Fall Festival Viewmaster Install
Studio: Fivestone Studios
When this project came across our desks, we were immediately excited to relive a part of our childhoods. World Outreach Church came to us to see if we could create a larger-than-life Viewmaster. Their annual Fall Festival was coming up, and they had already been using old school Viewmasters in some of their kids programming; now they wanted to tie that toy into an immersive experience right in their lobby.
We started off by doing a creative discovery with the client. This looked like a series of creative brainstorms to hash out the details of what our mega-sized Viewmaster would look like, and what elements would be included to make the interior an immersive experience. We worked closely with our fabrication partners at Practical Imagination to come up with a design that would integrate well with the AV components, and create an overall fun AND problem-free experience.
The end result included a lot of red paint, LED lights, surround sound, and a large monitor integrated into a custom facade.
Now… what about the video itself?
World Outreach Church has a large production team, so they wanted to handle the actual video content themselves. The idea was that a looping video would ‘click’ through their content, similar to how you might ‘click’ through the images on a Viewfinder wheel. In order to set them up for success, we jumped in to create an After Effects template that they could plug their video content into. After dusting off our old Viewmasters (okay okay, we had to go buy some…) and studying just how this transition between each clip happens, we re-created this visual effect, added some sound design, and packaged up an easy-to-use template.
When all was said and done, the install ran for about a month. And while we heard that the kids absolutely loved the experience, we think we loved the experience of making it WAY more.
Credits
Fabrication Partner: Practical Imagination
Creative Director: Daniel Petrino
Producer: Taylor Dressler
Designer: Lia Kim
Animator: Zach Gunter