St William’s shrine was dismantled nearly 500 years ago. What survives today are fragments, intricate pieces that hint at something much larger, but can’t fully tell the story on their own.

That’s where the incredible work of Viridian FX comes in.

Using detailed 3D scans of the surviving fragments, combined with deep historical research, the Viridian FX team painstakingly reconstructed the 14th-century shrine. The result allows us, for the first time in centuries, to see what the shrine would have looked like when it stood in the nave of the Minster not as speculation, but as a carefully researched digital reconstruction.

Our role at Hewitt & Walker was to bring everything together. The research, the reconstruction and the story of St William and shape it into a film that works in a space unlike anywhere else.

The Undercroft cinema features the widest screen we’ve ever worked on, with a custom ultra-wide aspect ratio of 4.82:1. That scale changed how we approached framing, pacing and storytelling, but it also gave us an incredible canvas on which to work.

Working closely with the York Minster team, we translated the research of Dr Jennie England into a clear, engaging narrative, guiding visitors through St William’s life, legacy and canonisation, before placing the reconstructed shrine at the heart of the film.