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The 2025 Big Draw Festival brought drawing into new dimensions, including virtual ones! We caught up with immersive storytellers Neon8 to talk about their work on the Digital Spaces Library VR tour with Inspire: Culture, Learning and Libraries, and their VR film Leaf Number Three. From translating hand-drawn illustrations into immersive worlds to working closely with libraries, schools, and artists, Neon8 share how technology, creativity, and community came together to create something very special for The Big Draw Festival's 25th anniversary.
For those who may not know your work, could you start by telling us a bit about Neon8 and your role within the team?
Neon8 is a two-person core team: husband and wife Kelman Greig-Kicks and Gemma Greig-Kicks. Kelman is the hands-on Creative Director and Immersive Filmmaker, while Gemma as Creative Producer keeps the work aligned with the brief, managing budgets and project milestones.
This project also features the fantastic skills of CGI Technical Artist, Adrianna Polcyn, who used Unreal Engine to translate the 2D animations from Kelman’s brief into the final immersive animation.
Inspire: Culture, Learning and Libraries invited you to be part of their Big Draw Festival programme for 2025. How did the partnership come about, and what appealed to you about collaborating with them?
Working with the wonderful Inspire team on the Digital Spaces Library Virtual Reality (VR) tour and the immersive films we produced for it created a very positive working relationship, and hopefully our approach and creative work helped in that regard! Our clear communication and easily digestible explanations of the technological processes and outcomes made this project feel like an achievable and desirable experience for The Big Draw audience. Inspire asked all the right questions, and hopefully we delivered the right answers for them too!
Inspire is part of the Digital Spaces project - a major new initiative supported by Arts Council England, BFI, National Lottery funding and The Space. What excites you about Digital Spaces and its mission to transform digital engagement in libraries?
We’re thrilled to be part of the Digital Spaces project as it’s aligned with our vision for making immersive experiences available to more people, and particularly those who don’t have disposable income to purchase expensive headsets. We live in exciting times in terms of new technology, but running alongside that is a challenging socio-economic landscape, meaning financial wellbeing for many people is under intense pressure. So, bringing new and unique experiences to people within their local library can fuel many benefits, including greater footfall and an increase in familiarity with library services, an alleviation of stress with some wonderful VR experiences and hopefully an inspiration point for burgeoning creative minds who see the possibilities in these new technologies.
Your VR film commission, Leaf Number Three, explores themes of being together yet separate, the same yet different. You worked alongside My Pockets on the illustration and animation. How did this collaboration work in practice, and how did you approach translating the concept into a virtual environment?
Leaf No. 3 was fantastic to work on! It was a creative challenge which required us to translate 2D illustrations and animations into a 3D 180° VR experience. The first stage was to really understand the usual workflow of a My Pockets animation project and then begin to work on a workflow template for the project which meant the assets we received from My Pockets were usable and easily translatable to a more esoteric immersive workflow using Epic Games Unreal Engine. One way to think about it is taking something from the screen to the stage! In a VR headset the viewer has the autonomy to look around the scene how they wish, so creating a virtual stage set was our first task. From there the animation and some extra sound design helped bring Leaf No. 3 to life in VR!
Inspire libraries across Nottinghamshire ran simplified versions of the My Pockets workshop, with each participant creating their own ‘leaf’. How does it feel to see your VR work directly connected to artwork created by local communities?
I think any creative/artist will always be happy when their work is used as inspiration points for others to help tell their own stories in any way they can. The whole point of any kind of creative work is to make some kind of impact, however large or small. Knowing Leaf No. 3 has a legacy impact is very heart-warming for us.
And how do you hope audiences will experience the VR film alongside the original drawings on the Drawn Together Exhibition Tour?
We believe VR, because it’s a relatively new medium, has great potential for eliciting a ‘Wow factor’ reaction in people. Seeing drawings come to life in a medium that many haven’t experienced before will hopefully help add greater emotional responses to the sentiment in the story; We’re all unique, so let’s celebrate that. We think VR is perfectly suited to delivering that message.
As artists working at the cutting edge of digital storytelling, what do you think emerging creators can gain from trying VR for the first time?
As previously mentioned, the wow factor for any new or emerging artform is a petri dish for new ideas and possibilities. VR is a difficult thing to describe. It’s abstract to people who’ve never experienced it, but once they do, it’s like a light switch flicked on. It’s our mission to show future immersive storytellers that it’s not as daunting as they think it might be – and it’s only going to become more accessible as the technology progresses. It’s very exciting!
