Tribeca Film Festival Reactor

Objective

Business Objective

To celebrate the Tribeca Film Festival’s 15th year, they wanted to create an in person experience that brought the magic of movies to New Yorkers like never before.

Background

Tribeca Film Festival had approached the team asking for a way to promote the 15th year of the festival throughout the city. We conceived the Tribeca Film Festival ReActor, which combined voice and facial recognition with motion technology to record people re-enacting notable scenes from beloved films. The ReActor then dropped participants’ best performances into the real movie scenes to create videos that can be shared online via social channels, as well as allow them to win free tickets to the festival.

Success Measurements

Create a standalone machine that works well in the streets of Manhattan and can transported to new locations every day.
Engage and excite crowds with the machine to build enthusiasm for the upcoming festival
Establish a viral stream of videos posted on social media to help promote the festival
Build in a way that can be reused at the festival and in the future.

Challenges

Usability Challenges

Needed to create an integrated experience where user is viewing the experience on two different screens:
- Interaction screen where user of different heights can interact with ReActor.
- Movie screen needs to be higher so users face can be looking at camera while viewing clip.
Give users enough time to learn scene but not make the experience bite size so many can play in a day.
How to grade a performance and how to communicate to the users how they are being graded to win free tickets.
Making it easy for the users to share their final videos on social media.

Technical Challenges

Lots of technologies that don't always talk needed to work together to create acted scenes.
Need to build so users can still hear and see the game out on the loud street during the day.
Need to be able to move around everyday for several weeks leading up to the festival
Users can only be a certain distance from the machine to be picked up properly

Solutions

UX responsibilities

I collaborated with a multi-disciplinary team to workout flow, created a journey map to determine the flow and exchange between screens. Worked with team to help design a a physical experience that will account for technical challenges. Created wireframes for interaction screens and movie screen prompts. Worked with design team to create a storyboard and functional specifications for piece to hand off to development. Performed in house usability test sessions during UAT to work out any unforeseen difficulties. Also, performed on-site live observational study first few days Reactor was live to adjust on the spot any additional usability issues.

UX deliverables

Site map
User journey map
Wireframes
Storyboard w/ Functional specifications
UAT/On-site user testing