Mary Shelley's
House of Frankenstein
CREATOR'S STATEMENT
Step into the dark world of Mary Shelley and her greatest creation, Frankenstein. Extending over four atmospheric floors, including their dank foreboding basement, immerse yourself in Mary Shelley’s complex and tragic past, and uncover the true story behind the world’s favourite monster. Bursting with unusual artefacts and vintage items, interactive multi-sensory environments and assorted body parts, Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein delivers an unnervingly visceral, illuminating and entertaining experience.
Summary
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To support Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein with its marketing and their aim to broaden the attraction's audience towards younger visitors, we produced a mix of digital and immersive content that builds on the attraction’s existing marketing, but which specifically aimed to: (i) communicate the immersive and experiential nature of the attraction, evoking what visitors will see, do and feel, based on our R&D and audience insight; (ii) doing so in ways that offered a tease into the attraction while bringing parts of it to life through use of immersive technology; and (iii) attract a younger, more student-centred demographic through said use of digital technology.
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Specifically, we produced a set of animated posters and web banners, an augmented reality experience for web, and a binaural promo video. Our overall promotional strategy was rooted in a desire to get to the emotional core of the Bath-based attraction - one of eerie dread, tainted by the past horrors of author Mary Shelley's tragic life.
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All of the below content was led by Matthew Freeman, who co-produced the assets with Bethany Wakefield, Nik Rawlings and Naomi Smyth, supported by the final-year Creative Media students at Bath Spa University.
Our overall approach was to foreground messaging concerning dark history and nightmares that gets to the emotional heart of the eerie atmosphere of what House of Frankenstein offers. Crucially, this messaging coherently brings together the two core appeals of the attraction, as determined by audience research: an exhibition focused on Mary Shelley, and an entertainment experience rooted in the monster.
Our animated poster and web banners, used across the website and social media channels, sought to communicate this eerie sense of dark immersion while foregrounding both of these audience appeals.
Our AR content, available via a QR code on the website, creates a dream-like, eerie experience that brings the attraction into your home. Content-wise, the AR experience showcases the exhibition aspects of the attraction (i.e. its artworks), while leaning into the contemporary relevance of the novel that resonates with young audiences - primarily the horrors of Mary Shelley’s troubled life and her personal struggles.
Finally, our binaural promo video aims to communicate the two emotional cores of the attraction: a dark history that has become a nightmare, with the use of spatialised binaural audio signalling House of Frankenstein as an multi-sensory, atmospheric, and at times frightening attraction. The Blair Witch-style ‘found footage’ aesthetic, which is highly recognisable to audiences, evokes both history and horror.
The video was designed as a promotional item for the website and to work across social media.
In the news...
Read more about the collaboration with House of Frankenstein, which extends to Bath Spa University.
