Little Big Engineers (LBE)
Project Summary
Little Big Engineers created a one-night walk-through Location-Based Entertainment (LBE) experience for the 2022 ETC Fall Festival, which took place on December 9th, 2022. Our five-person team of designers, engineers, and artists spent four months exploring the LBE design process and production pipeline, with the goal to produce an innovative, interactive, and immersive experience in physical space. Our project was described as "blue-sky" - our team was allowed to do anything we wanted, as long as it was location-based and elevated the guests' Festival experience. We were responsible for determining our own project scope, pitching our own budget, and fully developing our narrative and interactives from ideation to fabrication.
Our experience, Return of the Dragon, combined built elements, show control, and large-scale puppetry to transport guests to a fantastical realm where they become the heroes. Incorporating hidden RFID tap-points, custom puzzles, live acting, and interactive post-show locations, our guests were sent on a quest to revive the last known dragon eggs and return them to their mother dragon. In total, we hosted 171 guests over the four hour event.
My primary responsibilities included developing our floorplan/physical flow, set-dressing and physical theming, and designing/constructing our massive dragon puppet.
Project Trailer
(4 minutes)
Final Presentation
(15 minutes + 5 minute Q&A)
For more information on Return of the Dragon and Little Big Engineers, our team's media/branding, and our weekly development blog, please see this page.
The Team (LBE)
Lori Kipp - Set/Theming Engineer
Tsai-Yen (Cleo) Ko - Software Engineer
Chang (Ivy) Liu - Art Engineer
Nolan O'Keefe - Producer, Technology Engineer
Katherine Wheeler - Assistant Producer, Narrative Engineer
Floorplan Development
We decided early in our design process that we wanted to make a standalone attraction-type experience for our project. Our best room option was a very large classroom with a footprint shown here. In the digitized version, major gridlines are every 12 inches and minor gridlines are every 2 inches. To remain ADA-compliant, we designed all guest hallways with a minimum width of 36".
This image carousel features iterations of our experience floorplan. We began by including queueing space in our room, then moved to a layout where we were hosting different portions of the narrative simultaneously.
A special shout-out to sophomore Scenic Design student Louise Cutter, who assisted our team with modeling the final room layout.
Room Theming Photo Gallery
Designing and Building the Dragon Puppet
Throughout the entire process, our team of five excelled in task delegation and personal integrity. There's no part of the experience any of us can claim was entirely our own, rather we determined a "point person" for each element. My single largest responsibility was physically designing and building the massive dragon puppet head. Our team's two largest constraints were budget and weight; I was challenged with designing and constructing a show-stopping puppet with a single physical operator on a shoe-string budget.
Horns
The process started with a rough 3D model and concept sketch created by my teammate Ivy. As a team, we decided to proceed with building a crystal dragon with glowing eyes and horns. These lit features would enable us to communicate the dragon's emotional state with our guests without relying on dialogue. We focused on making her horns iridescent and translucent, splicing pieces of fluorescent light covers to get the crystalline structure and wrapping them with iridescent plastic from the dollar store. Pictured with the lit horn below is my teammate Cleo, our software engineer/show programmer.
Prototyping the Head and Eyes
To ensure the puppet would be low cost, we decided to construct the head almost entirely out of cardboard. In order to keep the head's weight down, we decided to make the inside of the head mostly hollow. I began by shaping the upper jaw of the dragon's head based off of the 3D model above out of three cardboard sheets and duct tape, and established the placement of her eyes. At the request of our project instructors, the dragon's eyes absolutely had to blink, so I got to work developing the internal mechanism for the eyes.
The eyes are made of clear plastic Christmas ornaments (which we painted white), and the eyelid mechanism is made from laser-cut black acrylic. An aluminum rod functions as the axle for the eyelids to swivel closed. To avoid the possibility of our dragon "winking" at guests, the left and right eyelids were attached and rotated on the same axis. We used hair ties as "springs" to ensure the eyes' resting position would be open, and attached a pull-string for the puppeteer to operate.
Dragon Skin
Knowing our guests would have the opportunity to interact physically with our dragon, we wanted to ensure that they would have a good tactile experience - our dragon had to feel like a dragon in addition to looking like a dragon. To give the dragon a scaled appearance and texture, we layered scored strips of cardboard across the jaw structure, giving the head an armored look. Next we used two layers of masking tape as "papier-mache" on top of the cardboard, which was then covered in liquid latex and iridescent latex paint. We used the same approach to create the dragon's bottom jaw.
Finishing Touches
Finishing touches on the dragon puppet were completed primarily by my teammate Kat. As I turned my attention towards room set-dressing and the post-show experiences, Kat gave our dragon teeth, a tongue, eye sockets and eyelids, and a beautiful holographic headpiece. We also incorporated a high pressure smoke machine, borrowed from the ETC's senior engineer Dave Purta, which allowed our dragon to breathe smoke.
Puppeteering
Our final dragon was a two-person puppet: one physical puppeteer, responsible for the dragon's head movement, eye blink, and jaw movement, and one digital puppeteer, responsible for the dragon's eye color, horn color, audio, and smoke triggers. In order for the puppeteers to see without being seen, my teammate Nolan set up three webcams around our dragon's "lair". All puppeteering was done behind black curtains, so neither of the puppeteers were ever seen by our guests.
The Final Product
20221209_223551_1.mp4