Imagine you’re visiting the the world’s biggest model railway. It is vast: more than 16,000 metres of track passing through painstakingly realistic dioramas of Italy, Rio de Janeiro and Provence, to name just a few. Located in a former warehouse in Hamburg, it’s a place of wonder. Indeed, it’s called Miniatur Wunderland – Miniature Wonderland.
And then, before your eyes, it begins to crack up. A castle is consumed by flames. Monaco is assailed by a hurricane. Venice meets its oft-predicted fate, sinking beneath the waves.
The immersive experience “Miniatur Warmland” was created by the agency Grabarz & Partner for Deutsche Telekom. The stage was a model, but the risk of climate change is huge. See the case film here.
So how did this epic activation come about? Ralf Heuel, the agency’s chief creative officer, says that when the idea was first evoked, he knew Deutsche Telekom was the client to pull it off.
When I sat down to convince them of the idea, I was very frank with them. I told them the truth: ‘You will not benefit from this. You won’t get any more customers. You won’t earn any money from it. The only thing you get out of it is that you are doing something good.
“For a start they’re one of the biggest brands in the world, so they have a lot of reach,” he says. “And Deutsche Telekom is 100% credible. They’ve been investing heavily in sustainability for years. They have bundled many of their sustainability initiatives under the label ‘Green Magenta’ (Magenta is Telekom’s corporate identity colour). And they’re the first DAX 40 company with net zero emissions across the entire group. They don’t bluff. They do.”
Disrupting the flow
The commitment goes way beyond that, he adds. “The team around Ulrich Klenke, who’s the chief brand officer there, understands that with great size comes great responsibility. For example, the telecom has done a lot of great work against hate speech. They really care about being a good corporate citizen: they know that to get something from society, you have to give something back.”
Finally, of course, the project was in essence a digital one. “Deutsche Telekom is a technology company – and this project was really groundbreaking, technologically. So as a client and the sender of this message, they ticked all the boxes that made them the perfect partner.”
What about getting access to Miniatur Wunderland itself? After all, the project required installing specialist equipment for an entire week, in a location that attracts thousands of visitors a day, many of them excitable children. Ralf says: “They have the spectator flow all worked out – it’s like a finely tuned machine. And we were going to go in there and disrupt the whole thing.”
Ralf works only a five-minute walk away from the building, so getting there wasn’t an issue. Getting permission was another story. The attraction was co-founded in 2001 by twin brothers Frederik and Gerrit Braun, alongside entrepreneur Stephan Hertz. The site’s head of collaborations and sponsorship, Pierre Georg, helped massively with liaison, Ralf adds.
“When I sat down to convince them of the idea, I was very frank with them. I told them the truth: ‘You will not benefit from this. You won’t get any more customers. You won’t earn any money from it. The only thing you get out of it is that you are doing something good. For the environment, for our kids, for the future. That’s the only answer I can give you.’ And they actually said: ‘Okay, we’ll support you.’ And they supported us massively. It was as if we’d ignited something.”
The Grabarz & Partner project team were allowed to visit day and night to carry out techncial tests, Gerrit gave interviews to the press, and at launch Deutsche Telekom held a major press conference in the middle of the attraction, while it was open. “It was not just a case of us ‘booking’ the location – these guys from Miniatur Wunderland were entirely part of the project.”
Technology meets craft
Talking of technical tests, how was the alternative reality element achieved? It looks incredibly sophisticated. Grabarz worked with an exterior partner called Curious Company “who did all the technical magic”; and with Tony Petersen Film and Director Jonathan Kneebone from The Glue Society to shoot the film.
Four areas of the attraction were carefully chosen to show four different impacts of climate shift, not just rising oceans. The German Climate Research Institute – and one of its leading climate scientists – came on board to provide verisimilitude and deter sceptics, even talking at the press conference.
We wanted to turn familiar, fairly innocuous data into an immersive, resonant experience for people.
Originally the agency imagined visitors using their own phones, but the Curious Company said installing iPads was the only workable solution. “And they had to be the very latest models, to process all the data and not overheat.”
The chosen scenes in Miniatur Wunderland were photographed in precise detail and the 3D digital models were calculated from that data. But there was a hitch when the tiny digital figures and objects didn’t look like the real thing – they were too dark. Large parts of the 3D scenes had to be digitally repainted by hand, using photos to ensure they perfectly matched reality.
Beyond “Wonderland”
Standing in front of the model railway and seeing the effect of climate change in person had a huge effect on audiences. As Ralf puts it: “It actually raised the hair on the back of your neck, because as a visitor, you could increase the average temperature degree by degree and experience the catastrophic effect on places you know and love.”
Over that week, as many as 30,000 visitors were impacted.
“But we knew we also had to spread the message beyond Hamburg, beyond Germany,” Ralf explains. “So while a lot of people experienced it on location, in parallel we built a website where you could have the same experience, seeing for youself what would happen to Venice and the other locations when you, as the user, raised temperatures by two degrees, or five degrees.”
In the end, the power of the Deutsche Telekom PR office and a well-planned media strategy meant the story spread far beyond the walls of Miniatur Wunderland. And won plenty of awards with it, alongside the Epica Grand Prix.
Ralf says: “We wanted to turn familiar, fairly innocuous data into an immersive, resonant experience for people. Our approach was: if we can’t manage to raise awareness of climate change through rational argument and data, then we’ll use maximum emotion to achieve it.”
This article first appeared over at the Epica Awards.
