Lulu & Mika’s Adventures

LULU & MIKA

ADVENTURES

Royal Caribbean

“All grown-ups were once children” - one of Saint-Exupéry’s famous “Le Petit Prince” quotes. Having said that, we all know how far children's imagination can reach - we were one of them too, once upon a time!

Lulu and Mika's Adventures are part of a fixed interactive installation on Royal Caribbean's ships. When the opportunity to create a project for children aged 3-5-year-old based on the narration of stories came in, we immediately saw it as a chance to do something special.
In the concept phase, I concentrated on the emotions and behaviours evolving around fairytales. When children are narrated stories, they often continue the adventures afterwards, inspired by the narrative and characters. Or they even come up with new stories.
So what if children playing with the installation were able to decide which path the hero will choose in the forest? Or what would be the outcome of drinking a magic potion?

With that question in mind, together with my team we built the interactive animated Fairytales, in which children actively participate in the narration through physical activities and interaction using our custom-built and designed controllers. In each chapter, they engage in small quests where they - together with the animated characters - should move around the scenarios and solve mild problems to determine the story’s path.
The kids’ actions interact in real-time with the animations appearing in the story, whether helping a character to choose which direction to go by pointing the controller or act out to win an imitation game, turning the children into lead players of the narration.

With that question in mind, together with my team we built the interactive animated Fairytales, in which children actively participate in the narration through physical activities and interaction using our custom-built and designed controllers. In each chapter, they engage in small quests where they - together with the animated characters - should move around the scenarios and solve mild problems to determine the story’s path.
The kids’ actions interact in real-time with the animations appearing in the story, whether helping a character to choose which direction to go by pointing the controller or acting out to win an imitation game, turning the children into lead players of the narration.

The main protagonists of the stories are two characters living in a small enchanted village: Lulu, a curious and smart kid, and Mika, his shapeshifter friend. While the art direction concentrated on the creation of the characters look & feel, I was responsible for the creation of the story path and the different options and outcomes. I created then the whole adventures and translated both in a script and on an animated storyboard to be used by the animation and 3D team.

After a year and a half, four stories have been developed and experienced by thousands of little visitors. The stories take part in different setups and situations are enriched with unique ways of interacting and surprising results. We didn't want to limit the way the audience was accessing the story, but rather extend the way the narration could be controlled. Hence, the gameplay includes sound-based interactions and movement-based interactions. The activity whether screaming, making a funny face, jumping, following a dance sequence, making a gesture or repeating a rhyme - is detected on a tablet and managed by the narrator, who has the opportunity to personalize the climax and story development.

RECOGNITIONS

FWA of the day
1x Gold, 1x Silver Travel Weekly Magellan Award
1x Bronze, 1x People's Lovie Award