al-Ula Escape Room

This project was for an escape room in the city of al-Ula in Saudi Arabia, and was (I think) part of a cultural festival celebrating the culture and history of the area.

The experience was inspired by traditional folktales from the region. As is the way of folktales, the originals were pretty grisly so these were sanitised versions to be more appropriate to the children and families who would form the audience.

The animations are played through projectors or on screens in the environment as a reward for solving each room in the experience. The rooms were designed to resemble the locations that appear in the fables.

The paper cut-out animations of Lottie Reiniger were a key reference for the videos, so i used texture, colour and smoke effects to try and capture some of the mystery and lumonisity of Lottie’s beautiful films.

The client was also, naturally, keen that the places and objects in the films were faithful to the real location, so a good bit of time was spent finding reference for accurate houses, palm trees, costumes and even the cliffs and sandstone textures.

I was pleased with how these turned out, we never received any feedback about the project and it’s not somewhere I’m likely to visit, so I like to imagine that the children and parents of al-Ula enjoyed them.