The thousands of commuters leaving Toronto from busy Union Station last night may have felt as though they travelled further than they planned. Much of the bus and train station’s busiest concourse is covered in images of Pandora, the alien world of James Cameron’s 3D blockbuster Avatar.
The four-week station domination, which went up Monday to announce the film’s April 22 release on DVD and Blu Ray, is the largest domination package ever sold by IMA Outdoor, which owns the media at Union Station.
According to Stephanie Jacobs, marketing manager for Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, the package includes never-before-sold portions of the environment thanks to extended negotiations with Go Transit, which sells tickets from the concourse floor.
Aside from large floor and ceiling coverings, pillar wraps, video screens and other more traditional elements of such executions, Twentieth Century Fox created a large-scale model of the film’s Home Tree environment.
IMA also set aside part of the lower concourse as a “Pandora zone,” where eight-foot-tall cut outs of movie characters stand against a back-lit mural.
“If you look up you will see us, if you look down you will see us,” said Jacobs.
Union Station was chosen for its high foot traffic. “It’s located in the heart of downtown, and in proximity to the Air Canada Centre. It allowed us to do something really visible,” Jacobs said. “We needed a high-impact execution that lives up to what the movie did theatrically.”
Zenith Optimedia handled the buy. Creative elements were made jointly by Fox’s in-house team and Markham, Ont.’s Timbol Design Communications, which worked on the 2005 DVD launch campaign of the last Star Wars trilogy.
