the lyric, further immersing spectators in the story and its dreamlike atmospheres. The temporal sequence of the projections was guided by the skilful direction of Aldo Tarabella and the experience of the soprano Susanna Rigacci
For Rossini’s “Cinderella” we worked closely with director Aldo Tarabella to pay homage to the local beauty. Instead of using abstract sets, we brought the interiors and gardens of Semivicoli Castle to the stage.
The creative processwas meticulous: we first conducted a photo shoot in the area’s most evocative locations and then animated those shots using video compositing, motion graphics, and VFX techniques. This synergy allowed us to project hyper-realistic yet magical scenarios, immersing viewers in a fairytale Abruzzo.
In 2017 we experimented with the same technique,installing a maxi-rear projection screen, designed and built specifically for the association, which served as a scenography for the show “Così fan tutte” by Mozart. We then built the theater sets byreproducing the settings through 3D modeling and animationtechniques and then proceeded with the setting and live execution of the projections. We developed and created the work with the Florentine director Manu Lalli.
