Business Insider: "Westworld" has come to Austin, Texas, for the SXSW film festival.
HBO created an entire theme park set in the American frontier, where "Westworld" fans can experience what it's like to be a guest of the sci-fi show's park. Actors playing the town's residents live out elaborate storylines, and visitors interact with them like they're AI hosts from the show.
It's like Disney World's Frontierland with gunslingers, prostitutes, and booze — lots of it.
3 comments:
I always thought it was only a matter of time before Westworld pulled a publicity stunt like this. I mean, come on, the subject of the show is a theme park designed to entertain guests, so this isn't really a big leap for them to make. I must say though, that they did an impressive job on this "experience". Since the show lends itself to this type of advertising so naturally, it could be easy to generate something generic and straightforward, but they really went out of their way here, producing developed story lines and characters, as well as some great production design as well. On top of all this, they still present a solid advertisement for season two, which I personally cannot wait to see after the marvelous premiere season last year. Westworld was one of my favorite shows last year, and based on the budget HBO is pouring into it, combined with marketing stunts like this, I would say it's here to stay.
Talk about immersive theater this looked like the coolest experience ever! While I am not a WestWorld fan I was truly delighted to read this article. I am a huge fan of immersive theme parks and theater so the photos and the written segment of this article was insightful and interesting. I feel like you have to be much more thoughtful when you are composing an immersive world because when humans are given the option to explore at their own pace, they often will touch and look at things that you might never have thought that they would care about. Curiosity will drive people to be ambitious and over analyze every piece of the puzzle, even if the creator didn’t plan on it being a piece of the puzzle. Plus when someone has to make a script that is 440 pages long and cast 60 actors in addition to horses? Once the show starts these actors are on their own, it's not a film where they can do 100 takes of one shot. It much more like theatre in the sense that once the performance has begun it will not end till it is over.
I remember going to a crappy "wild west" town near the grand canyon when I was a kid, but this sounds way better than that was. Largely due to the huge amount of money HBO could throw at this project, I am sure. I think it is a cool idea to make the TV show come alive even more for the people who were there and actually got to experience what it must be like to be there. I wonder if they will ever let the guests start to kill the hosts? That would be pretty interesting I am sure. This must be an extremely tough job for an actor to do. It seems like the experience is heavily scripted, yet it all relies on the actor's abilities to ad lib and converse with the guests. Kudos to them. I am glad to see that this did not turn out like the dozens of tourist traps scattered across the midwest.
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