«We want our guests to experience an avalanche – without being terrified».
Jostedalsbreen National Park Center is Norway’s oldest national park center. Together with SixSides, we’ve been commissioned to create an “avalanche experience on safe ground”: Powerful, with a pinch of terror. The experience will last four minutes, and take place inside a specially built room accommodating up to 15 guests. Since there will be visitors of many different nationalities, there should be no text or speech.
Morten Marius and Torgeir inside the avalanche room
Testing the avalanche
Review of the whole adventure
Yes, how do we solve this? Our first call is to the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute to ask if it’s possible to trigger an avalanche on command at all. The answer comes promptly and surprisingly – Yes! … but there might not be enough snow for it to be a proper avalanche. Therefore, we need to understand how an avalanche actually “works” and create a digital avalanche in a real landscape.
The project has been complex, and in brief summary, it looks like this:
Working meetings and close dialogue with architects and experts in Sixsides and NGI.
Where can we make a tough avalanche - an avalanche that goes in a turn down a slope in the area around the centre.
Storyboard, research and even more research.
Special adaptation of 360 camera on drone and test flight.
VR simulation and mapping testing.
Two months of waiting for admission weather until we had no nails left.
3D simulation and camera tracking to composite the avalanche into a 360 video.
Editing, compositing, sound work, and testing.
More VR testing.
Installation og high five
If you want to see more about how we worked with this along the way, you can find our project blog here (norwegian language). On such projects, we like to write a blog to document the progress. We include both what works and what doesn’t work. There is a lot of learning and the journey form start to finish is never straightforward. There is always a lot of testing and research before we find the best approach.
The opening of the new exhibition with Environmental Protection Minister Andreas Bjelland Eriksen and center manager Wenche Nesje.
