DarKastle presented Holovis with the unique opportunity to build upon both the narrative and fan base of the iconic original attraction at Busch Gardens and use our creative and engineering smarts to design and deliver an amazing new attraction for the guests.
As this was another turnkey attraction for Holovis, we worked in close partnership with our client and their teams from the beginning to support the creative process, develop the attraction and conducted site walks, design assessments and creative planning around the existing show building to ensure that the next iteration of this attraction and its story and narrative would deliver something unique and magical for the guests, while remaining true to the origins of this iconic attraction.
Our creative, design and engineering teams used models and virtual simulations of the attraction to help develop and test the different show effects and thematic elements that we would use to bring the new story to life and ensure that all elements integrated seamlessly with both the ride system and the existing show building when we arrived on site for the installation. We also built mockups and tested these at our facilities both in the UK and Orlando to ensure what we had envisioned and modelled would work and deliver the creative vision our client was looking for.
It took a small army of multi-disciplined people from the Holovis UK and US teams to carry out the media production, character modelling, musical composition, voice over recordings, scenic fabrication, structural engineering studies, hardware procurement, lighting design, programming and coding, installation - all the elements and skills that are needed and have to work effectively together to create an attraction of this scale and to ensure it delivered the overall show package and amazing experience for our client and their guests.
It’s been so exciting to coordinate all these elements and see the overall experience come together. DarKastle has a loving fan base so we worked closely with Busch Gardens in finding ways to weave easter eggs and nods to the original attraction into the experience while also creating something that would be a standalone attraction for the modern guest, a new story for King Ludwig which doesn’t necessarily rely on the original.