Back From China ~ Images of the Shanghai World’s Expo !

What an awesome experience! Here’s a little tease of the…count ‘em… 86 animated and interactive media pieces I produced for the Information and Communications Pavilion at the Shanghai World’s Expo 2010 (presented by China Mobile and China Telecom). This enormous World’s Fair will be running until the end of October and is expecting 70 million visitors! I was hired by BRC Imagination Arts, one of the leading World’s Fair attraction design companies, to create all of this media, starting with 18 high definition pieces for the exterior Welcome Garden where visitors cue up to go inside. Here is the exterior of our pavilion showing a few media samples, day and night:

 

Why oh why does this blog make the video so compressed???

In the Welcome Lobby visitors are given a custom made touch screen handheld device that they can use on their journey through the pavilion to collect imagery and information that will be saved for them on their own web page that this system automatically builds for them.  I produced all of the media on the handheld device and on the orientation videos. 

 

In the preshow theater, a wall mural comes alive to guide visitors through the history of telecommunications.  I produced the clips on the Handheld device that sync with this show.  These are actual historical photographs that were also used as visual reference to create the larger film.  The pavilion’s sponsors are the 2 largest telephone companies in the country; China Mobile and China Telecom.

 

 

The main theater has a huge screen and 33 more that form a barrel ceiling overhead.   Here the handheld device is used to help the characters realize their dreams by utilizing futuristic communications technology.

(background photo courtesy Brian Smith)

For the Post Show I produced/directed six 8-minute HD videos showcasing future technology that entailed more than 260 layers of composited 2D and 3D animation combined with live action footage. Here visitors can use their handheld devices to play an RFID triggered dream lantern collecting game. When visitors swipe their device in front of the backlit panels under the monitors, a 3D magic spinning lantern that represents one of the future technology concepts is triggered to fall into the game board.

 

AS OF AUGUST 28, 2010 A NEW FANTASTIC VIDEO SHOWCASING OUR PAVILION WAS PUT ON YouTube BY BRC IMAGINATION ARTS, CLICK HERE TO SEE IT, BUT PLEASE COME BACK TO MY BLOG!  I produced & directed all of the media shown in this video either on monitors or on the handheld devices.

Click here to go to BRC Imagination Arts website, the creator, designer and executive producer of the pavilion.

Mindi Featured in May Issue of In Park Magazine!

The California Academy of Sciences is the Cover Story of the latest In Park Magazine. Click here to link to it and download the full article (the 4th pdf down called "Green Acres"). I'm on page 3, and here is an excerpt from the story above.

Hot Off the Press! Behind the scenes Science museum video.

Here's a little sneak peak of the "Making of the Media - California Academy of Sciences" video I just completed. This is the intro for the piece, if you would like to see a "back of house" walking tour of how the innovative interactive games, kiosks and mini-documentaries for CAS were created, contact me to see the full piece. Scroll down to see other media excerpts I designed and produced for Theme Parks and Museums.

A little glimpse of media pieces produced by Mindi Lipschultz (scroll down to see more)

Mindi Lipschultz Creates Innovative Media for California Academy of Sciences

Wow! I just completed 2 years of media design and production on the new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. It was a fantastic project and I created 31 media pieces including interactive games and kiosks, mini-documentary films utilizing archival footage and stills which were brought to life with some fancy After Effects tricks, edge blended projections to bring static murals alive, soundscapes and more. You can read the full story on the Blooloop Themed Attractions site. I'm posting some samples here for all to see and you can click here to go see more images and video samples. When you get there, click on the first image of my logo on black, then use the "View Album" feature in the upper right to get a slideshow. Don't forget to hit the back button to return to this blog!

One of the most popular attractions at the California Academy of Sciences is my Insect Collecting Game. Players use a hand tool that they swing in mid-air that corresponds to one of 4 scientific collecting tools on thescreen. In this game, players are virtual field scientists on an expedition in Madagascar. Watch the movie to see how it works!

At the conclusion of each round, actual Academy collection drawers animate out to reveal the insects each player collected. The software calculates each catch and places it in the drawer.

In this excerpt from the documentary about the history of the Academy's expeditions to the Galapagos, I wanted to bring to life the archival photos that the scientists took 100 years ago, so we separated them into layers and animated them using a "multiplane 3D" technique and also added special effects to give the visitor the feeling that they are traveling through the actual 1905 landscapes.

Islands of Evolution film  © California Academy of Sciences

There are so many more samples of the exhibit media to show here, but please go to the photobucket to see them, click here. I'll just show a few more ...

Portal to Undersea Galapagos Underwater Adventure, and...

...one of the 4 interactive Kiosks for Africa Hall. Each kiosk has 2 Virtual Safari Adventures that get visitors involved in the stories depicted in the adjacent dioramas.

Mindi Creates First Ever High Resolution Spherical Film for Paul Allen's Science Fiction Museum in Seattle.

This "centerpiece exhibit" film was an 80 year retrospective of Science Fiction Films and literature. It utilized 5 projectors and the 2K film was divided up into 5 edge blended streams. I edited 14 picture tracks in sync and created original CGI mortise windows that displayed the simultaneous scenes. If you would like to download a better quality version click here. It will take you to the NOAA site and this is the 5th one down. NOAA provided the hardware system that this movie played on, Science on a Sphere... but even the Rocket Scientists had never seen it put to this use!

This is a frame of the film before it was "wrapped" around the globe.

and here it is after:

Here we are on Opening Day under the Space Needle. This is the Science Fiction Museum:

And since Steven Spielberg is on the board of the Museum, he was there for the Opening Day Ceremonies. I call this photo "Half Mindi and Steven with Son":

Click here to see The Globe, as it appeared on the front page of the Seattle Newspaper.

I became known as the "Globe Girl". I soon got a call from Big Buddha Baba Productions to produce another globe film. This one 3 times bigger than the Sci-Fi globe, for the post show of the new Spaceship Earth attraction at Disney's Epcot Center in Orlando.

Las Vegas Museum and Themed Experience

I designed 57 media pieces for the Las Vegas Springs Preserve. There was a lot of history here and great archival images to work with. I utilized some innovative animation techniques to bring the archival imagery alive and tell the history in a captivating way. This clip is about the arrival of the Railroad to Las Vegas and the auctioning off of the first land plots. There was a pre-existing visual device of a "Historical Notebook" that had to be integrated into the media, so here we go:

and the Hoover Dam story, among others, was told by a little water drop named Dewey:

In the museum, there were many interactives like this one where the visitor places a fossil they dig up from a sandbox on a scanner to identify the creature that it originated from.

I also designed media screens for this interactive where the visitor slides a mechanism to see the microscopic organisms inside the soil,

and this one where visitors learn what geological forces were at work to create the Las Vegas terrain.