Redwood City Family Camp In (2020)
Experiential Designer, Script Writer, Event Producer, Video Producer
Commissioned by Redwood City Parks & Arts Foundation in response to the pandemic. This was an interactive family ‘camp-in’ event to celebrate Halloween and connect families from all over Redwood City (and some out-of-state relatives and friends) as they camped out ‘together’, all from their own living rooms and backyards. The festivities included a persistent livestream, guided crafting activities, story times, a sing-along, a halloween costume parade, scavenger hunts, private tents and more; which had local youth asking if they could stick around and keep playing with their friends after the official end of the event.
Why is it interesting?
This is the only pandemic-era community event of its kind. The project combined a stack of consumer-level tools in order to balance interactivity and accessibility for different audience profiles and technological comfort levels.
While certain activities like the scavenger hunts, hide and seek, and the halloween costume parade were only accessible to participation via the Gather.town platform, those less comfortable with video game environments had access to a livestream which showcased many of the activities via our hosts’ participation and could take part in zoom based crafting activities, or watch a number of pre-recorded videos available to them, if they so desired.
This project came together through the partnerships/sponsorship by Redwood City Parks & Arts Foundation, Redwood City Sesquicentennial Committee, The Port of Redwood City, Redwood City Library, Bravemaker Festival, Magnetic Mapworks, and Dragon Productions.
It utilized Gather.town, YouTube Live, OBS, Slack, Zoom, and Google Meets to manage all ‘onstage’ and backstage aspects of the event.
What was the scope of the Project?
We designed and pitched this event based on a request to create a livestream which showcases some of the community favorite activities from the annual camp-out. After a short consultation about the goals of the event, we knew a livestream was not going to sufficiently capture the feeling of coming together as a community, which this annual campout event represented. Although the cost would be significantly more, our partners at RWC Parks & Arts Foundation agreed that the multi-platform event I designed would be the way to go instead of a simple livestream.
We conceived of the event, and worked with a cross-disciplinary team to design all interactive elements of the event across multiple platforms, write the host script for the livestream, oversaw map design and event staffing, produced video and coordinated the remote production of video when necessary, and handled all post-production and media preparation for the event as well as handling ‘on-set’ live video production and streaming.
Want more?
Explore the **Gather.town map** (Laptop or Desktop Computer recommended)
Check out the Event Landing Page for mobile users
