For Paradise Season 2, The Refinery conceived and designed an immersive OOH bunker installation on Sunset Boulevard — smoke, lighting, curved digital displays, a countdown clock, and environmental details that turned a barricade into a physical extension of the show’s world. Ad Age covered it. The season delivered: 950 million minutes viewed in premiere week, a finale that hit 4.3 million views in three days — up 35% over the premiere — and a combined S1 and S2 total surpassing 13 billion minutes streamed.
The challenge
For Paradise Season 2, the assignment was to create an experiential OOH moment that could stop people on the sidewalk and pull them into the world of the show.
The work needed to intrigue people who already knew the series while still making sense to passersby with no context. It had to create a physical moment worth photographing or filming, balance real-world impact with social capture, and clarify enough of the campaign message without overexplaining the mystery.
The challenge was not just “make a cool barricade.”
It was: how do you make someone feel like they have walked up to the edge of the story?
The idea
The Refinery developed the bunker as an immersive campaign object: a barricade that felt like a portal out of the show’s world and into the real one.
The concept leaned into the visual memory of Season 1, using the bunker as the familiar anchor instead of relying too heavily on Season 2 plot beats. The idea was to make the installation feel like the threshold of something unknown: initiation, escape, danger, adventure, and whatever comes next.
The bunker was designed to feel alive. Real smoke would come out of it. Lighting would give it atmosphere. Curved digital displays would add movement and depth. A countdown clock would create tension and give people a reason to watch. The doors could open, close, reset, and repeat, turning the installation into a looped public moment.
The goal was to make it feel like someone had just walked out of the bunker.
What The Refinery made
Immersive bunker concept
The Refinery created the concept and design for a barricade-style bunker installation for Paradise Season 2, turning a sidewalk structure into an experiential OOH campaign moment.
Smoke, lighting, and motion behavior
The design incorporated real smoke, lighting, and movement to make the bunker feel active, atmospheric, and physically present in the environment.
Countdown clock and door sequence
The Refinery developed a countdown clock concept and explored how the bunker doors could open, close, reset, and repeat to create intrigue and reward people who stopped to watch.
Curved digital displays
The concept included curved digital displays designed to add motion, campaign messaging, and dimensionality to the bunker experience.
Environmental design details
The design explored overgrowth, texture, lighting, and physical cues to make the bunker feel like a real-world extension of the show rather than a flat advertising surface.
Campaign messaging and tagline exploration
The Refinery considered where promotional art, title visibility, and tagline messaging should live so the installation could intrigue fans while orienting people who did not know the show.
Rapid concept development
The Refinery completed ideation in approximately one week, developing the experiential creative quickly while accounting for physical experience, social capture, motion, lighting, and campaign clarity.
Why it worked
The bunker worked as a concept because it treated experiential OOH differently from key art.
A poster asks, “What should the audience see?”
An immersive installation asks, “What should the audience experience?”
That shift changed the creative process. The Refinery had to think about how people would approach the bunker on the sidewalk, what they would notice first, where the title and campaign messaging should live, how smoke and lighting could create curiosity, how a countdown clock could build anticipation, and how the moment would read in a phone video.
The concept also balanced fandom and accessibility. For people who knew Paradise, the bunker connected back to the world and mythology of the series. For people who did not, the smoke, countdown, lighting, and physical structure created enough intrigue to make them stop and wonder what was happening.
That is the sweet spot for immersive entertainment marketing: recognizable enough for fans, strange enough for strangers.
The work also understood that modern experiential campaigns live twice. First, in person. Then, online. The bunker needed to turn heads on the sidewalk, but it also needed to create a clean visual moment for social capture: smoke moving, lights shifting, doors opening, a countdown ticking, people filming, the campaign traveling beyond the original placement.
For Paradise Season 2, The Refinery designed an immersive OOH concept that made the show feel physical, tactile, and public.
The kind of thing you walk past, stop for, and then immediately send to someone with no context except: “wait, what is this?”
Project details
Client: Hulu
Title / Brand: Paradise Season 2
Assignment: Create a bold experiential OOH concept that would place passersby inside the world of the show and generate both an IRL and social-first campaign moment
Project scope: Experiential concepting, immersive OOH design, barricade bunker creative, environmental graphics, smoke effect, lighting direction, countdown clock concept, curved digital display integration, tagline exploration, campaign placement strategy, production-ready creative direction, and final design support
Markets: [Approved market / placement city]
Production note: The Refinery led the creative concept and design. Fabrication and manufacturing were handled separately.