Industry icons: Filipe Carvalho
- Live team
- 1 day ago
- 10 min read
From a childhood love of magic to directing large-scale immersive experiences, Filipe Carvalho is a creative force who has carved a unique path as both an illusionist and creative director. His work spans Disney, Secret Cinema, arena tours for 50 Cent and Kacey Musgraves, and redefining iconic IPs like Back to the Future and Batman. Known for transforming simple tricks into jaw-dropping moments, Carvalho thrives on collaboration, audience anticipation and exploring the meaning of ‘immersive’. His story is proof that magic, when paired with vision, can become unforgettable experience.
Interview Verity Butler
Being both an illusionist and director is certainly a niche profession. What led you here?
It all started with magic and illusions, which have been my hobby since the age of five. I think the first time I saw someone do a magic trick, it just blew my mind. I was fascinated about how it was done, and usually the how was quite simple. The fact something so simple could create such a ‘wow’ moment was the big hook for me.
Then from magic, I got into theatre direction. When I was 18, I produced Annie: The Musical in Portugal. Projects such as this gave me the background of what I wanted to do.
Instead of becoming an electronics engineer, which is what my parents wanted me to be, I decided I wanted to find something I was going to enjoy and really want to do – rather than just doing something for the sake of it. That’s when I decided I wanted to be a producer.
I researched the best places to go and decided to come to London to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2007, which proved to have an incredible theatre technology course. You do stage management as well as all the technical side of theatre such as sound and lighting. This gave everyone a broad understanding of the contribution of each department to a show, then in the second and third years you would specialise into what you want to do.
In my case, I chose production. I wanted to know how shows were put together, which is what I did for the early parts of my career. I worked as a stage manager, a production coordinator – did all sorts of events management as well, which included festivals, musicals and immersive shows.
At some stage, I started to miss the creative side of things and so decided to focus on going back towards that. One of the shows I did was Dinosaurs in the Wild! – one of the biggest immersive shows being done at the time. It had the original producer of Walking with Dinosaurs – a big arena show – on board. We opened in Birmingham, then did Manchester, and it stayed in London for about six months. The show expanded my background in immersive hugely and was a big learning curve.
That was my springboard into immersive, and from there the illusion side started to come in too. I got the opportunity to be illusions associate for Mickey and the Magician at Disneyland Paris; it was the first time I got to use my understanding of magic principles in a professional setting. I loved it.
That was when I realised that I could merge all my theatrical know-how – from technical to acting – and my background with magic into one. After the Disney job, I got asked to do more and more shows, and my career morphed into what it is today. I’m now a creative director for live shows, and I specialise in immersive content – including the concept. I’m also involved in creating specific illusions for live shows, immersive experiences and concert events.
Without spoiling too much of the magic, could you tell us a bit more about your illusions work?
Professionally, my first role was as an illusions associate for Disneyland Paris.
I also worked on Back to the Future: The Musical, which was a great collaboration with Chris Fisher, who’s also an illusions designer. I enjoyed that one a lot because I got to do all the magic and AV workshops for it as well. One of the biggest tasks was working out how to get the DeLorean car to move at the same time as the projection.
Then, on the magic side, we got to do some really cool stuff too. One of the jobs was to make the DeLorean appear out of nowhere. I can’t exactly reveal how we did it, but it involved technology and a very good understanding of how lighting works. Haze is an illusionist’s best friend – it’s a combination of lighting, projection and haze that allows you to achieve such incredible results.
This might be a spoiler, but at the end of the show, the DeLorean flies over the audience, which is an impressive feat of engineering, but also creativity – in the sense that all the departments have to come together to pull it off.
That’s what I love about using magic in shows. It’s not just a one-person job – you have to rely on lighting, sound and set designers – making it a deeply collaborative process.
I also worked on Secret Cinema, where, again, I had to merge my knowledge of illusions and passion for immersive. We did Stranger Things, and one of the tasks was to make a can of coke levitate – which had been featured in the show. We also did Peaky Blinders, which was a dance show, and because of that I really wanted to make sure it wasn’t a show of magic tricks, instead featuring ‘visual enhancements’. An example of this is making people suddenly appear, or creating a scene where smoke is being expelled – but by no obvious means.
Over the last two years, I’ve had the chance to go into a completely different field in terms of my magic path – arena shows. I got asked to create illusions for 50 Cent’s The Final Lap Tour. Suddenly, instead of having 1200 people in a theatre watching what I’d created, I had 20,000. It’s a completely different format, since I had to create a 360° experience without the usual sideline boundaries offered by theatrical venues.
Last year, I was also asked to make Kacey Musgraves levitate for her tour. Without giving too much away when it comes to how levitations work; it’s virtually impossible to do it from a 360° perspective. When I was asked to do it, I told the team they had to manage their expectations. It took a lot of adapting and some clever lighting once again – as well as the use of a massive LED wall – and we got there in the end. It actually turned out very well.
What were some of the key lessons when moving into arenas?
One of the main learning curves was on the operational side of things. I’ve always predominantly worked in a theatrical setting. Even when I did the CBeebies arena tours – that was still a theatre setting in terms of management.
I learned that whenever I have to do an illusion scene for an arena show, I do need a dedicated team just to look after that scene. In theatre, the show team can take responsibility for it, but in arenas you can’t rely on that, as there’s so much more for the production team to be handling and you can’t expect that to be maintained. You have to look at the magic as a department in itself, just as the sound elements have a sound team.
How does it feel putting so much time into creating moments that could be under a second in duration?
That’s what the magic is all about! Yes, a lot goes into just a few seconds of the show, but that’s where the creative director side of me comes in. I love creating the actual illusion, but I also love building everything around it. How will we construct the entire scene, rather than just that one moment?
For example, with 50 Cent’s tour, the opening scene is probably a good three minutes long. I worked closely with the show’s creative director, Daniel Richardson, to come up with an incredibly cool opening scene. We start with anticipation – in this case we used sirens and shadows – which all build up to the final moment when 50 Cent appears inside his empty box full of smoke and everyone is hyped up and has their phones out. It’s magical.
With Kacey Musgraves, the levitation scene also has a build-up. The arc of the levitation is a series of suspenseful beats until the central moment. You have to come up with ways of making people enjoy that moment rather than feeling challenged and thinking, ‘oh they’re trying to be clever’. It’s more about creating a dream.
The word ‘immersive’ gets thrown about pretty often in the live space. How do you define it?
To me, the most important thing about an immersive experience is that it’s the opposite of a passive experience. So, you’re not sitting in a theatre watching something you’re not part of. For me, immersive is when the audience are actively engaged in discovering the journey of the experience.
It could be anything from an exhibition to a theatre show – but where you are still an active part of it and you have agency over the journey. We did Batman Unmasked last year, which we were very careful to call a ‘themed exhibition’, as it wasn’t just an exhibition.
Because it’s being used a lot, the meaning gets diluted and is starting to lose its power.
I’m developing a big intellectual property (IP) at the moment, which I unfortunately can’t name, but is based on a very well-known franchise of movies – and we’ve been having a discussion about what we can call it. It’s theatrical and immersive, where you are split into groups going from room to room and experiencing things happening to you – led by actors. Some of the team say they don’t want the name immersive because it’s used too much. The use of the word is not very black and white – but I think the whole immersive world is like that. That’s why it’s so tricky, but also so fascinating.
If you think about it, the immersive ‘boom’ had probably been going on for about ten years, whereas concerts and theatre shows have all been going on for centuries. So the immersive world is still a baby, and we’re still just figuring out what it really means.
What AV trends have you noticed in your line of work?
One of the biggest breakthroughs across multiple forms of live events have been LED screens. The fact you can use these with no size restrictions – and a great level of fidelity – is incredible.
This project I’m currently working on involves a Pepper’s ghost technique, but in a way that hasn’t been used in a while. I still don’t know if we are going to do LED or projection because the sidelines are so strict – that’s going to come down to development.
Projection mapping has also come incredibly far and enables us to do a lot of very cool stuff that we weren’t able to do before.
3D engines such as Unreal allow us to build entire worlds, then enable us to manipulate content live. Something that used to take hours can be done in half an hour thanks to the advancements in these technologies.
Do you have a preference for working on IP-based immersive experiences, or non-IP-based?
There are pros and cons to working on a non-IP experience. I’d say the biggest advantage is that you are free to come up with your creative – you’re not tied into something that already exists. You don’t have to go through licensing; you don’t have to adhere to guidelines; you can create the whole world yourself, which can be fascinating.
But if I were to put my commercial hat on, non-IPs are quite a lot harder to sell. IPs tap into an existing audience – be it for a brand, movie or character – and our job is to deliver that emotion or product that people expect to be associated with the particular IP.
But my personal approach is to try and find the core of that IP – find out what people coming to the experience actually want from it. I then attempt to meet those expectations – but then overdeliver, either with a twist or the use of something completely different.
With Batman, it could have just been an exhibition with props. But instead, we decided to have some fun with it and create some infinity rooms and mazes – which is something people weren’t expecting.
Does fan expectation of IPs weigh heavily on creative decisions?
You do have to be both aware of and 100% embrace the fans. I know that, with some previous shows, mistakes have been made in trying to completely reinvent the wheel and not even engage with them.
One of the first things we did when developing this current show, that has a massive fanbase, was set up an informal meeting with one of the fanbase’s London groups and ask for feedback.
They gave us loads of ideas and got really involved with the show. Having said that, we need to be careful not to do a show just for the fans. That’s when experiences can go wrong, when they are only looking at the fan perspective and not thinking about the commercial one, and end up making it unappealing to mainstream audiences or new target audiences. Ultimately, this affects the ticket sales.
Have you faced any challenges along the way?
There was something with Saw: Escape Experience around three years ago now – which was a project I really enjoyed working on.
We knew that the core of this had to involve escape rooms because, ultimately, that’s the theme of the films – the experience of having to escape Jigsaw’s traps.
But what happened was, because we launched on Halloween and it was a brand-new show, we had a lot of people (fans as well as others) coming in and expecting it to be a horror maze with actors jumping at you.
We got a lot of negative feedback at the time – not because it was bad, but because people were going in with the wrong expectations. After the Halloween period ended, we then went back to the drawing board to try and find a clearer message. We changed the title to Saw: Escape Experience as a starting point. The other comments were about the length of the show, explaining how it felt too short. It was advertised as just over an hour, which it was, but we realised that perception of time is different for different people.
I took myself away and spent a week trying to analyse why people felt the show was shorter than it really was. I knew I couldn’t add rooms, as we’d already maximised the space. I then realised that, when someone is coming to do an experience, their main focus is on the interactive element, so their brain associates the start of the experience as being from the moment they are first interacted with. With Saw, we had 15 minutes of build-up until that point, setting the narrative.
So, we dealt with this by making people thrown into an escape situation immediately. Once this change had been made, our ratings shot back to five stars and it solved everything.
Do you have any words of advice for readers who might hope to follow in your footsteps?
Only do it if you’re truly passionate about it. The work becomes your entire life and has very anti-social hours. There are really stressful moments, but it’s unique too. There’s nothing else like the reward of opening a show. When you see that first audience taking part in an experience you’ve had a hand in creating, it’s an adrenaline rush and payoff like no other.
In terms of getting your foot in the door, research and understand the work of professionals who you admire – then reach out! I’m a big fan of meeting face to face. Knock on office doors, ask for shadowing opportunities and internships. Be bold!
To learn more about other industry icons, head to this article about Chloe Lamford.
This feature was first published in the Jul/Aug 2025 issue of LIVE.
