Chattanooga, TN

Project Management
Experiential Planning and Design
Content Development

overview

Working at the clients request for life-like characters, we created a timeline of twenty realistic scenes based on conflicts in American history that placed full-size plaster figures of recipients in uniform, each carefully researched and precisely sculpted to match facial features, in the action positions and environments that best represented their medal citation. Though we had only eighteen months to design and complete the 10,000 sq. ft. main gallery and 2000 sq. ft. temporary gallery space, we delivered this turnkey project on time and on budget.

From May 2018 to the opening in February 2020, Encore led the project team as the interpretive planner, content developer, and primary experiential designer for this new interpretive center that tells the stories of recipients of the nation’s highest decoration awarded for military valor, the Medal of Honor.

The National Medal of Honor Heritage Center will introduce a new immersive experience in May 2024 that tells the story of Medal of Honor recipients Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart through the eyes of Super 64 pilot, Michael Durant, from the Battle of Mogadishu, Somalia, October 1993.

Super 64
Immersive Theater

Using 360°projection technology and hydraulic Blackhawk seats that tilt, sway, and shake, audiences will experience an authentic reproduction of the events of Super 64. Employing a combination of archival video footage, radio transmissions, enhanced animation, and narrator Michael Durant, we will recreate the events surrounding the Blackhawk, both in the air and on the ground, in a ten-minute audio/video/sensory production of Gordon and Shughart’s selfless determination to save the lives of as many of the crash survivors as possible.

Michael Durant