The Living Room

A 3D animated flood, staged inside an ordinary front room, driven through the UK's worst affected areas with the UK's largest Digital EcoVan.

Flood Re is a joint initiative between the UK government and the insurance industry, set up under the Water Act 2014 to make flood cover available and affordable for homes at the highest risk. Ten years in, it wants to shift the conversation from insurance to resilience, because repairing the same flooded home over and over is not a plan.

Around 6.3 million properties in England sit in areas at risk of flooding, and by 2050 that number goes up. Flood Re needed people to stop filing flood risk under "happens to someone else."

So we put an ordinary living room on the street and drowned it.

The work runs on a Digital EcoVan, the largest in the UK, built around a full 3D animation made specifically for the screen. A brick wall breaks open. Behind it is a room anyone would recognise. Striped wallpaper, an armchair, family photos, a child's teddy bear sat where a child left it. Then the water comes in and takes all of it.

Anamorphic 3D on a moving screen is an awkward technical problem.

The depth has to hold from the pavement while the van is in traffic, in daylight, in British weather, and at whatever angle a passer by happens to catch it. The animation was built to survive all of that rather than to look good in a render.

We ran it through Manchester city centre on a wet day, past the retail streets and the cathedral gardens, so the standing water on the pavement and the flooded room on the screen sat in the same eyeline.

The van runs entirely on eco fuel. For a campaign about climate resilience that felt like a requirement rather than a bonus.

ReThink Resilience.