Fruit Of The Loom: Human Crane
The Ask
This was not the craziest ask we'd ever gotten but we were more than happy to jump on board and lend a hand to our good friends at Grandesign for this one. Essentially we were brought in to provide signage, sounds easy right? The Human Crane was a product that was being rented from another company. The activation was at X-Games and it was a really great experience to be apart of. The installation was Union based and if you've ever worked with union crews outside of Los Angeles then I don't have to say much more.
The Catch: 40mph Winds
To dive deeper into why an experiential fabrication agency was brought in to do signage requires a bit of explanation. The client wanted the Crane Game to look as close to an actual arcade crane game as possible. This required rigid signage on all sides and mounting hardware. The top signs seemed easy enough: DiBond wrapped in vinyl with a mounting hardware on the back. The bottom signs were huge but still the concept was the same.
Then the weather came... potentially 40mph winds in Minneapolis. This is when our union installers refused to continue working. Their concern was that the rigid signs could fly off and injure people if the winds caught them just right and ripped them off their metal mounts from the metal structure, I was in disbelief. I then spent the next hour attempting to work with union guys to try and see how we can fix this instead of giving up on it. The client is in the background stressing out, imagine an unbranded human crane game. After realizing my union team was wholly uninterested in problem solving this solution I called my team, Illumivation, to brainstorm. Within 5 minutes someone suggested Safety Cable used for theater lighting rigs on truss. I wish I could tell you that I returned to the union crew and explained my plan and everything went great but shockingly that's not the case. I suggested that to mitigate risk we'd drill holes in the signs and use safety cable wrapped in client blue vinyl and attach it to the truss making it impossible for anything to fly anywhere. One of the union guys literally walked off the site and quit... His boss profusely apologized after she heard what took place and she stepped in and took his place. It was wild but it all got done (like it always does) and everyone was happy, except for that one union guy.
Fruit of the Loom was sponsoring Ryan Decenzo at the time and he came by to do a photoshoot. Really nice guy.
Guests had to grab balloons with tickets inside to win prizes. Grand prize was a signed skateboard.
X-Games view from Fruit of the Loom booth inside the event.