From our first onsite visit to Give Kids The World Village we were introduced to Father Time, a pneumatic driven animatronic in the form of a grandfather clock. The Village used this clock in their daily operation as a way to close down the Castle for the night at 9pm; Father Time “sings the castle to sleep.”
While a very charming how, we knew we could help enhance it and would add a dynamic reason for Tom Foolery to have a nightly show. What if Tom would ask the children to help wake up Father Time so they could sing the castle to sleep together?
So that is what we did, we built our first show around a small show for Tom and then he would transition into the goodnight castle show. Story-time on Tuesday night and a dance party became extra additions that the staff could insert into the middle of these two shows.
This would take some of the pressure off of the volunteer or staff member who was responsible for the task as they have Tom to rely on to sing and ask for participation with for Father Time. But to get this sort of interplay to work would take finesse, technical trickery, and some magic.
iTec is the original vendor for the Castle of Miracles, so we reached out to them about integrating with their PLC. While initially skeptical of our wild plans, they helped us make this happen. They were concerned about making too many changes to a very old system that was still operating well, which we agreed we wanted to be a least intrusive as possible.
We kept the original infrastructure in place so Give Kids The World can still signal Father Time from the PLC, but they gave us a way in to ping the specific show file we needed when Tom is to wake up Father Time.
The Good Night Castle Show is all one file, so it took some adjustment to get the dialogue to match, but luckily we had spent time beforehand to align the files so they matched each other.