Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World
BRC’s Bob Rogers discusses the massive undertaking that is World Expo 2010 and how it will affect the attraction industry for years to come
by Jeremy Schoolfield
World Expo 2010 (otherwise known as the World’s Fair) opens May 1 in Shanghai, and the size and scope of this event boggle the mind. The event will cover more than two square miles (5.28 square kilometers) in the middle of the city, with 242 countries and other international organizations participating. Expo officials project 70 million people will visit the site during its six-month run.
“Nobody quite knows what this is going to be like, but it’s going to be really big,” says Bob Rogers, founder and chief creative officer for BRC Imagination Arts in Burbank, California.
BRC is the experience designer for both the USA Pavilion and the Information & Communications Pavilion, the latter sponsored by China Mobile and China Telecom. In the first of a series of articles this year on World Expo 2010, FUNWORLD asked Rogers about the massive event, how it applies to IAAPA members, and how it will affect the attraction industry in years to come.
Just how huge of an event is World Expo 2010?
This will be the largest location-based entertainment event in the history of the planet. You could fit the Montreal and New York World’s Fairs into this thing and still have room for a couple more.
This is getting various estimates that the average day will be 750,000 people. It is enormous and a huge deal for China. Whereas the Olympics was primarily a television event and China’s coming-out party for the world, World Expo will be attended primarily by people who live in the region. So this is China’s coming-out party for itself.
The pavilions are going to be quite extravagant, correct?
Countries will spend 60, 80, sometimes 100 million dollars on an individual pavilion. The China national pavilion is a half-billion dollars.
How does World Expo stand up to others events you’ve been involved with?
No one has ever been a part of anything this big. There are going to be days when they have more than a million people in attendance. You won’t be able to see this in a week. If you make 20 appointments over a 12-hour day and you hit it hard over six days, you won’t see it all. This is a staggering amount of entertainment. How big would Walt Disney World’s Epcot be if it was built to handle 800,000 people?
What is driving this World Expo to such proportions?
China believes the 20th century was the American century and the 21st century is the Chinese century. China is clearly a nation on the rise, and it’s looking forward. It’s trying to step up to its place in the world; a place of leadership among nations. Having the nations and great corporations of the world come and create pavilions in Shanghai is certainly a way of celebrating the rise to prominence of China.
What will people in our industry learn from this year’s World Expo?
Any World’s Fair is a huge, well-funded laboratory for doing creative things outside the box. There’s tremendous pressure and financing for novelty. Some of the famous things introduced to our industry by World’s Fairs include the ice cream cone, the Ferris wheel, the first Circle-Vision film, some of the first 3-D films, and, of course, Disney’s “it’s a small world” in 1964. So it’s a tremendous opportunity to introduce new technology and new ways of thinking.
If you have to build something and you’re going to run it for 25 years, you think a bit more conservatively than if you only have to keep it running for six months. As a result, you can experiment. A lot of the pencil pushing is completely absent, so people are free to try things, and they try some bizarre stuff. As you walk around, you say, “This doesn’t work at all in the way they intended, but this gives me another idea, and I know how to make this work.” They’re either introducing new ideas or playing with new possibilities.
What impact will this event have on the future of the attraction business?
This is the biggest thing in the history of our industry. It’s going to give the industry a lot of great ideas that may launch the next decade of innovation. Expo’s going to seriously disturb the status quo [in China]. The Expo will raise the expectations China has for its own location-based attractions, and that will create opportunities for people all over the world in our industry.
Contact Senior Editor Jeremy Schoolfield at jschoolfield@IAAPA.org.
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