Lionsgate Entertainment World: Environmental Media

Lionsgate Entertainment World in Zhuia, China, is a very high tech theme park. It’s brand and general experience is futuristic with a very modern architectural look. To help bring this to life Framestore created screen installations all around the park, this floor to ceiling screen media wrapped pillars, curved media walls, and the centerpiece to the park; a chandelier of huge curved LED walls.

All of these screens play bespoke, high resolution, high frame-rate animated sequences based on the 6 film IPs in the park which Gavin wrote and directed.

Read more here.

Gods of Egypt: Battle for Eternity

The world’s first purpose built VR roller coaster. Directed by Gavin and based in Lionsgate Entertainment World in Zhuhai, China. Working alongside Thinkwell Group.

This roller coaster ride takes in the whole movie, including sneaking through the city and night to break into the vault, weaving past giant fire breathing cobras in underground tunnels and blasting the evil god Set into a giant spire that explodes to bring light back to the land… it’s all in there.

As we were building this roller coaster from scratch to be a VR experience we chose to have a powered vehicle that we could control to mimic the movement in the VR visuals. This enabled us to traverse the whole track twice giving a very different feel on each lap without the guests realizing, and fitting a what seems like a huge rides into a relatively small space.

Read more here.

The Twilight Saga: Bella’s Journey

The Twilight Saga: Bella’s Journey is a dark ride that (as the name suggests) attempts to tell the take in the entire story of the Twilight Saga franchise. The ride is in Lionsgate Entertainment World, in Zhuhai, China. All of the ride’s visual and audio media was directed by Gavin, alongside the creative team at Thinkwell group.

Featuring animatronics, rich scenic design and perspective warped media screens, guests take on the role of Bella Swan, and experience her emotional journey throughout the Twilight Saga. From falling in love to a huge vampire vampire and tumbling down an icy mountain.

The team at Framestore built digital doubles of the movie characters and used a blend of hand animation and motion capture to bring them to life. We commissioned a full cinematic score for the ride which was performed by a one hundred piece orchestra, and we also directed all of the sound design and voice over performance.

Read more here.

The Twilight Saga: Midnight Ride

Gavin directed this VR motorbike ride for Lionsgate Entertainment world in Zhuhai, China, working alongside Thinkwell Group. The ride is loosely based on the events of Twilight: Eclipse, which has the riders teaming up with Jacob Black, as they race through the forest with the black pack of werewolves drawing out the evil newborn vampire army.

Original concept art

The ride won a Thea award for outstanding achievement and was one of the first full scale high throughput VR attraction in the world which gives riders agency of thier actions. Riders have full control of thier bikes, being able to seek out different paths through the forest, discovering hidden jumps and tunnels, and choose how to avoid the attacking vampires.

Storyboard

Artists and developers across Framestore’s London, New York and Montreal studies were involved in this major project.

Read more here.

Pearl Quest

Our first theme park ride! Jason and I creative directed this ride at Framestore for Wanda Group.

The ride is in Qingdao, China and is based on an ancient legend about a young god called Nezha and his battle with the 4 dragons of the oceans.

It was a 3 year project, during which the team at Framestore designed all of the characters and environments, wrote the script, created many storyboards and pre-vis iterations, commissioned the original musical score and sound effects, and created all of the animation and VFX.

More information here: https://www.framestore.com/work/wanda-group

Trick or Treat 2016: Toxic Ooze

We created a toxic ooze factory theme this time, and by handing out Chromadepth glasses to the kids all the crazy colours we used appeared to go a bit loopy in 3D depth. It took us months to paint all the scenic and props, and LOTS of luminous paint. Our garage was left looking a bit weird.

The whole thing was an intense impact on the sense, with industrial alarms going of, a ton of strobe lights and disorientating 3D effects. Fun for all!

We also collected for Cancer Research this year and found everybody really keen to donate, so a huge thank you for everybody who came along and dug deep.