R&S Production Services Inc. assembled a core global team and tasked us with creating and developing this attraction under a seemingly impossible time frame.
Project Director / Art Director / Show Designer: John Matthews
Project Creative producer / Show designer: Michael McHugh
Owner of the Virtual Production Studio
Project Producer: Renee Palmer
The Kahramaa Awareness Park:
Project Goal: Rapidly develop designs and concepts in a virtual environment to speed up the design and creative work flow for a fast paced real world entertainment development project under construction. Create a work environment to bring the attraction to life as quickly as possible with a global team. It was a small budget so not every area received equal finish treatment in the virtual world.
The R&S Project was divided into five elements:
1. The Canopy : The load /unload and queue area of an educational traditional dark ride in a science museum. We wanted a visual statement that would begin the ride and show by engulfing the guests in a magical special experience. The inspiration for this large sculptural element was to try and capture the essence of water as it flows across the earth and finds its way back to the sea. We explored color rhythms and dynamic shape relationships, as well as, fabrication possibilities to make sure we were staying in the prescribed budget.
2. The Ride & Show: The client will be teaching about water and energy conservation and development of natural resources through exhibits, films and a dark ride show. The ride system takes the guests on a whimsical yet educational journey illustrating " The Life Cycle of Water " featuring some of the museums characters and educational curriculum.
3. The 3D/360 degree dome theater: The design exercise here focused on the facility and was guided in a total re-design by the lead designer/art director John Matthews from his Shanghai and Los Angeles offices. The film production is being produced by R&S production Services Inc. and supervised and directed by Daniel Flannery.
4. Ride on-screen production: All the show elements in the ride are driven by both theatrical sets and on screen animated presentations of the show material. The entire attraction was created scripted and developed by the team and then developed in world giving us a wonderful preview of the guest experience.
5. Show-set and special effects design & production: All the show sets were constructed in the virtual world allowing us to see quickly what would work in the space. A series of show scene and set images were generated and included in the show set and special effects bid and production packages.
The level of detail and finished quality of the virtual model was set at medium in most cases because of schedule.
John Matthews : Project Director, on site in Doha, Qatar taking care of business.
The following group of pictures is a brief overview of the evolution of our design efforts.
We created many studies for the "Canopy" and the Dome as well as studies for all the ride and show scenes. These images are a small selection of progress shots for some of the design thoughts. All available tools were used from pencil to Maya , 3D studio max, AutoCad and Google Sketch-up. Many different file formats were imported into the world as required.
This site created and maintained by: Michael McHugh copyright Michael McHugh & R&S Production Services INC.