We collaborated with Lionsgate on the Hunger Games Exhibition project, which opened July 1 at Discovery Times Square, practically in our backyard. (Which makes it awfully convenient for our Operations staff…. )
(Our All Star Operations team onsite: Dhierry Clermont, Operations Manager, and Michael Suswal, Head of Strategy and Development, Entertainment)
This definitely isn’t your run-of-the-mill tour. The tour was created to be an integral piece to the exhibition and is an all-encompassing experience—it’s a fictional web of narratives, settings, plots, and characters created out of whole cloth to complement the existing world of the Hunger Games.
And what luck: Our very own John Simoniello, Senior Producer and Digital Media Strategist, was a huge fan of the series long before the project began. He binge-read all the books in short order and gossiped with our Business Development Manager, Alison Burke, about the casting of Katniss. His knowledge of the books, the movies, the characters and the setting paid off when he took on the daunting job of creating the world of Panem for the Acoustiguide mobile app. He helped identify the core narratives to highlight along each stop in Katniss’s journey, and even named one of the characters after our Operations Manager, Dhierry Clermont.
Simon Dale, Chief Software Architect, says his favorite feature is the Passport functionality. The digital Passport allows visitors to collect passport stamps, take photos throughout the exhibition and favorite stops. Visitors can then send and share their passports via email. The passport, said Dale, engages users in the social sphere beyond a static “share” button… the Passport allows visitors to share something without offering a dreaded text box.”
From image recognition, augmented reality, and beacon technology, the team developed the customized app in about 10 ten weeks.
No great tour is complete without a great soundtrack. Tony Cirne, composer extraordinaire, created an original composition that bridged familiar sounds from the movie to the tour. He wanted to use the music to spotlight the personality of each character.
So…how are things going since the exhibition opened? Every day, our Assistant Onsite Manager, Pippa Budge, witnesses Acoustiguide’s hard work at play. Pippa says in the past two weeks, she’s met people from all over the world, and plenty of fellow Aussies. She’s loved meeting the Hunger Games’ far-flung fans including “a high school student who has 267k Instagram followers, based purely on her Hunger Games themed account!” In homage, Pippa often wears her hair in braids a la Katniss, and admits to have taken hundreds of selfies with visitors using the camera function on the Hunger Games app.
