There's a growing sense that culture is running out of hands to make it, that taste is being outsourced to an algorithm, and connection to social media. It’s a feeling that makes genuine collaboration, built on real reference points, more valuable than ever. The Unlimited Dream Company has cracked the code. The creative melting pot revolutionizing London's live music scene, is a relief to write about. UDC's own manifesto puts it more bluntly: they want to prove that “in a landscape of AI generated slop and generic led creative direction, there is still a massive appetite for genuine, ground-up creativity.”
"The future is boring. Make it mean something". That's the opening line of The Unlimited Dreams Company's founding manifesto, and it doubles as a fair summary of everything the studio has been doing since 2021, building live shows for Alicia Keys, Skepta, Olivia Dean, Nia Archives among others. They treat the stage like a film; engineered beat by beat, on the emotional logic of narrative. And that’s what makes the audience connect.
The studio was founded by architect/filmmaker George Thomson and production designer Harrison Smith, whose own paths already carried the same idea in different disciplines: Thomson through a career spanning Foster + Partners, Heatherwick Studio, VFX and a Turner Prize-nominated stint as music video director and screenwriter; Smith through the world of subculture itself, VJing for the cult Leeds label 2020Vision before building sets and visuals for stages as large as Coldplay's and American Idol's. Around them, UDC has assembled a small team spanning art direction, animation, documentary directing and creative strategy - pulled from music, fashion, film and subculture in equal measure, and united by the same instinct to build worlds.
We sat down with the UDC team to talk about where this conviction comes from, what it looks like in practice, and what they think is actually broken in live music today. And, most of all, how to fix it.
Let’s start from the very beginning. How did you come up with the name, and what does the concept of a dream mean to you?
We are obsessed with the work of near future sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard and loved the title of this book. The idea of basing our company in a world of limitless creativity, like a dream, really resonated. Dreams are the ultimate space for creative-led narrative structure, a place where the subconscious tells stories with complete freedom, entirely unbound by the conventions or physical laws of reality. When Willy Wonka said, "Come with me to a world of pure imagination," we saw a literal space we wanted to inhabit.
We work with artists at every stage of their careers, and the pinnacle of a musician's dream almost always centers on the live performance. So our name sits at the intersection of these two ideas.
You’ve mentioned that the starting point for your set designs is the feeling or emotion an artist wants to convey. How do you translate that initial idea into the final result?
Story is the heart of the human experience. Memory is a story about the past, the present is the story we tell ourselves to contextualise reality, and dreams are freeform stories from our subconscious. And like the human experience, every story is anchored by emotion. When we moved into the live sector, we found a fractured landscape where lighting, video, and staging departments were all making isolated decisions. We started out by wanting to enforce a unified vision, but visual concepts can easily devolve into vague, Pinterest-led mood boards. So we went a bit deeper to underpin everything with the mechanics of film scriptwriting and employing the classical narrative archetypes to structure our shows. But going even further than narrative, all good stories are driven by a message or emotional truth, something we can all relate to. We ask each artist a simple question, “How do you want your audience to feel?” Then we use this to drive structure and all design decisions.
In modern society, we are all so familiar with the structural beast of cinema and when employed in any context it holds the audience's attention and keeps them engaged. We’ve been to lots of shows where even if you love the music, you start to get bored or disengaged, that’s the result of having no structure or no clear emotional through line.
Which artists and creative figures have inspired your set designs in the past, and which ones continue to inspire your work today?
We pull heavily from filmmakers who build their own surreal, uncompromising realities - specifically Werner Herzog and David Lynch. Both these directors' work feels like a dream or constructed reality but is still tangible or visceral on its own terms. On the spatial side, we often look to radical architecture movements like Archigram and Superstudio, who treated architecture as a provocation rather than physical utility. We are also inspired by the limitless exploration of paper architects like Lebbeus Woods. What unites all these designers is their use of space to develop a narrative, and the use of that story to push culture forward.
Additionally, we draw inspiration from less overtly creative or artistic places too. History, societal structures, mythology and objects all become source material for us. We try to build unconventional references off the concept itself, for example the Greek creation story for Gorgon City, or biospheres for Maribou State. Rooting the concept in these less aesthetically driven spaces tends to lead to more interesting and unique ideas as the work develops, and adds conceptual depth.
What do you draw on most: cinema, literature, or your own imagination?
We have a clear design process and that always leads. Before going to references, our imagination is the best guide to original outcomes. But that imagination is rooted in an appreciation of cinema, literature and art. We often use classical painters like Canaletto to guide our use of light and composition, whereas our cinema references tend to dictate pacing and structure more than visuals. Then literature often provides the foundational "why" behind a project. Our Hopecore concept for Maisie Peters, for instance, was deeply rooted in literary themes of quiet resistance in the novel How To Do Nothing - Resisting the Attention Economy. We love how literature often leads us to ideas that need visual representation. In a way our company name is the best example of this.
You have created visuals for artists such as Jorja Smith, YUNGBLUD, and Olivia Dean. Who was the first artist for whom you had the opportunity to oversee the creative direction? And which collaboration has been the inflexion point to establishing your presence within the industry?
Our first full opportunity was with Pa Salieu. The core idea was to give African art the status it deserves - the kind of reverence that is criminally missing from Gombrich's texts and major Western museums. But the collaboration that we became most associated with was for Loyle Carner. Because he is also a filmmaker, we share the same visual language and he fully engages with our process and how we build creativity. That shared vision allowed us to completely subvert what a live rap show could be, and that work introduced us to a much wider audience.
How does your approach to set design change from working on a film set to designing environments for large-scale music festivals?
The creative approach doesn't change; the logistics do. An audience perceives space entirely differently in a dark cinema versus a muddy festival field. And in both scenarios, you are battling massive constraints and immovable variables. Being creative is the easy part. The real challenge is engineering a hyper-ambitious design that can actually be built, struck, and thrown into the back of a truck by a production crew every single night without compromising the vision. But unlike art, design loves constraints and we take as much joy in the design of the delivery logistics as we do with the overall concept.
Who are some artists you would be excited to collaborate with in the near future?
We work with artists at every level, whereas most other show design studios work with artists at the top tier, who have the proper budgets for design work. But our interest is focused on the music and the vision, not the level of the artist. We don't care about Spotify streams or record sales. We trust our gut to find a fruitful collaboration: we are looking for artists willing to go with our a-typical process. Looking ahead, we want to develop our process in entirely different spaces and modes. We really want to design a metal show, and we really want to direct a contemporary opera. We’d love to collaborate with Miley Cyrus, Metallica, and Playboi Carti. Or anyone who wants to break out of the pinterest cycle and do something interesting, anyone with something to say or any artist with a story to tell.
How would you describe London’s music scene right now? What do you value most about it, and what would you change?
The music scene in London is an exciting space to work in, and is often the starting point for new genres and sounds. There is a whole new wave of exciting and interesting artists like Jim Legxacy and Fakemink starting to get the momentum and recognition they deserve. However the industry is breaking in obvious ways: artists need to be paid more and take much more ownership of their output. Culturally, people are starved for collective, in-real-life experiences, and because those moments are becoming increasingly rare, we have a responsibility to make sure they actually count. Behind the scenes, there desperately needs to be more diversity in the technical and creative roles surrounding an artist, especially in live production. And after traveling the world with these shows, one of the things we really appreciate here is that London audiences always bring it.
What advice would you give to young creatives?
Hunt down work experience immediately. There is a massive ecosystem of roles in live production that cater to wildly different talents. It can feel like a closed shop, but we are actively trying to hold the door open for the next wave to walk through. Ballard once said his biggest fear is that the “future is going to be boring” and without proper representation in creative spaces we are minimising cultural potential. So let's open this up and stop it becoming boring.
Ultimately, what message would you like to convey through your work?
We want to prove that in a landscape of AI generated slop and generic, Pinterest-led creative direction, there is still a massive appetite for genuine, ground-up creativity, that we as a creative community, still have the ability to create genuine awe and spectacle. Design shouldn't just decorate reality; it should manifest worlds that don't yet exist. We are here to break the cycle of recycled aesthetics and create completely original work driven by raw emotion and the human experience.
