CELESTIA

Normal Studio and Paquin Entertainment Group worked together to create Celestia: an immersive art experience that transforms St. John’s Cathedral into a living canvas. Through light, projection, architecture, and original music, Celestia creates a shared moment of contemplation, both personal and collective.

The team’s main challenge was to deliver content at a 9K square resolution, so they built a flexible, real-time review pipeline to test how visuals actually held up against the architecture, before and during integration. Notch sat at the heart of that pipeline. As Notch Artist Julien Lassignardie explains, “Real-time workflows helped us iterate on lighting, texture treatment, and complex animation more efficiently than an offline-only pipeline, speeding up our workflow by a factor of 10.” That responsiveness let the team skip traditional rendering bottlenecks and keep things precise without slowing down.

That speed gave the creative team room to push complexity. Notch was used to build procedural visual systems, particle-based effects, dynamic masking, and lighting-driven motion, along with reusable rendered elements that accentuated the cathedral’s height and stone surfaces. Five full scenes were built entirely in Notch: Water, Storm, Sanctuary, Harmony, and Gems. Lassignardie continues, “Notch was used where real-time iteration brought the most value: complex visual behaviours, flexible render passes, and content adapted to the cathedral scale.”

Celestia marked both a continuation of more than 15 years of expertise and a real step forward for Normal Studio: it was their first full 360-degree architectural projection mapping project inside a cathedral, with Notch central to their content and iteration workflow. Since Celestia, Normal Studio has kept investing in Notch, sending a new group of artists to official Notch training and continuing to test new Notch tools in the studio's ongoing work.