HBO: Bleed for the Throne

(2019)

This project was completed during my time at Accomplice. We were hired by Giant Spoon to help them build the Game of Thrones SXSW 2019 experience for HBO just before the final season had started. The campaign named “Bleed for the Throne” partnered with the American Red Cross to host live blood donations on-site. After participants donated blood they were led through the “Immersive Enlistment” - an immersive storytelling tour featuring a dark maze of four rooms that each focused on one of the main characters for the upcoming season. Our fabrication team also designed and built the entire physical set for the experience. 

As the Immersive Media Lead for this project I led our design and development team to build the technical system for the “Immersive Enlistment” tour. The core of the tour was built on a headphone experience with each user getting an iPod Touch with a custom iOS app on it. The app hosted the audio content for each room and supplementary visual content. The rooms were equipped with Bluetooth beacons so that when users entered each room, the iPod automatically started playing the audio for that room. 

My favorite part of the technical aspect of this project was how we got the audio from each iPod to always be in sync with projected video content for each room. In order to do this, so that any user at any time could enter the room and have the audio synced to the video, was to create looping content for each room. All of the projected content for each room was running on Touchdesigner. We had one computer for each room and master computer. As the user entered each room, the custom iOS app would ping our master computer via an ad hoc network and request what frame the video content was on. The iOS app would then jump to the correct frame in the audio and “unmute” the audio for that room. This ensured that each time a user or groups of users entered each room their audio headsets would be perfectly in sync with the projected video content of that room. 

This was a dream project to work on and we had a ton of fun and learned a lot on the way. The project was a major success and received a lot of media press and was the most covered activation of SXSW 2019.

A supporting video is below and more information can be viewed here: https://accpl.co/case-studies/hbo/

Client: Giant Spoon / HBO

Immersive Media Lead: Ryan Padgett

Lighting + Projection Lead: Blake Manns

Project / Account Manager: Jenny Kroening

Fabrication / Engineering Lead: Scott Starr

Touchdesigner Development: Dom Davis, Michael McKellar

iOS Development: Tony Llongueras

Visual Design Support: Kristen Keiser