Recorded live at Ministry of Sound in London, this episode is in partnership with London Experience Week, and the studio is dressed by USED Creative, a circular Marketplace.
Paul Nicholls is the BAFTA- and Sports Emmy-winning CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Factory Fifteen, the studio behind some of the most ambitious cinematic worlds in entertainment — from the BBC's Tokyo Olympics titles to UFC 306 inside The Sphere. Trained as an architect at The Bartlett, UCL, he's spent fifteen years proving that the building and the story are the same design problem.
Paul turns the entire idea of immersion on its head and doesn't stop. He draws a hard line between physical immersion and story immersion, arguing that The Sphere is a technical marvel but not a bigger cinema, and makes the case that you have to design the world before you write a single word of the story.
We cover what it actually took to help concept The Sphere back in 2016, the surprising creative lesson behind Kia's North Pole experience for children with cancer, why his BAFTA now sits broken in the studio as a tribute to his late business partner, and why Paul believes AI is about to remove the friction between humans and machines entirely.
━━ CHAPTERS ━━
00:00 — Welcome to London Experience Week: Paul's first experience event, and it's on his doorstep.
01:37 — The Factory 15 Journey: Architects, viral films, a BAFTA and the Sphere.
09:28 — The Art of World Building: Design the world first. Write the story second.
14:00 — Designing for the Sphere: From concept in 2016 to creating content for the biggest screen on earth.
21:33 — Physical vs Story Immersion: The distinction most experience designers miss.
28:00 — The Future of Experience Design: AI, Gaussian Splatting and what nobody is talking about yet.
35:00 — The Keyboard Is Dying: The human-machine interface is about to change everything.
━━ BIO ━━
Paul Nicholls is a BAFTA and Emmy Award-winning director. He earned a first-class Master's in architecture at The Bartlett, UCL, in 2011 before co-founding Factory Fifteen, a film and experience design studio where he serves as CEO and Chief Creative Officer. Over the past 15 years, Paul has directed films, animations and experiences for The Sphere, The Olympics, The Royal Opera House, The Royal Albert Hall and several World Expos, among others. He is represented commercially by Nexus Studios.
Factory Fifteen is a film and experience design studio led by BAFTA and Emmy award-winning directors. They create extraordinary cinematic worlds and live experiences for innovative brands and cultural institutions. Recent experiential case studies include the UFC and Backstreet Boys events at The Sphere, Max Cooper's Royal Albert Hall show, the Kia "Joyride" experience at St Jude's Cancer Research Hospital, and Rêve des Lumières in Tokyo Dream Park.
Connect with Paul Nicholls: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-nicholls-36620a30/
Full bio: https://factoryfifteen.com/person/paul-nicholls/
━━ CREDITS ━━
Special thanks to USED Creative for dressing the studio: https://www.linkedin.com/company/used-creative/
Grateful to The World Experience Organisation for the collaboration at LXW26: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wxo
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