Xtreme Days - X Edition

Client: Xtreme Days Festival
Year: 2025
Location: Sacile, IT
Category: Show Design, Projection mapping, Animation

A large-scale 3D projection mapping commissioned for the 10th anniversary of Xtreme Days Festival — Italy's leading event for extreme sports, urban freestyle and outdoor activities. Over a full weekend, the 16th-century facade of Palazzo Pegolo in Piazza del Popolo, Sacile, became the stage for a decade of athletic history. The narrative was built around the athletes who defined the festival: virtual reconstructions of their performances — skaters, freestylers, highliners — projected at architectural scale, reclaiming the city center as their arena once again.

The show featured Armin Holzer, a professional highliner who had become a beloved fixture of the festival, known for stretching his slackline above the rooftops of Sacile. He passed away years ago. His likeness was reconstructed from archival photography using AI animation and CGI, rendered with enough realism to be recognizable from the ground — and reintroduced to the crowd that remembered him.

The final sequence follows a virtual athlete who, startled by an explosion, sprints across the upper floor of the palace — seen moving through window after window. He disappears. Then, from the first window of the adjacent building, the same figure reappears — but no longer virtual. A real highliner, identical in appearance, picks up exactly where the fiction left off.

Credits /
Project coordination: Plam Studio
Direction and Visual Storytelling: Marco Calzolari
Sound Design: Paolo Maiarelli
Building Scan: Loudlab
Highline Athlete: Nazareno Marcantoni

The apparition of Armin Holzer /

AI animation in Runway

Compositing into 3D space

AI motion capture from video /

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