Andrew Henry Presents and Belvoir St Theatre’s 2025 smash hit Grief Is The Thing With Feathers was a rare work: intimate, strange, devastating and deeply theatrical.
Adapted from Max Porter’s novel, the production moves between poetry, fable and fractured domestic reality. A story about a family learning to live with loss, and a Crow who arrives as grief made visible.
The video design followed that same instability. Rather than creating one fixed visual world, the production used a series of conventions that could shift with the emotional logic of the piece.
Production Photograph — Brett Boardman
At times, video operated like fable. The Crow’s stories were given a hand-drawn, mythic quality, developed in close collaboration with illustrator and long term collaborator Jon Weber (Fantastic Mr Fox, James and Giant Peach). These sequences didn’t simply illustrate the text; they created another layer of storytelling, allowing grief to take on a strange, unruly and almost folkloric shape.
At other moments, the design moved into fragments of domestic memory: a door in shadow, a radiator, the faded suggestion of wallpaper, the outline of a room that never fully resolved. These weren’t literal locations, but emotional traces – pieces of a home seen through the distortion of grief.
A key part of the design was treating projection not simply as image, but as light. Across the production, video helped carve the architecture of the space, shifting the curved wall between surface, atmosphere and emotional landscape. In conversation with Nick Schlieper’s lighting design, the projection could soften, erode or reveal the stage picture. This allowed image and light to blur until they became part of the same visual language.
Illustration by Jon Weber
Production Photograph — Brett Boardman
The central scenic gesture was a large curved rear wall, painted as an abstracted beach. Across the production, projection, light and sound slowly activated that surface. The image accrued meaning over time, until the final scene allowed the space to appear to resolve, or at least offer the fragile illusion of resolution.
This was a design built on true collaboration. Working with director Simon Phillips, lighting designer Nick Schlieper, illustrator Jon Weber and the wider creative team, the aim was never to make video the hero of the production. It was to let image, light, sound, text and performance breathe together.
Illustration by Jon Weber
Technically, the challenge was restraint as much as precision. In Belvoir’s intimate theatre, every projected image had to earn its place. The video needed to feel alive, but never over-designed; present, but never decorative. With the room’s low ceiling height, the design used two compact 7K projectors as front projection, blended together to create a single image across the curved wall. The smaller units helped keep projector noise from intruding on the audiences expertience of the sound design and live music. Careful consideration was given to projector placement to ensure it gave the cast greater freedom to move through the space without unintentionally casting shadows through the image.
Production Photograph — Brett Boardman
Recognised with a multitude of Sydney Theatre Awards, including Best Design, Grief Is The Thing With Feathers was a reminder that video design is not always about scale or spectacle.
Sometimes it is about finding the smallest image that can hold the biggest feeling.
See more about the production here.