Arbour Heights Launch — Lendlease at Elephant Park

Brief

Lendlease commissioned Vivid Squad to cover the launch of Arbour Heights, part of The Wilderly — the final residential phase of Elephant Park, Lendlease's regeneration of Elephant and Castle in Zone 1 London. The Wilderly is delivered in joint venture with Japanese developer Daiwa House, and the launch evening brought guests together on the building's roof terrace, with the Shard and the City skyline as the backdrop.

The brief was to document the building's unveiling through its key moments and capture the atmosphere of the evening for Lendlease's marketing and social media. That meant covering the full flow of the event — guest arrivals, networking, speeches and guided tours of the show homes — as both high-resolution photography and video, with the footage shaped from the start around a vertical highlight reel.

What We Delivered

• Four-hour event photography & videography
• Kagami Biraki ceremony coverage
• 30–60 second vertical highlight reel
• Edited gallery of interiors & guest experience

About the Project

We approached the launch as social-first storytelling. Rather than filming everything and finding the reel in the edit, we planned the coverage around a clear narrative arc — arrival, conversation, the ceremony, the view — so the 30–60 second vertical highlight video had a natural flow from its first frame to its last. Vertical video is how launch content actually gets watched on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok, and building the shoot around that format means every shot earns its place.

The centrepiece of the evening was a Kagami Biraki — the traditional Japanese ceremony in which a sake barrel is opened with wooden mallets and shared as a celebratory toast. It is a single moment that happens once, so we covered it with photography and video at the same time: the group gathered around the barrel, the strike of the mallets, and the toast that followed. For a development delivered with a Japanese partner, it was the image that told the story of the launch, and it had to be right first time.

Around the ceremony, we documented four hours of the evening as it unfolded: guests networking in the roof garden, speeches framed against the London skyline, live saxophone on the terrace, sake served at the bar, and guests settling into the residents' lounge. We also captured the building itself — the terraces, the planting, the interiors and the views across Elephant Park towards the Shard and the City — because for a residential launch, the space is as much the subject as the people.

The result was a full edited gallery of interiors and guest moments alongside the vertical highlight reel, giving Lendlease assets for immediate social posting and a longer-term library for The Wilderly's sales and marketing. Event photography that shows real people enjoying a building does work that a render cannot: it proves the place is finished, lived in and worth visiting.

Property launches reward a team that can read a room and a building at once. Our work across London estates — including British Land at Canada Water and Greenwich Peninsula, where we are the on-site production team — means we arrive knowing how developers use launch content, and we shoot for those uses from the first frame.