Architecture studio Brut Deluxe has designed this year's Christmas lights in Madrid to work like a "flip book on an urban scale", taking spectators on a trip to the moon as they walk through the city (+ movie).

Instead of creating a repeating motif, Madrid and Munich-based Brut Deluxe has designed a sequence of 31 lit images representing a trip to the moon.

The perception of the lights changes along the route, meaning that taking the time to walk its entire length is the only way to experience the installation in full.

Banners of gridded blue lights strung high above the street feature a white cratered moon design in the centre, which becomes larger and appears to get gradually closer to Christmas shoppers strolling beneath.

"Instead of flipping through pages with your thumb to produce a primitive cinematographic illusion of motion or animated pictures, with Moon it is the spectator that creates this effect by moving himself along the street," said head of Brut Deluxe, Ben Busche.

The site-specific installation responds to the topography of Madrid's Gran Via. The thoroughfare rises at Plaza España and the crossing with Alcala Street, with its most elevated point located at half way – between the Telefonica Building and Plaza Callao.

"The sequence of light motifs produces an effect of arrival or zooming in to the moon, coinciding with the rise of the street, and inversely, of departure or zooming out with the descent," said Busche.

The installation will be in place until 6 January 2015 – the "twelfth night" – when Christmas decorations are traditionally taken down.

Each year Madrid's city council commissions a different designer or architect to create festive street lighting. In 2012, Italian architect Teresa Sapey created glittering circles of LEDs for the Spanish capital.

Other festive designs installed in Europe this year include a Christmas tree in Budapest made from 5,000 pieces of firewood.

Photography is by Miguel de Guzmán.