Clear Lake City Council made the decision to turn talking into action at this week’s city council meeting by approving the consultant agreement with Trivium Interactive for the immersive museum integration and content development.
Meaning, that Trivium and their hardware provider Electrosonic will be taking on the project to make the music museum come to life.
“If you recall from our Destination Iowa project, one of the signature component projects was this music enrichment center,” City Administrator Scott Flory said. “We considered it at that time to be much more of an interpretive kind of center project, not a fully immersive experience.”
But, as mentioned by a few people at the council meeting, folks are not going to static museums anymore. If the goal is to attract people, you need to give them something to be attracted to.
Jeff Nicholas, president of North Iowa Cultural Center and Museum, said, “It’s hard to get people to go to a static museum where you see a picture of Buddy Holly or Richie Valens. People don’t go to those museums, so as we progress through that, we realize we have to do something different.”
Flory said, “We had an epiphany of sorts on this and thought ‘wouldn’t it be really interesting if we could take this to a higher level and utilize this greater level of technology here?’ The communicating, the messaging and experience being more impactful, to share the story that we have here.”
They sat down with three firms that responded to their request for proposal and brought them here.
Trivium, based out of Boston, Mass., came to Clear Lake for an in-person visit and interview
“They were the very first firm we interviewed,” Flory said. “And evaluation of them after we were done is that they were going to be a hard act to follow.”
And they definitely were, as in the end, they were the chosen firm.
“Trivium overwhelmingly was the strongest on their content creation capabilities and were certainly as good or better than the other firms on the technology aspects of the project as well,” Flory said.
Nicholas said, “We’ve got lots of great people that can build things in this community, but when it came to the creative point, we think maybe we cold do this but we really need some help.”
According to Nicholas, Trivium showed their passion, their commitment and their understanding of not only Clear Lake’s musical story, but other musical stories as well.
Trivium did a similar project in the Black Musicians Walk of Fame in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Some of their other projects include the Mascot Hall of Fame in Whiting, Ind., Create Your Own Candy Bar at Hershey’s Chocolate World in Hersey, Pa. and You, Me, We at Boston’s Children Museum.
“It has been such an honor to work on this proposal and on this RFP,” Kirsten Holmes, principal, executive producer of Trivium Interactive, said over the phone at this week’s council meeting. “The content is amazing and just being able to work with the content and the technology to bring this story to like just excites us so much.”
Two other people were on the call as well. Nino Fusaro from Electrosonic and Bruce Spero, principal, creative director for Trivium both were on the call to help with the presentation.
Fusaro said, “We [Electrosonic] are a full turnkey solution provider from design all the way through service and support of the system. We do large scale projection, media walls, immersive audio, pretty much anything that needs doing or projecting, we love and it and we specialize in it.”
“We do video production and studio shoots, but we know that you have some really good talent locally that we’ll be working with on that,” Holmes said. “And then we’ll be working closely with Electrosonic on the hardware and systems consulting.”
Their full presentation can be viewed on the Clear Lake city council meeting video from July 1. But the plan for Clear Lake’s immersive center as it was presented by Trivium and Electrosonic, would be to have interactive media walls that people can touch to learn the story of “The Day the Music Died.”
Fusaro said, “The Black Music Walk of Fame really pulled a lot of the components together that we’re talking about for bringing to Surf Ballroom alive. Interactivity, large scale video projections, the dynamic storytelling of a lot of history and about how it’s more than just Clear Lake, than just Iowa, even more than just the United States.
“Some of this music and the events that have surrounded what happened in Clear Lake impacted music around the world. And so it’s similar to some of the stories in the Black Music Walk of Fame.”
They showed an early rendering of some of their ideas for the museum, but it is all subject to change as they are early in the creative process.
“We know the story creates a story and telling it is going to be an amazing collaboration between Trivium and Electrosonic,” Spero said. “But more importantly, with Clear Lake, with the focus on the Surf Ballroom, with the North Iowa Cultural Center and Museum, that we’re going to work together to shape what this becomes because we want to build a world-class music-based visitor center, immersive space that’s like none other. And we want to do it in a way that it compelling.”
They had a timeline of things through history where folks could use gestures or touch the screen to slide through the timeline and touch digital artifacts like Buddy Holly’s glasses or guitar, that would help them learn the meaning.
“There’s two pieces we imagined and one is the immersive linear show, which just sort of happens around you,” Spero said. “So a group will go in there and they’ll see projections on the wall, that curved wall. And then the second part of it is the interactive portion which will allow people to walk up to that curved wall and interact.”
And then, whole they are interacting, they can look around the room and on each wall will be a different era of music or musical style or genre represented.
“They’ll be shorter videos, telling individual stories and vocalize that to really bring it to life,” Spero said.
Things are subject to change as the process continues and they have many ideas bouncing around, fueling their excitement to work on the project.
Holmes said, “We have a lot of musicians on our staff who are fighting to join us on the project. Everybody is really over the moon and…thank you so much for having us and listening to us about our company and our creative thoughts on the project.”
Being what it is, this project is ending up more expensive than they had originally planned.
“We all felt like the juice was worth the squeeze,” Flory said. “We’d take a run at this and see where it would end up.”
They then decided they would need some more help financially to make the project a reality.
The Community Tourism Grant was an opportunity through the Iowa Department of Economic Development.
“One of the requirements of that was that we needed support from out county governments in order to make that application,” Flory said. “So, there was a group from the city and the nonprofit that met with out Board of Supervisors a couple of times and they agreed to contribute $250,000 for this project as a local match.”
The city also agreed they needed to have a match in there as well, so they agreed to contribute an additional $300,000 for this portion of the project for the purposes of making the application, making their total application request at the state $965,000.
“The application was very well received by the state,” Flory said. “And if it weren’t for the fact that we were already receiving nearly $4.4 million in Destination Iowa funds for the surf district project, this project would have been fully funded by the Enhance Iowa board.”
Be as it may, they awarded the city $400,000 to put towards this $1.5 million project. Leaving them to figure out how to fill the gap in funds.
“Between some reallocation of funding for the music enrichment center project, then some scaling back at some of the furniture fixtures equipment, we will be able to meet that gap,” Flory said. “There are some additional grant opportunities that are begin pursued the North Iowa Cultural Center and Museum, so should we get those grants, those would be applied to this project as well.”
Nicholas said, “This is a big ask. We realize this is a big ask, this whole project is a big ask. But this is a big community. It’s a community that is looked at throughout North Iowa, and the state and the Midwest. And so we need to be leaders in these kinds of things.”
The council unanimously approved the motion and were all optimistic about this project as well as the work that Trivium and Electrosonic presented to them.
They were also excited about how the Surf District is growing overall, the enrichment center included.
