Prodigy12

Your work pushes the boundaries of audiovisual experiences. How did you reach the point where you are today?
We built everything step by step. As brothers, this started in our childhood. The first performance we ever gave was literally for 10 people. We quit our jobs, and everything began to revolve around this. It grew from there, through a journey of tragedy and joy, to today, where tens of thousands of people attend the shows. Step by step, the team was formed, and this passion is now shared by an extremely talented team.

We have always had one focus: How can we create the best possible show? Our dream is to create something people will remember 50 years from now. We started as musicians. From there, over the past years we gradually learned other disciplines associated with the shows, such as story writing, 3D visual design, stage design or the technical setup. Alongside the practical aspects of communication, and of course, building our audience : ). We often compare this to a human body. The heart is the show, and only through the precise collaboration of all limbs and organs can the heart keep beating.

Why do you rarely give interviews? Is anonymity a conscious choice?
Beyond our last name, we indeed wish to remain anonymous. We want all the focus to be on the shows and the stories built around them.

How do you balance creativity with technology in your musical theater productions? Do you see technology as a tool to realize your vision, or does it sometimes determine the project's direction?
We often refer to the use of the first film projector in 1870. Back then, many gimmicks were shown that audiences found appealing. Later, names like Chaplin, Hitchcock, or Disney brought the use of almost the same film projector to a new level.

We believe we’re in a similar moment now. The tools exist. 360 projections, interactive sets, spatialized audio - but what matters is how they’re used. They should never distract. They should deepen. For us, tech only matters if it allows the music, the story, the human presence to resonate more deeply.

Does tech enable your vision, or does it sometimes steer the direction?
We try not to let technology lead us. It’s always about the script first. The emotion. The question that started the piece. That being said, certain technologies have opened doors we never thought we’d walk through. Sometimes, a new tool inspires a shift in how we see a scene or shape a moment. But we always go back to the story.
The most powerful moments often happen in complete silence or with the simplest light cue. So while we embrace innovation, we’re careful. We don’t want to create for the screen. We want to create with the actors on stage, with their energy and their talent.

How do you implement the city into the show?
The city is never just a backdrop. It’s a living decor of the story. For each production, we reconstruct parts of the city in painstaking detail, often working from old maps, public records, and thousands of photographs. Every balcony, cobblestone, or streetlamp is hand-modeled and reimagined. But we never aim for strict realism. Like an impressionist painter, we interpret the soul of the place. It’s about what the city feels like, not what it looks like.
Sometimes, the city becomes a figurant character in itself, changing, moving, reacting to the emotions of the actors on stage. It’s our way of grounding the surreal in something familiar. Whether the musical takes place in a dreamscape or in a hyper-local version of reality, the city gives it weight.

How does the technical side of the visuals look?
Unreal Engine is the backbone of our production, its virtual production tools make it possible to integrate assets from other software and optimize them for projections. Some examples: the stormy ocean we created in Houdini, a 360 render at 32k resolution with more than 80 million particles. The city we modeled in Maya, the movements of the characters are captured with Vicon cameras, the hair we did in Houdini, the abstract visuals we made with node-based visual programming. You can watch here a behind-the-scenes video of a previous production.

What is the importance of the actors on stage?
We believe deeply in the relationship between the actors on stage, what they’re doing, their arc, how they look, the music, the lights, the visuals - everything needs to serve a purpose. For example, in a key environment of Prodigy 12, we ask: how does our surreal world of that show look and feel? How do the actors move and behave in that environment?