Meet Brian Allen, VP of Creative Services at Disguise, a role he took on in February 2025. An immersive entertainment pioneer and co-founder of Illuminarium, Allen will lead a team to deliver innovative content solutions that empower clients to realize their boldest ideas across virtual production, broadcast, and immersive installations.
Bringing more than a decade of experience designing at the intersection of storytelling and cutting-edge technology, Allen has shaped immersive experiences for major brands and cultural icons. His past work includes immersive art venue Illuminarium, the American Express “UNSTAGED: Taylor Swift Experience,” and more...
Live Design: What is your new role at Disguise?
Brian Allen: I lead Creative Services at Disguise. Our team turns a powerful platform into a living stage, taking ideas from sketch to signal without losing their soul across both real-time and pre-rendered pipelines. My role allows me to draw on my previous experience as a co-founder at Illuminarium — the global large-format projection and multi-sensory venue hardwired for scale, reliability, and emotional impact under showtime pressure. That perspective shapes how Creative Services runs today: a global consultation, previs, and content practice that speaks natively to Disguise hardware and software, so the output is not just compatible — it’s compositional.
Because the creative team, the makers, sit alongside Disguise’s engineering and product teams, we can move from brief to build with fewer handoffs and faster iteration. And when a brief calls for something new, the team prototypes, extends, and finetunes through the Designer plugin framework — Disguise’s core software — to integrate workflows and devices without breaking the chain. That proximity is the edge — fewer handoffs, faster iteration, and outcomes that hold under real-world pressure.
LD: How do you harness technology to the art of storytelling?
BA: I love this question, as technology is evolving faster than ever. I see technology as stagecraft: precise, powerful, and invisible when it’s doing its job, guided by the story that tells every system where to breathe. We can now design hybrid canvases where physical actions ripple through vast digital worlds at scale. Picture a world set in an orchard, for instance — we can build it half from timber and half from light, then let a picked apple trigger a transformation across the scene. That fluency comes from technical literacy used as creative leverage, so feasibility expands the brainstorm instead of constraining it. The palette keeps growing — sensors, real-time engines, projection, LED — but the principle stays simple: start with a strong narrative, and tune the stagecraft to serve it, not the other way around.
LD: What is it like to segue from Illuminarium to a manufacturer?
BA: The key shift has been from building for a single venue format to delivering across multiple formats. At Disguise, work is project-based and varied: one month could be developing a projection mapping experience for a client, the next a virtual production shoot, then moving on to an interactive install. That range is familiar from my early experiential years at RadicalMedia, so it feels like a return to a broader practice. The core remains the same: lead a creative team to tell strong stories with technology. It’s just that now, the canvas changes more often.
LD: What kind of audience experience do immersive environments provide?
BA: Immersive environments give audiences a shared, real‑world experience enhanced by responsive media, not a replacement for reality. They invite participation, heighten presence, and create clearer emotional memories than passive digital content.
What matters most is intent. Start with the human response being sought — joy, nostalgia, curiosity — and design toward that outcome. Technology is there to support the moment, not to dominate it. When teams focus first on the emotion and then select the right interactive and visual systems, the result is more memorable and easier to connect with.
This approach also counters the fatigue of purely screen‑based media. By grounding experiences in physical space and social context, immersive work offers a healthier, more engaging mode of attention. The goal is simple: align tools to the feeling, and deliver a shared moment people can remember years later.
LD: How do you define "experiential" in terms of content and placemaking?
BA: Experiential asks people to go somewhere, share time with others, and feel something specific. It can be music, performance, interactive media, or quiet design choices that guide attention. The test is simple: does the environment elicit a clear emotion or narrative response, and does it linger after someone leaves?
For Disguise, the “live” in live entertainment matters. It means building for real people in real spaces, with social context as part of the design. This isn’t about replacing reality with headsets. It’s about shaping environments that support connection, curiosity, and memory.
In practice, that can happen anywhere — a museum, a concert, a lobby, a plaza, even an airplane cabin. What makes it experiential is intention and clarity of outcome. Define the human response first, then align architecture, content, sound, light, and interactivity to support it. When those elements reinforce each other, the place feels coherent, and the story reads cleanly in the body, not just on the screen.
LD: What does the digital future hold...
BA: The digital future should feel lighter in the hand and faster in the mind. Ideas move from spark to screen with fewer steps, and the work bends closer to the person in front of it. Personalization will continue to become a major part of the craft, with AI helping to shape details to each viewer while the core story stays intact. In practice, that means adapting moments based on preference or context without fragmenting the room’s shared arc. The promise isn’t novelty for its own sake. It’s clarity, pace, and resonance. Tools that disappear so the story meets people where they are, and lingers after they’ve left.