Theme parks: Engaging entertainment

• Features

• 07/01/2021

For a while, the focus of theme parks and the visitor attraction sector has been on ‘experiential’ outcomes. However, professionals working in the segment feel that the word does not fully encapsulate what theme parks are striving towards.

Peter Cliff, creative director at Holovis, says: “The word experiential has been a little bit overused. A rollercoaster, by its very design, is experiential without the need for any additional bells and whistles. I think a better way to conceptualise this is to think in terms of increasing the level of immersion and giving guests in some respects a more active role. But we can’t forget that we also have to deliver an exceptional experience. We have to build the world more and allow people to dig as they wish but also appeal to an audience that isn’t bothered about that and who just want to go along with the ride and be entertained.”

Kevin Murphy, director of sales and marketing at Kraftwerk LT, is even more frank: “Buzzwords have been around since I started work in the 70s and they get pulled out, dusted off, refreshed and reused again.”

From these responses, it seems that the goal is to be ‘immersive’ rather than ‘experiential’. Increasing the level of immersion is making theme parks seek to develop and deploy new attractions. For example, demand for flying theatres is increasing according to Kraftwerk LT.

Murphy says: “There aren’t many flying theatres around the world, but the interesting part is that demand for them is increasing. We worked on four or five last year, and we have another six flying theatre projects in the pipeline.”

Why the spike in interest for flying theatres? Murphy details: “They’re successful and people really like them. They deliver an experience and at the end of the day what people are looking for in an experience. They like to be immersed in an experience and this is why to a certain extent they quite like sitting at home and watching the TV or a film.” Cliff from Holovis explores the idea further: “It is proven that if you can get people emotionally engaged at a visitor attraction, this is by far the biggest commercial driver for repeat visitation than anything else. This is why Disney is so popular.”

According to Murphy from Kraftwerk LT enabling this engagement should be the core focus of all parties: “The audience doesn’t care if the visuals are 12K. Of course, you can use technology to market your attraction, but the audience cannot differentiate between 8K or 12K. For the average member of the public, what they notice is whether they enjoyed the experience and whether they would like to visit again. The right technology systems deployed in the right way have a part to play in making the audience enjoy the experience, but the engagement always comes first.”

Just a blip

Like any other business, theme parks are impacted by the general state of the market. Cliff from Holovis details: “You have to look at the demographics, who is your audience? And perhaps more importantly you have to look at who is spending the most money? This might be a crude way of putting it, but the demographic that has the most money to spend [on visitor attractions] are families. Theme parks thrive where there is a burgeoning middle class and that is one of the reasons we have seen so many theme parks popping up recently. The middle class is growing rapidly in China as well as Saudi Arabia and it is no surprise that both of these countries have high demand for visitor attractions.”

Cliff continues: “What does the middle-class family unit look for? They are not necessarily looking for a two-minute or three-minute thrill, one of the kids in the family or the brother or the friend might be but the thrill is part of the whole package. The thing that these families are looking for is creating memories as a unit and you do that by locking into emotion and emotion is driven by fantastic storytelling.”

Has the global Covid-19 pandemic had a detrimental impact on the visitor attraction market? Cliff from Holovis answers: “The investment from the visitor attractions that are already operating might increase. They will need to invest to ensure that operations can resume with the proper safety measures. The investment from parks that haven’t been built or are in the process of being built, we haven’t seen that slowdown or that pullback. Major theme park development in Saudi Arabia, China, UAE, Malaysia, Southeast Asia and Singapore is still continuing because they are of the mind that the disruption caused by the pandemic will be a blip when you take into account that the development of theme parks can take years.”

With the prevailing business climate put into perspective, Cliff talks about the role of technology: “People still want to have big AV spectaculars, they want to create these story driven shows which obviously media and digital do so well. I think we have also been very cognisant that we have to make design tweaks and ensure that we are helping the situation and not creating a negative impact.

We are considering things like touchscreens that visitors have to interact with and seeing if we can use gestures instead of contact. We are thinking about ways to use audio and create more cost effective attractions that are still nice and seasonal.”

Additionally, there is a drive to encapsulate the trends and business directions discussed into new attractions. Cliff details: “I think LED domes will become more prevalent in visitor attractions and it is an interesting development.

Projectors are getting brighter and more compact, which opens the possibility of pushing the envelope. But the core technology has not evolved all that much in the past 10 years in terms of what it can do. If the projector was not bright enough you just triple, quadruple stack projectors. But LEDs bring with them a certain level of brightness and occlusion as well. With projectors we have limitations with regards to where the audience can stand and where people can go and how we can hide the projectors. With LED domes these limitations are removed and it opens up a number of possibilities. For example, we can have drones fly in an LED dome without having any shadows cast. The idea of not having limitations and just having a canvas to use means we can explore new creative avenues.”

Murphy from Kraftwerk LT explains the impact LED domes can have from personal experience: “I walked into an attraction in China, which had an LED dome as part of its flying theatre. As I walked in, they had some astronomical footage running by pure chance and I just stood there taking in the whole experience. The blacks, the colours, the resolution and the texture of the image was like nothing else. The only negative at the moment is that LED domes are expensive. If you compare projection versus LED, LED is two to three times more expensive than projection.

But, the nature of the visitor attraction business is such that you will always find clients who have the appetite to look past just the cost.”

While on the surface the emergence of LED domes sounds like the death knell for projectors, this is not necessarily the case. Murphy explains: “I think for a time, maybe the next five years, there is going to be debate over projection versus LED and it is going to come down to the application and the budget. There are still things projection can do which other display types cannot replicate. If you want to cast visuals on the side of a castle, projection mapping is the only route you can go. The two technologies will live side by side although we may see them become more specialised and suited to the applications they cater for.”

To conclude the conversation, Cliff from Holovis returns to talking about the user: “You have to understand your audience and answer the question ‘who are we telling the story to?’. Then you have to understand what story you are telling. If you don’t understand the narrative then building an experience becomes more difficult. You shouldn’t start with the technology you should start with understanding the story first."