Lola's Lab
In LOLA'S LAB, a children's art and edutainment production company that. served thousands of experiences, I integrated my writing, production, and design abilities to nurture a child's confidence through creative imagination.
Beginning in 2010, I wrote, produced, and directed over 40 original immersive audience adventures paired with interpretive curriculum and projects in complex monthly pop-up environments with extraordinary visual and performing artists.
Lola's Lab pioneered the use of experiential learning through the use of a highly visual art direction and story-based immersive education. During this time, I was also experimenting with book and merchandise development, video and podcast production, and adapting our program for e-learning, considering how to structure achievement levels and participant interface through available technology.
Creative Strategy
To activate the content, live characters interacted with students throughout the day. This primed students with a personal relationship to the story and created a mysterious atmosphere of surprise. I employed cliffhangers and gamification in the writing to enroll and motivate the students to invest themselves in the story adventures and to collaborate on solving problems that the characters were having in real-time. These ideas were prototypes in the breakout sessions, which included maker labs and taught principles of design thinking and collaboration.
Story adventure camps were 1 - 5 days long. Children were deeply invested in the story and their missions together. The training during our programs impacted the children at home, helping them build creative confidence and collaborative skills. The full impact was an experience unlike anything on the out-of-school market, traditional education, museum-style learning, or family entertainment.
RESULTS
7 years of live experiences
The business served thousands of families and gave me a platform to exercise various creative and management skills while working with extraordinary visual and performing artists. As the founder/writer/ illustrator, Lola's Lab allowed me to create an innovative brand with an extensive catalog of original material and products. I continue to turn the plays into new formats of interactivity today.
I created a pipeline of over 40 productions with repeatable, evergreen content that could always be personalized. Lola's Lab was a land of many stories; each was developed into a dramatic play with its product family of scripts, unique characters, curriculum, and story-based merchandise. We also performed short, interactive productions at the National Children's Museum and other venues. By the end of year 4, I was developing interactive storybooks for sale. In 2015 we won Arlington Magazine's Top Vote Getter Status for best camp. And by year 6, I began to format the live program for licensing by outside organizations. The program was presented by Encore Children's Theater in 2018, and a request for more again in 2019.
In 2019, despite the request for more, I ended live productions in year 7 to focus on the reinvention of the story content for web-based platforms and took a long look at how the next steps of growth could not continue under my direction without a larger production company to carry out what I could visualize. We had come to the end of an era in many respects, but the dawn of a new one professionally where I knew I was best served to work on innovative storytelling in environments with sizable production budgets for incorporating new ideas and technology.
