Metro Hall, animated

Light Up Louisville is the city’s holiday season opener, one of its largest annual gatherings, with crowds filling downtown in front of Metro Hall. The event has always had fireworks and lights. J Wagner Group hired Backbeat to add a building.

The build

Backbeat carried the full creative and technical scope: visual concept, all content animation, and the projection calibration that locks digital imagery to a historic facade. Metro Hall’s architecture became the structure of the piece, with windows, columns, and stonework treated as compositional elements rather than obstacles.

Civic scale changes the job. The audience is not a ticketed crowd with sightline control. It is thousands of people standing in a public square in November, and the content has to read clearly from wherever they happen to be.

What happened

The 2024 show ran, and the city came back for 2025. Backbeat produced the Metro Hall projection for both editions, which is the fact that matters most here: a spectacle you get hired to do twice is an operation, not a stunt.