overview

Over a five year period beginning in 2014, opticnerve™ created seven films and provided creative direction for all seventeen of the large-scale immersive films inside the National Museum of Qatar. Watch this short teaser for an overview.

Nafas, the first film created and designed for the museum, is a 360 degree immersive film about Pearl Diving directed by Mira Nair and edited by Jon Kane at the opticnerve™ studio.

Based on the success of Nafas, the museum retained opticnerve™ as the creative director for the ten remaining art films. Additionally, optic™ edited and designed seven of the films produced by Doha Film Institute. The engineering for these groundbreaking films was designed by Dean Winkler with technical consultation and hardware engineering provided by Res/London.

Designed by the architect Jean Nouvel, the museum opened to the public on March 28, 2019. The building, made out of massive curved discs inspired by the desert rose, features grand interior gallery walls designed for projection of the ultra-high resolution videos we created. The large-scale immersive art films are presented in a flowing path nearly a kilometer long and tell the story of Qatar from the pre-historic era to the present day and into the future. It is currently the world’s largest permanent video projection installation.

Since the star-studded opening on March 28, 2019, the museum has been enjoyed by a quarter of a million people. The New York Times called it “breathtaking” and a building that “leaves most state-of-the-art museums in the shade.” Other critics called it “the most extraordinary building of the decade,” or simply, “astonishing.”