Canadian War Museum: Air War
Overview
Deadly Skies – Air War, 1914-1918 is a 7,000-square-foot travelling exhibit that immerses visitors in the World's first air war using the unique storytelling medium of a supersized graphic novel.
Details
- Client
- Canadian War Museum
- Project
- Deadly Skies – Air War, 1914-1918
- Size
- 7,000 sq. ft.
- Scope
- Exhibit Design - Aviation, Exhibit Design - Traveling
- Location
- Ottawa, ON, CA; Traveling Exhibit
- Design Completed
- 2016
The
Goal
Focusing on the stories of nine real people, Deadly Skies sought to provide an enticing, immersive, and engaging visitor experience through visual narratives in the form of a graphic novel come-to-life. Together with the artifacts and graphic reproductions, visitors would understand how these individual experiences connect to the larger context of the First World War in the air.
The
Design
R&P’s design approach was to break the boundary between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds. Carefully layered and folded cut-outs create an illusion of perspective, allowing visitors to literally walk into the world of graphic novels. The super-sized comic book pages surprise visitors by playing with scale. Whenever possible, the design team inserted artifacts directly into the graphic novel panels, physically connecting objects to the narrative.
In order to be travel-ready, the graphic novel panels were designed as stackable modules to fit into standard-sized crates, ready for shipping. After the original exhibit is dismantled, the changeable graphic system allows the order of the two official languages to be flipped.
