[sl/ushmm] Ninth meeting with the U.S. Holocaust Museum Ambassador program
Today we started off the day by making some final decisions about the project, with the Ambassadors thinking creatively about some of the critical language relating to the project. They came up with a fantastic title for the whole build, "Experiencing History: The Night of Broken Glass", and decided on a quote by Einstein the will be part of the entry area.
After that, we met with Reallife Orca from Digital Refinery, who brought us through the major changes that were made to the build. We started in the entry area, where you are now greeted by an automated receptionist that lets you know how to get started. As you come into the entry area, there are press offices with fedoras, cameras and the editorial assignments. Ambassadors got decked out in their fedoras and cameras, entering for the first time the role of reporter that the project has its visitors take on
We then moved on to the street scene, where the sounds of glass breaking and a general sense of destruction pervaded the street. We encountered many different people that experienced Kristallnacht in some way, from innocent Jewish children, to SS officers and firemen that let fires in Jewish stores burn but put out ones that spread to non-Jewish owned facilities.
From there we went into the synagogue, where Ambassadors commented on how much they liked the stained glass, the details on the doors and the Torah scroll sitting near the ark at the front. Some suggestions were to add a chandelier, more stain glass windows along the walls, and to lengthen some of the pews. Reallife let us know that they’re still trying to figure out the technology that would allow the synagogue to change back and forth from the destroyed state to the pristine state.
Finally we moved into the debriefing room, where we checked on the story submission bulletin board which is currently being rescripted as a bug was found, and RealLife let us know that he’s currently working on the t-shirt vendor where visitors can get t-shirts with the quotes chosen by the ambassadors.
The build has come a long way since we saw the prototype last Friday, and the Ambassadors at the end of the session each took turns talking about the parts of the build that people liked best, with lots of compliments being given to RealLife on how the entry area in particular had developed. So exciting!
