Dave Cobb and Vincent Leclerc discuss how technology can enhance storytelling and experiences in physical spaces like theme parks, museums, and live events. Cobb provides context on how Walt Disney pioneered integrating technology and storytelling to bring fictional worlds to life for audiences. Leclerc then discusses how his company Eski Studio uses technology like interactive wands and illuminated balls to foster communal experiences and engage audiences. Both emphasize that the goal is to use technology in service of emotional storytelling rather than as an end itself.

1. STORYTELLING:
PLUGGING
INTO
THE
REAL
WORLD
EventTech
NYC,
11.12.12
1

2. dave
cobb
senior
creaEve
director
@davecobb
2
I’m Dave Cobb, the Sr. Creative Director for the Thinkwell Group, a unique multi-disciplinary design & production firm in Los Angeles, with expertise in location-based themed entertainment like museums, live events,
and theme parks.

3. group.com
@ThinkwellGroup
3
We’ve done everything from fountain shows to flume rides to live events to dinosaur encounters.
Recently, we opened The Making of Harry Potter, a 150k-sq-ft, 3.5 hour permanent behind-the-scenes attraction located at the very London studios where all eight movies were filmed
Currently we are designing an 100-acre theme park in Beijing where over 40 rides, shows & attractions will bring to life the legendary 16th century Chinese stories of the Monkey King. Enough with the sales pitch...

4. “SO,
YOU
DESIGN
ROLLER
COASTERS?”
4
When I try to describe what I do, 99% of the people I meet respond with: “So, you design Roller Coasters?”

5. NASA
=
ROCKET
SCIENTISTS
5
It’s like assuming everyone who works at NASA is a rocket scientist.
Not entirely incorrect, of course -- but not precise enough.
My answer would be “well, sort of...”

6. “NO,
I
TELL
STORIES
WITH
ROLLER
COASTERS.”
6
Which makes people even more confused -- “roller coasters need writers?”
Why yes, they do, as well as a lot of other really interesting people -- if there’s a science or a discipline you can think of, I can bet you it’s probably been used in service of a theme park attraction or two before. What
we do can be highly prototypical, so we synthesize ideas from lots of different worlds.

7. 7
I owe my weird job to the efforts of Walt Disney in 1955, when he created Disneyland.

8. 8
Using techniques from moviemaking, live theater, stage illusions, and the trickle-down from burgeoning technologies like industrial controls and robotics, Walt evolved and expanded his media empire to include live,
real-world attractions -- bringing things to life that audiences had never seen, telling his stories dimensionally and experientially.
Disney came up with the term “Imagineering” to describe this unique blend of technology & storytelling in social, physical places.

9. 9
He’s not really the first, of course. It’s basically theater.
From Winsor McCay’s animated “Gertie the Dinosaur”, to Renaissance & Arabic automata, all the way back to the Greek “Deus Ex Machina,” technology has always been used in service of live spectacle & storytelling.
The difference is, Disney pulled down the proscenium. The real world became magical.

10. 10
Disney took the raw mechanics of amusement, and added emotional context and stories.
Spinning carnival rides became flights with Dumbo.
Roller coasters became bobsled rides through the Matterhorn.

11. 11
The crass hodgepodge of the midway gave way to the orderly, aspirational, reassuring theater of the Magic Kingdom.

12. 12
Disney parks don’t have “rides,” they’re “attractions” that tell a story, immersing riders in a complete world through a sophisticated combination of theatrical, perceptual, psychological, and technological trickery.
They started as mostly passive stories, operettas to be observed, from the safety of doom buggies and pirate boats.
But as audience sophistication levels changed, so did Disney’s attractions -- by the 1980s & 1990s, they became first-person narratives where guests were written into the story, perilously caught up in the Death Star
trench battle in Star Tours, or spelunking cursed temples with Indiana Jones.

13. 13
Universal Studios similarly jumped on the bandwagon, evolving their sleepy 1960s behind-the-scenes tram tour into an increasingly perilous collection of shark attacks, earthquakes, and giant monkeys that brought
the stories and magic of movies to life in immersive new ways.

14. 14
And when DVD extras made behind-the-scenes tours irrelevant, Universal parks became full-on sensory assaults from giant robots, tornadoes, fire, ancient mummies and flying dragons.
Still, the trend was always story-based, even amongst the peril and technical pizzaz. You dove into adventures and came out the other end, safe and sound, with an awesome tale to tell your friends and family.

15. 15
It’s not just theme parks that were affected by this participatory change of expectations from consumers.
Science museums, touring exhibits, planetariums, and aquariums are actually a big part of our business -- more and more they compete, regionally, dollar for dollar, right alongside theme parks, as the same sort of
social, entertaining “third space” that people want outside of work and home.
Museums and exhibitions have become less about boxes full of dead stuff, and more like theater -- using immersive and interactive techniques to inspire and educate guests.

16. TECH
+ SOCIAL
+ ENVIRONMENT
+ STORY
16
So, enough with the brief nerdy history lesson. What we deal with is technology... embedded in social environments... to tell stories.
Story can be a loaded word -- it’s often assumed that it means an “a-to-b” narrative, but that’s not always the case. In our business, story can mean emotional context, or an operetta or book-report of known themes
or brands... and increasingly, it’s about a more participatory, co-created form of storytelling.

17. 17
More and more, our entertainment is engaging us more directly, asking us to co-create our experiences -- not only through technology, but socially and environmentally.
The off-broadway show Sleep No More takes Macbeth and turns it into five floors and over a hundred rooms of non-linear exploration, blurring the line between audience and performer by literally seducing viewers
into the action.
Shows like Fuerza Bruta are literally putting the audience on stage and having them touch and feel the performance with every sense.
Alternate-reality games like Disney’s Flynn Lives campaign created massive multiplayer online story worlds and puzzles that manifested as real-world pop-up attractions that immersed players in the electronic world
of Tron Legacy.
Theme parks are using game techniques to add layers of participation and content to physical places, like Disney’s Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, which uses the various themed lands of the world’s most popular
theme park as “levels” for a unique augmented-reality card game.

18. 18
A lot of the talks about technology here revolve around mobile, which isn’t exactly what we’re talking about, because ultimately, our job is about pulling people out of their daily lives and the distractions that come
with it.
Obviously, mobile is something that we take very seriously as location-based attraction designers, because it can be a distraction or out of context. And truthfully, if people want to tune out what we have to offer, they
will -- regardless of technology.
The trick for us is using technology that will keep them distracted on our terms, or open up their personal context to enhance the locations they’re in.

19. ‣
THE
SHOW
AT
THE
PIER
at
AtlanEc
City
Pier
‣
NATUREQUEST
at
Atlanta’s
Fernbank
Museum
of
Natural
History
‣
WIZARDING
WORLD
OF
HARRY
POTTER
2010
Grand
Opening
Event
19
Three recent projects that Thinkwell designed and produced are good examples of how we use technology to help enable location-based storytelling.

20. ‣
THE
SHOW
AT
THE
PIER
at
AtlanEc
City
Pier
20
[Embedded Video] In 2006, we were challenged by the Atlantic City Pier to create an attraction that would draw people to a “dead zone” -- a terminus point in their retail development.
Partnering with Carnegie-Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, we developed hardware and software that was totally unique to the fountain industry. In addition to hourly preprogrammed shows, the fountain
plays interactive “games” with the audience, using multiple imaging and sensing technologies.
Guest discover these games simply by walking up to the fountain -- it responds to their movements and slowly builds into different games as crowds start to gather, from simple “follow me” games with single viewers,
to massively multiplayer “color wars” and group dance competitions. While any fountain show would have offered a certain level of attraction, we created something that constantly engaged guests in different ways,
creating great repeatability and word-of-mouth and raising the value of the tenant spaces in the process.

21. ‣
NATUREQUEST
at
Atlanta’s
Fernbank
Museum
of
Natural
History
21
[Embedded Video] Last year, we opened NatureQuest at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. The museum approached us with a challenge: urban Atlanta kids had one of the nation’s most diverse urban
forests in their backyard, yet little to inspire or encourage them to explore it. They wanted to engage urban kids -- of all ages, and various reading levels -- with the ecosystems of the southeast, in a new, non-
museum-y kind of way.
Rather than a typical didactic museum exhibit, NatureQuest’s content is embedded everywhere, engaging the senses using sound, touch, and sight to immerse visitors in a nature-inspired environment that quite
literally comes to life around them using a combination of high technology and tried-and-true analog play environments and theatrical techniques. And everything designed into the environment -- down to the last
leaf -- is species-accurate to the region
A river of projected fish responds to every step; animated animal habitats are integrated seamlessly into scenic environments; augmented-reality night-vision goggles reveal unseen nighttime animal activity in the
actual environment of the museum; RFID acorns, shells, eggs & seeds reveal what they’ll grow into when placed in front of a magic mirror.
Scavenger-hunt-style “challenge cards” enable an active conversation between parent and child as they discover the environment together. These cards make the space infinitely reprogrammable -- by age, time of
day, grade level, seasonally -- by “gamifying” the entire exhibit space.
Fernbank has dozens of individual stories about nature, but it’s up to the guests to co-create them into their own narrative. Technology -- and sometimes just crafty theatrical techniques -- allow those stories to be
discovered by the guests, rather than told didactically.

22. ‣
WIZARDING
WORLD
OF
HARRY
POTTER
2010
Grand
Opening
Event
22
[Embedded Video] In 2010, Universal Orlando was getting ready to open the new “Wizarding World of Harry Potter”, a spectacular addition that they had designed for their Islands of Adventure theme park, featuring
attractions based on the most popular movie series of all time.
Universal looked to Thinkwell to help create an equally spectacular, headline-grabbing opening event. It had everything: celebrities arriving in the actual Knight Bus & Ford Anglia from the films, Warwick Davis
conducting a chorus of frogs, custom HD mapped video on Hogwart’s castle, an 80-piece live orchestra conducted by John Williams -- everything to get that cover shot for USA Today, and millions of unique views on
Universal’s live webcast.
Most uniquely, all of that spectacle was actually kicked off by the guests themselves. We created special wands prior to the event, and everyone in the audience got one. Most thought it was merely a souvenir, but to
their surprise, Daniel Radcliffe asked them all to raise their wands and cast a spell together by shouting “Lumos Maximos” -- and suddenly all of the wand tips lit up in unison, totally surprising the audience and
beginning the magical transformation of Hogwarts with imagery and pyrotechnics. It was an amazingly memorable moment co-created by the fans, with a one-of-a-kind keepsake to boot.

23. vincent
leclerc
co-­‐founder,
creaEve
director
@vincentleclerc
23
Technology can help us remove boundaries with our audience, creating experiences that can engage, enchant and empower guests to participate in entirely new and exciting ways.
Sharing the stage with me is Vincent Leclerc, who heads up the mad geniuses at Eski Studio in Montreal, who empower locations and events with incredible technology and unique social interactivity.

24. 24
Founded 5 years ago, in Montreal.

25. 25
video

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27. 27

28. 28

29. 29

30. 30

31. 31

32. 32
[VIDEO] Inspiration: South Korean stadium card stunts

33. 33
VIBE:
Dressing people up to catalyze collective experiences.
Generate a feeling of unity and shared experience with the artist on-stage.

34. 34
[VIDEO] Cirque & XBox Live Event

35. 35
Arcade Fire experience. 1250 balls at Coachella 2011.
Building momentum.
Ball drop > illuminated balls > pixmob effects > second life

36. 36
[Embedded Video] Coachella 2011

37. 37
[Video] Coachella Ball driving away in someone’s car

38. 38
Second life

39. 39
From spectator to promoter

40. 40
Osheaga 2012: Keeping the magic alive

41. 41
[Video] Osheaga

42. PHYSICAL EMOTIONAL COMMUNAL
42

43. PLACES
+
STORIES
+
TECHNOLOGY
43
There will ALWAYS be a potent social, psychological, and cathartic need for the “third space” -- be it a mall, or a museum, or a theme park, or a live event.
We believe that the next plateau can’t be reached with technology alone. What new buttons are out there to be pushed in people emotionally, is the next level we’re seeking.
The best innovation is going to come from generalists, who understand the entertainment space as a whole, and create full systems of experience -- not falling in love with specific technology for its own sake, but
rather to harness various technologies as they emerge to bring together the emotional power of physical places, the compelling power of storytelling, and the social power of groups, to create lasting, meaningful
experiences.

44. dave
cobb vincent
leclerc
senior
creaEve
director co-­‐founder,
creaEve
director
@davecobb @vincentleclerc
@ThinkwellGroup @EskiStudio
44