Australian Center for the Moving Image Renewal

How do you turn the museum visit into an immersive 21st century experience?

Background

Australian Center for the Moving Image (ACMI) is Australia’s national museum of film, television, video games, digital culture, and art, and the most-visited moving image museum in the world. With the ambitious goal of redefining the museum experience, ACMI invested $40M into architectural, programmatic, and digital upgrades to create an interactive environment, enhance learning opportunities, and showcase new innovations in moving image technology. They chose us to help them place visitors at the heart of the experience.

We’re reinventing how people experience every aspect of their connected lives—and the places they interact with.

Elke Klinkhammer
VP, Executive Creative Director
Capability Lead for Physical & Digital Experiences • Razorfish

Journey

Collaborating with BKK Architects, we combined spatial thinking with an innovation mindset to lead the experience and exhibition renewal, designing a 17,000-sq.ft. multi-faceted centerpiece exhibition, a first-ever Digital Future and Media Preservation Lab, high-tech education, event, and cinema spaces, and a hospitality hub curated by celebrated chef Karen Martini. This changes the way people interact with museums and inspires future generations of screen creatives.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors encounter two main elements of the moving image: light and motion. Once onboarded, they receive the Lens, a handheld device inspired by the iconic View-Master that allows them to interact with art and collect materials to explore more deeply after their visit. “Maker moments” invite guests to animate shadows, craft optical toys, experiment with time, splice movie scenes, and create sound effects in a custom Foley studio.

Behind the scenes, the proprietary eXperience Operating System (XOS) transforms the museum into a living canvas, connecting physical and digital content in brand new ways. Turning ACMI’s database of objects and media into gallery experiences, XOS embeds interactivity throughout the journey and invites visitors to explore and even take home 900+ items from around Australia and the world. It also collects analytics about how visitors move through the space and objects that catch their interest, providing insights to inspire future exhibits.

ACMI welcomes visitors at Federation Square

The Lens “collects” exhibits to enjoy post-visit

Story of the Moving Image captures film milestones

Games Lab highlights an addictively fun medium

Girl playing video game in a red room — A custom Foley studio creates a world of sound effects

3 people with their backs turned — The Edit Line remixes iconic film and TV moments

Constellation brings interconnected content together

Lens and Constellation create galaxies of new media

“We’ve tried to pay a nod to the original architecture, which is much loved by Melbourne and which we love as well, but also to impart ACMI’s identity into the building…to really say ‘this is our space’.”

Deb Adams
BKK Architects Senior Associate

Outcomes

Our fresh approach to the museum experience blends physical and digital content like never before, garnering media attention in major publications like Variety, The Guardian, and The Sydney Morning Herald. Its 700+ media stories generated 24M print and broadcast impressions.

Through emerging technology and human curation, ACMI’s trove of knowledge and information is now accessible to people everywhere, with 7K attending its film programs in the opening weeks alone. It’s a fully immersive experience that puts people at the center of moving image history.

49k
ACMI visits
152k
website visits
16k
hours spent on ACMI website
54%
of visitors being new to cinemas
830
student and teacher visits

Our multidisciplinary team of designers, story makers, and technologists brought ACMI’s innovative vision to life.

Elke Klinkhammer
VP, Executive Creative Director
Capability Lead for Physical & Digital Experiences • Razorfish

What are people saying?

For five years we've been planning this transformation, for our museum to become something incredible, an interconnected physical and digital experience.

Katrina Sedgwick
ACMI Director & CEO
Victorians are hungry for creative experiences and ACMI’s reopening will entice more visitors back to the heart of Melbourne with new interactive and immersive exhibitions.

Danny Pearson
Minister for Creative Industries