A Christmas Carol
Queue for Universal Creative Lab
Creative Direction, 3D Modeling, Design Development
Universal Creative Lab, Summer 2024
Professor: Peter Weishar
Collaboration with Dallas Kirkland
Our Christmas Carol ride was a concept created in collaboration with Universal Creative in their UCF Lab class. Our concept called for an immersive dark ride experience designed to bring Charles Dickens’ classic tale to life. Tasked with designing the queue, the set design features highly detailed facades of historic London buildings, complete with cobblestone pathways and gas-lit streetlamps to enhance the authenticity of the environment. Custom stanchions, styled to reflect 19th-century ironwork, line the pathways and queue areas, ensuring the thematic consistency extends throughout the guest experience. Special attention has been given to atmospheric effects and period-accurate soundscapes to create a fully immersive storytelling experience.
Queue Overview
Tasked with refitting the Men in Black: Alien Attack show building, we we're given a large portion of the building for the queue. Starting with the London Streets, we researched the accurate streets that Scrooge would've lived on in 1800s London. Entering through an oversized Christmas Carol book, guests would feel as if they were entering Dickensian London. Turning right onto Lime street, guests would enter Scrooge's business, seeing scenes from the story reenacted by high-quality animatronics in each of the three show rooms. As guests leave the storefront through the back of the building, the streets get dark and cold as they enter the Dark Streets. Scrooge's mansion lines the opposite side of the load area, where guests entered their Horse-drawn Carriage ride vehicles.
The Ride Vehicle
The ride vehicles were designed to resemble Barouche carriages, the kind of elegant horse-drawn coach you might have seen on the streets of 19th-century London. These carriages were a symbol of wealth and status at the time, which ties directly into Dickens’s story about class and society. By seating four guests facing each other, the vehicles recreate how people actually traveled, making you feel like you have stepped right into the past. We chose this design so that from the moment you board, after walking past cobblestone streets, glowing gas lamps, and ornate ironwork, you are immersed in Dickens’s world before the story even begins.
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