1 of 8 | Changi Airport Group commissioned Moment Factory to collaborate on two multimedia features to entertain passengers as they navigate inside Singapore Airport. Photo courtesy of Moment Factory
March 12 (UPI) — When Sakchin Bessette co-founded Moment Factory, an interactive entertainment studio, in 2001, airports like Changi Airport in Singapore and Haneda Airport in Tokyo were just beginning to embrace digital art.
Today, Moment Factory is leading the charge, transforming travel hubs around the world into buzz-creating gateway destinations.
Since its creation in Montreal, the studio has grown to over 450 employees, with satellite offices in cities like Paris and New York. During this time, Moment Factory has spearheaded projects ranging from the Super Bowl halftime show to touring with artists like Olivia Rodrigo and 100 Gecs.
An innovator in the entertainment and travel industry, the studio's iconic style can be seen around the world, transforming established venues like the Kaleidoscope Kavern Lazy River in Tennessee and the Orchard, inside Tennessee's Hamad International Airport. Qatar.
Speaking to UPI, Bessette said the company's motto, “We do it in public,” encapsulates the company's signature style of merging interactive and multimedia art with the real world.
In many cases, Moment Factory installations have become major draws for tourists and art lovers who now associate interactive art with places such as Changi Airport, LAX, the Moynihan Train Hall of the Penn Station in New York and Shinjuku Station in Tokyo.
In Shinjuku, the world's busiest train station, Moment Factory has partnered with Sony Music to create a new flagship media installation at the east-west crossing in 2022.
Using sound, light and video, a team of several dozen people from Moment Factory installed The Color Bath, which saturates the space through which more than 3 million passengers pass every day with shades blue, pink and purple.
Bessette said the company has seen significant growth over the past decade, driven by increasing competition between cities for tourists and airlines and airports for customers.
“If passengers have a better experience at the airport, they are more likely to stop at that airport rather than another,” he said.
“Many of our facilities have been designed with the overall passenger experience in mind. Specific facilities enhance the passenger experience, sometimes distract from queuing and security, and improve aisles or processing areas. transition within the airport.”
That work began in earnest in 2013 with an overhaul of Los Angeles International Airport, Bessette said, but has since expanded across the world, most recently landing in Singapore.
In New Jersey, the company transformed Terminal A at Newark Liberty International Airport in 2022, adding a large-scale digital mural featuring a rotating lineup of New Jersey highlights.
Customers can view a mix of practical flight information, intuitive boarding hints and fun facts to know about Jersey as they venture towards their boarding gate.
Bessette said the company will sometimes create an “experience theater” — essentially an incredibly large LED screen combined with sound programming — to relax passengers and gently entertain them while they wait in line.
“We want to create a spa-like ambiance, without it necessarily being distracting,” he said.
Other facilities, like the hallways at LAX, are more interactive: When passengers pass by or a flight is ready to take off, the screens synchronize with departures. In places like Changi, the studio has used weather data to provide visualizations, showing raindrop animations if it's humid outside or sun animations if it's hot.
The massive Moment Factory waterfall in Changi was designed as a spectacle rather than just a work of art, making nature a spectacle. In Doha, Qatar, the company used similar technology to improve the airport's shopping and dining areas.
Depending on the client and the space, Bessette said, Moment Factory applies unique approaches to entertain, manage “pain points” or improve transitions within the airport.
He said the company's success at LAX has led to all kinds of opportunities, programming new facilities for venues like the Las Vegas Sphere and music tours for artists like Madonna And Billie Eilishas well as modernizing iconic travel destinations like the Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal or the iconic Dôme des Invalides in Paris with its AURA experience.
Currently, Moment Factory has teams working on multiple projects simultaneously, including new facilities at Incheon International Airport in Seoul, the UNICEF Heartstrings program, which will be launched at the end of March in Houston, and the Messi Experiencean interactive experience featuring soccer superstar Lionel Messi, launching in April in Miami.
