Inara Sound & Light show

How do you reinvent a show that’s been running for nearly sixty years?

The Sound and Light show has been part of an evening at Giza since the early 1960s. As the sun goes down, the pyramids and the Sphinx are lit up one by one while a narrator tells their story to an audience sitting out in the desert. Generations of visitors have watched it. It’s even famous enough that James Bond turned up at one in The Spy Who Loved Me, although he spent most of it chasing a contact rather than watching the show.

The trouble was that the show had barely changed in all that time. The setting was as extraordinary as ever, but everything else had quietly fallen behind, and by then it looked and sounded every one of its years.

A show with that much history is a hard thing to replace. Change too little and nobody notices. Change too much and you lose what made it worth seeing in the first place.

In 2018 Orascom Investment Holding was given the job of reimagining it. The plan went well beyond a new show. It meant a whole new destination on the original site, with new facilities, places to eat and shop, VIP lounges, and a proper reason for people to come back to the plateau once the sun had gone down.

Start with what was already there

The first job was working out what had gone wrong. I went through the existing show as a guest would, looked at how it was positioned and sold, and studied what the best night time attractions elsewhere were doing that this one wasn’t. The honest answer was that the place had never been the problem. The experience around it had simply stopped trying.

So the brand was built around transformation. Same pyramids, same Sphinx, a completely different evening. The name, which came from Orascom, means a ray of light. It says exactly what the show does and feels right whether or not you know the translation.

The thinking went further than a logo. It covered the whole guest experience, from buying a ticket to the walk out at the end, because on something like this the brand is the entire evening, not just the sign at the entrance.

Gold, reeds and a lot of restraint

The show itself was going to be something else. Forty minutes of theatre, original music, imagery and 3D mapping, telling the story of Mery and Khafre across the pyramids and the Great Sphinx, projected onto a surface of roughly a square kilometre. Next to that, the brand had one job: set the tone, then get out of the way.

The identity drew on the gold of ancient Egypt, fine hieroglyphic detailing and the reeds that line the Nile. It was kept deliberately clean, with simple type, a restrained palette and very few graphic elements, so it felt special without competing with what was happening on the plateau.

All of it was creative direction, showing exactly how the brand should look and feel wherever a guest would meet it. That ran from tickets and a poster for each of the show’s two characters to the mood for the spaces around it, which included three rooftop VIP lounges, an enclosed lounge for corporate guests and six shops.

The one that didn’t happen

Everything was documented in a full set of brand guidelines, ready for the teams who would build and run it, and I designed a six page microsite to introduce INARA to the world ahead of opening. Then, as happens on projects this size, things changed well above everyone’s heads, and the whole thing was cancelled before it was ever built. The microsite went with it.

I could have left it off the site. I haven’t, because it’s an honest part of how the bigger story unfolded. The work was done properly, the relationship carried on regardless, and before long Orascom came back with something even bigger. That became the Pyramids of Giza.