John G. Shedd Aquarium
Services Provided:
Mightybytes worked with the incredible team at John G. Shedd Aquarium to create animated content for A Holiday Fantasea, their aquatic send-up to the 2010 holiday season.
The entertaining and educational show features dolphins, sea lions, and beluga whales alongside dancing snowflakes, a snow queen, animal trainers, and a 120-foot wide screen filled with animated holiday-themed content.
OUR APPROACH
The project started mere weeks before A Holiday Fantasea was scheduled to open, so we collaborated with the Shedd crew on an aggressive timeline that included several rounds of content reviews and early tech tests to make sure the content was properly formatted for the giant screen, which runs video content from two edge-blended high definition projectors. Our clients at Shedd Aquarium should be given gold stars for project management, as they provided us with the following prior to starting the project:
- A detailed project plan and script for the show.
- Layered graphics files created with consistent naming conventions that matched the script.
- Flattened PDFs of key screens to insure consistency of art placement, typography, and so on.
- Video prototype that showed slides coinciding with the show’s timed music.
All these files and the careful discussions that accompanied them allowed us to very quickly get to the task of animating content and not wasting time organizing files, finding script references, and so on. We can’t thank the team at Shedd Aquarium enough for that.
IMPLEMENTATION
Production consisted of several projection tests mentioned above to insure content integrity on the big screen followed by low-resolution animation reviews, a few face-to-face meetings, and the expected rounds of phone calls to discuss details. We shot high definition clips of animal trainers and children discussing their experiences at Shedd Aquarium in front of a green screen and then composited the shots into our animated content. Thanks to the extreme level of detail taken by our clients in pre-production, we were able to get the project finished on time and on budget with enough time left over for rehearsals to guarantee an awesome live show.
This was our fourth collaboration with John G. Shedd Aquarium.