At the 2019 Event Marketing Summit, I attended the session titled, ‘007 ELEMENTS’ CASE STUDY: CREATING CINEMATIC BRAND EXPERIENCES. In this session, two of the design leads for this project outlined how a James Bond immersive experience came to be perched atop a mountaintop in Austria. Tino Schaedler, CDO, Optimist and Neal Callow, Art Director, EON Productions described how the project came to life. During the location scouting for the film Spectre, the team chose a mountaintop in Solden, Austria that was only accessible by gondola. They approached the leader of the town council about using the location, and the council leader, always trying to think about how to one-up the neighboring ski villages in order to gain a greater tourist market share, responded by saying they could film at the location but only if they would allow him to build a Bond Museum in Solden. The production team agreed, and as part of the contract, the film’s Art Director was required to provide concepts for the experience.

After Spectre was completed, the production team came to Neal Callow and told him he had to provide the concepts for the museum. Thinking, this is a long shot, Neal devised several concepts from a traditional artifact museum through to a fully immersive cinematic experience. After presenting the concepts, the town council chose one of the most over the top concepts, and the rest is history.

It was a great story, but the real learnings from this session were more about Tino Schaedler’s thought process of approaching architecture from a cinematic perspective. A few of my favorite takeaways were:

• Think of the experience as a sequence, a series of events in the same way a scene or series of scenes in a film weave a story together.

• Frame your experience as a series of camera viewports.

• “Spacialize” the content. There is a message to be told, but that doesn’t mean you just use text, a logo or the tag line. Nowhere in the 007 Elements experience does the 007 logo appear. Now that’s strong experiential branding if you know where you are, but you can leave the logo off.

• Act like a film director and choreograph the experience. What is the timing, the pacing, the music, the vibe? How are those best expressed to get your message across?

The views, space and experiences are set-up to educate and entertain audience about the elements that make a bond film a Bond film. Different rooms highlight elements such as: sets, locations, characters, music, gadgets, vehicles, and special effects. And the vibe of each room echoes each particular theme. And the viewports, such as the barrel of the gun entry hall, the lobby, and the crashing airplane sculpture are just a taste of how they integrated cinema, architecture, and lighting to create this immersive space.