The year was 2015. Harkins Theatres was opening their new flagship theater: Harkins Camelview at Scottsdale Fashion Square.
The new theater was spared no expense to create the ultimate movie going experience for their guests. The location included 14 luxury theaters with full reclining seats, a cocktail bar, a cafe with pastries and gelato, a (somewhat) secret screening room dubbed “The Freezer”, and dozens of digital screens placed throughout the lobby and hallways.
As Harkins’ longtime video production partner, my team at Anderson Advertising and I were tasked with creating content to fill these digital screens. There are two vertical displays in the lobby (dubbed “wall scrolls”), digital posters in the hallways, and various 4k TV’s and projectors throughout the location.
Working directly with movie studios and their marketing teams, we’ve created very special marketing materials we call… Takeovers.
Takeovers
The lights dim, the music stops, and all of a sudden, every screen around you is showcasing a single movie. You may see Spider-Man swinging between multiple screens in the hallways, or a T-Rex standing life size, watching you order your popcorn. The movie trailer plays on one screen, while the characters interact on another. Harkins Camelview Takeovers are a movie-going experience like no other.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved in these takeover projects for over 10 years, working with movies such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Avengers: Infinity War, How to Train Your Dragon, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
The Process
In the beginning, we were often scraping movie assets off the internet, cutting them out in Photoshop, and animating them in After Effects. These days, the movie studios often provide assets directly to us, including animated characters on transparent backgrounds, animated logos, layered poster files, sound effect libraries, and more.
I was able to create templated systems in After Effects to quickly put together takeover files at the correct spec, render out proofing files, and use preset render settings to export the takeover files. In other words, takeover production became a well oiled machine, providing the technical framework to get really creative.
Every takeover is a little bit different. Starting with the poster, we add life and movement to studio provided movie posters. We also re-frame the movie trailer, scene by scene, to a 9×16 aspect ratio to fit inside the digital movie poster screens. Sometimes, there’s the opportunity for characters to run across several poster screens, as if they’re windows into the movie world. The poster hallways are laid out in After Effects to the same distances as the real world hallways, where I can coordinate the movements between each screen.
The wallscrolls, which are massive vertical displays at 1080x8640px or 1080x10560px depending on which side of the lobby you’re at, provide a massive, high resolution canvas with which to create on. Some movies provide high resolution poster art that can be easily resized to such a tall and skinny size. Others provide animated characters that move, dance, leap, or fly across the displays.
The movie trailer, or more animated artwork, is displayed on the standard 4k TV’s and projectors in the lobby. The ambient lighting also changes color and brightness, and even shows animated patterns, in sync with the rest of the takeover.
The Results
The takeovers have been wildly popular, gaining attention and sponsorship directly from movie studios to promote their movies. We’ve even gotten shout-out’s on social media from celebrities. As Harkins opens new locations, they continue to expand their digital screen real estate, requesting even more hand crafted movie advertising and animation.
We’ve won many awards for takeovers over the years, including AAF Phoenix Gold, Silver, & Bronze Addy Awards, and an AAF National Silver Addy Award for Animation, Special Effects, or Motion Graphics. All in all, the takeover media space is a wellspring for creativity for myself, Anderson Advertising, and Harkins Theatres that continues to delight and impress movie-goers of all ages.