For the 2021 holiday season I was asked to create a transformative experience to grow the museum’s holiday offerings. For years our offering had been stagnant and needed to be reimagined to compete with other Indy cultural attractions. I responded to the challenge by leading the design of a 13,000 sq ft (indoor) family train ride, Snowfall Express. The previous train ride was a simple kiddie ride, the new experience would be as close to an immersive dark ride as we could get.
Snowfall Express takes visitors on a journey from the last day of autumn to the first snowfall of the season. Along the way they would encounter Indiana animals, modern and prehistoric, as they celebrated the changing seasons.
We created this amazing ride with in-house talent, taking what we learned from fabricating traveling and temporary exhibits, to great effect. Augmenting that team was a local illustrator and a composer who has previously worked in amusement parks.
Needless to say, visitors loved it, expressing how charming the experience was and riding over and over. We saw an uptick in family memberships and increased visitation.