One of the hallmarks of a theme park visit is getting to meet your favorite characters in real life. Guests often wait in long lines, eager to meet and take pictures with their beloved character friends. Yet, the experience always feels a little awkward when engaging with masked characters.
Conversations are very one-sided where questions are often met with over-the-top gestures to compensate for the lack of voice. The frustration is even more palpable for the younger guests who know the character can talk, and extremely limiting for visually impaired guests who rely largely on sound and touch when interacting with others. However, the solution is so much more than simply adding pre-recorded sound bites to a traditional meet and greet. Once you give a voice to a character, it becomes a conversation. This requires innovative tools and a novel design approach that puts the performer in control and lets them engage directly with the guest, reacting in the moment, and with the character’s real voice.
Using simple gestures and poses, along with a healthy dose of innovative technical and show logic smarts behind the feathers, the Big Bird performer walks around and interacts directly with guests anywhere in the park, using over 500 prerecorded sound bites of the voice of Big Bird, Matt Vogel. Strategic sound amplification places the sound source at Big Bird’s beak, making it sound like Big Bird is talking directly to you. With all the required equipment embedded in the costume or on the performer, Big Bird is freely able to walk around and interact with guests anywhere in the park, completely untethered. In addition, wireless signals give Big Bird the ability to interact with the surrounding environment, including fun exchanges with Oscar the Grouch, shoutouts to the neighboring Laundromat and Bike Shop interactives, and live shows with Sesame’s Storyteller, creating a truly dynamic and immersive environment.
Beaudry Interactive is no stranger to in-costume gesture control systems (we pioneered the talking characters originally for Disney). Embedding sensors in costumes, props, and set pieces, combined with our interactive show control system, Diva, has been one of the cornerstones of the company since its founding in 2006. Bringing this innovative technology to one of the most beloved Sesame characters was an amazing journey, and helped us see its potential beyond its feathery exterior. We feel the innovation we brought to Big Bird truly marks a revolution in character-guest engagement. And while this technology is proprietary, it is not exclusive to any previous application or partner. The core system is character agnostic and is available to bring life to any character who wants to connect with his fans.
Beaudry Interactive, in collaboration with Sesame Workshop and SeaWorld, set out to enhance the standard meet and greet experience. The goal was to make it more magical, more inclusive, and more authentic without sacrificing the practical operations and budgetary needs of parks or the consistency of the beloved character’s persona.
The goal of the project is to have Big Bird engage directly with the guests. Through easy gestures and poses, the performer can cue and trigger pre-recorded sound bites. Although the sound bites have been scripted, the dialog has been crafted so that at no point does the performer need to follow a prescribed cue list. The result is a conversation that is relevant to that exact moment of engagement. This requires some show smarts working on the software side, where similar gestures and poses trigger different sound bites based not only on scene and show beats, such as meet & greets, photo ops, or going on a park “walkabout”, but also previously triggered cues. For example, if a performer triggered a more solemn reply in response to a guest’s action, the next set of cue options would be toned to match.
In addition to the sound bites, the physical approach to the system, both from the performer and costuming point of view, is essential to the system’s success. The gestures are designed to be natural to Big Bird’s mannerisms and simple to execute, especially given the limited mobility within the costume. Gestures range from simple hand waves to merely striking a pose, such as hand up, hand down, one-finger point, two-finger point, OK sign, making a fist, and so on. A single 3-fingered glove with embedded sensors is all the performer wears. The rest of the electronics, which are fairly minimal, are attached to the frame of the costume.
One of the things we love working with a puppeted system being able to tie into the mouth actuator. With this we designed the system so that nothing is vocalized until the performer begins to puppet (animate) the character’s mouth. This provides both a safety net against false triggers, and ensures synchronization between the spoken dialog and the mouth movement at the most critical point, the start of the sound bite. Utilizing this mechanic as our trigger means the performer can emote and animate as needed without fear of triggering an unintentional cue.
On the costuming side, strategic amplified sound places the sound source at his beak, making it sound like Big Bird is actually talking to you. Big Bird’s voice comes from Big Bird himself. And with all of the required equipment embedded in the costume or on the performer, Big Bird is able to walk around freely and interact with guests anywhere in the park, completely untethered.
Additionally, wireless signals give Big Bird the ability to interact with the surrounding environment, including fun exchanges with Oscar the Grouch, shoutouts to the neighboring Laundromat and Bike Shop interactives, and live shows with Sesame’s Storyteller. The result is a truly dynamic and immersive environment.
Sesame Place San Diego opened to the public March, 2022.