Experience Design

Cross platform sound for Disney

Disney Habit Heroes

Disney Habit Heroes was a mobile app and an in-person theme park experience. The content focused on healthy habits and ways to fight bad habits and fighting bad habits through a character driven narrative about healthy eating and nutrition and exercise.

2012 was a period in which the obesity topic was top of mind, and projects like Michelle Obama’s - Let’s Move! we being launched. Disney took action to be present in this space with Habit Heroes.

Stakeholders - Disney partnered with health insurance providers as subject matter experts and launched the first iteration of the project which received negative reviews from audiences and thought leaders on the topic. Disney recruited part of the creative team from a previous project to deliver a 2.0 version. I worked under the leadership of a Senior Connected Experiences Creative at Disney Imagineering and in-house creatives that included illustrators, animators and programmers. As the sole sound designer and engineer on the project I worked across the freelance and the in-house team to design and execute the sonic element of the project.

Platforms

Disney’s position was to activate Epcot as a site for providing anti-obesity programming that was also entertaining. At the same time they wanted to take advantage of the emerging mobile market to expand the audience beyond visitors to Epcot. However, this tech was so new that best practices were still yet to be established. This was still a very new time in mobile entertainment and how in-person and mobile experiences were designed. The outcome would be a traditional interactive theme park experience that included mini-games to prompt users to move their bodies. The in-person experience would also serve as a touchpoint to onboard new users to a Disney Mobile offering. My job was to apply sound design to achieve a seamless translation between mobile and in-person experiences.

It took some advocacy to convince the client that sound design for both properties should leverage transmedia best practices. Put another way, I advocated to be involved in the Epcot experience where originally I was hired to focus exclusively on the mobile property. By the time I won the green light I had already sound designed the app, so I got to work integrating the design into the in-person experience. The app sound design functioned as the baseline for in-person experience. I built around elements like laser sounds, explosions and creature sounds to complete and immersive sonic elements that worked for in-person experiences. I as needed, I created new sounds for design elements exclusive to the Epcot experience while staying true to the sonic world I had created. As much as I would have liked to experiment more with speaker arrays and leverage the in-person experience, it was beyond the scope of this project.

OUTCOMES

While this project was not considered a success in achieving health outcomes for the target audience, the sound/experience design aspect left me excited about the possibility of future experience design projects and the impact that sound design can have on digital, in-person, and transmedia experiences.