While also relating Sir Ernest Shackelton’s 1915 expedition aboard the
Endurance — the greatest survival story in maritime history—we dramatically enhance the narrative dimension of this space.
As guests would be navigating four downward ramps with three switch-backs, the experience needed to be identifiable and compelling from every angle and elevation. Thus novel wrap-around Projection Mapping would be employed.
Since the Antarctic region is defined by vast vistas and other-worldly scales, the image would have to be as large as possible, ultimately becoming 145’ long and 20’ high (the maximum size allowable in the space).
Because guests would be walking in close proximity to projection surfaces the image needed to be seamless ultra-high resolution to remain sharp and realistic. This demanded five 4K laser projectors.
To truly immerse the audience photo realism was demanded. This included recreating the Endurance from 19th century blueprints, using period music known to have been on-board, projecting 1:1 scale and producing realistic oceans and atmospheric conditions. Ultimately only the ship and ocean were produced in photo-realistic 3D CGI, everything else included in the scenes is our own original live-action photography from Antarctica.
Since guests would move more slowly on the ramps during peak times four different 1-minute scenes we’re created to avoid repetition. Each scene depicts a unique sea state and time-of-day, including “stormy”, “high rolling seas”, “calm day with icebergs” and “calm starry night”. By having the ability to loop these scenes in different ways the zoo is able to intensify or de-intensify the experience depending on the current guest mix providing the ultimate programming flexibility.
Like the wrap-around image, a 6-channel surround sound system with dual subwoofers envelops the audience. From the gusts of winds, to the splashing of whales to the creak of the ship every sonic detail has been included. As a final “intensifier” we added 4-D environmental effects, including 4 hurricane fans to create strong winds, 9 water nozzles for sea spray from bow splashes and waves, as well as a snow machine to occasionally dust the visitors.
Due to the zoo’s total ambition for the building and our wish to deliver above expectations Creative made the following conscientious decisions at the outset:
1) have very low facility impact. Our proposed system would not require any architectural modification or re-designs. We would use existing walls how and where we found them.
2) produce a durable system with as low operating costs as possible. This led to the choice of laser-based projection systems to avoid challenging bulb replacement and high operating costs.
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