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    Imagine’s Tom Zaller on dinosaurs, bodies and the art of the traveling exhibition

    Imagine Exhibitions has been growing, generating, advertising, and operating acclaimed traveling exhibitions for ten years. So what are the secrets and techniques of the organization’s fulfillment, and why did it put a Tyrannosaur on a truck? Tom Zaller, President, and CEO of Imagine Exhibitions and veteran of the leisure and exhibition industries, is famend for presenting artifacts and their tales excitingly and compellingly.

    His creations consist of Jurassic World: The Exhibition, REAL BODIES, Angry Birds Universe and Titanic The Exhibition, Dinosaurs Around the World, and Survival: The Exhibition, to call a few. He and his team have additionally collaborated on The Hunger Games: The Exhibition, Downton Abbey: The Exhibition, Andy Warhol: 1 Minute Eternal, Discover the Ice Age, Da Vinci The Exhibition, and Living Dinosaurs. Bar mitzvahs and The Grateful Dead He spoke to Blooloop approximately his heritage, the career path that brought him to his modern-day role, and his long-held dream of becoming a wooded area ranger.

    Zaller grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in which his brother Paul had a production employer:

    “So I was in the enjoyment enterprise business from an early age. I started operating on the degree and in theatre, doing weddings and bar mitzvahs at 13 or 14 years vintage.”

    After working weekends and over the summertime together with his brother for a few years, he had the enjoyment to exit on an excursion along with his first band at the age of sixteen. He labored with well-known acts during his tenure there, including Joe Walsh, Todd Rundgren, and The Grateful Dead.

    “Cleveland changed into a massive rock and roll metropolis and had the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Art Museum. It’s an entirely cultural town, even though it gets a terrible rap.

    “By a spread of circumstances, I ended up in this leisure area. Even though my dream turned into a wooded area ranger and rescuing humans off the aspect of the mountains, this led to why I like mountaineering a lot, and why I became an Entertainment Rigger,” Zaller says.

    He went directly to the college to further his wooded area ranger ambitions, even persevering in doing gigs in his loose time.
    A Titanic enchantment

    Regarding his time at university, Zaller says: “I turned into working extra than I become studying. I by no means finished college and ended up taking place a long time tour with David Copperfield, the magician.”

    He spent seven years traveling with Copperfield. “After my time with David, I talked to my manufacturer to discover what could be subsequent. I imagined it might be some other excursion. However, he stated: ‘We’re building an everlasting enchantment targeted on the Titanic in Orlando. Why don’t you move paintings on that?’

    “I went and saw the movie and then met the humans that owned the smash site of the Titanic.”

    He also took element in a submersible dive on the to destroy site, which afforded the insight that enabled his sensitive coping with Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition.

    He says: “We started by using licensing the artifacts from RMS Titantic, Inc., the organization that owns the salvage rights to the break of the Titanic. I’d spent quite a lot of time in museums as a kid, and this changed into the first time I knew of an enjoyment group wanting to create a brand new type of immersive storytelling, the use of artifacts from a smash web page to tell the story.

    “When we opened our first huge exhibition in a museum in Chicago, nearly 900,000 people got here in 7 months, so we knew we truly had something.”
    Plastinated our bodies and traveling exhibitions

    This was the starting point for severa distinctive journeying exhibitions with Zaller as Production Manager.

    On the evolution of his position in the entertainment enterprise, he says: “I then moved to Atlanta in 2003 to construct a brand new department at RMS Titanic Inc. Related to traveling exhibitions. I informed the CEO that the Titanic is super; however, I would love to create a plastinated human body exhibition. So we fashioned an organization, Premier Exhibitions, in early 2004.”

    Zaller becomes instrumental in growing Premier Exhibitions, owning 5,500 Titanic relics with approximately 1,300 on display in numerous international locations, alongside numerous plastinated body exhibitions. That first bodies exhibition, BODIES…The Exhibition turned into an immediate success from the start.

    “At one time, we had as many as 17 of those visiting exhibitions visiting the world,” says Zaller. “We additionally did a BODIES Revealed, Our Body: The Universe Within; Star Trek: The Exhibition, and Dialog in the Dark. The organization had a very successful run for the five and a half years that I changed into there.”
    Just imagine

    His decision to transport on changed into driven using the corporation’s boom. He explains: “As these corporations grow and begin making greater and extra money, distinct investors are available in: it was a publicly-traded organization. To me, it seemed to have lost the unique idea of creating content material and journeying exhibitions and had become all about earning profits, so I left in 2009 and started Imagine Exhibitions. That was ten years ago.”

    Zaller started by way of generating different human beings’ exhibitions. In that first 12 months of operation, he asked to supervise a brand new museum called the ArtScience Museum in Singapore for the Sands Corporation.

    “I ended up becoming Founding Director of the ArtScience Museum, Marina Bay Sands, which is a stunning building on the bay of Singapore. The task lasted approximately three years, and at some stage in that point, we deliberately opened and operated the museum as well as bringing approximately 13 one-of-a-kind touring exhibitions through at some point of that time.”
    Working with predominant IPs

    On returning to the United States, he persevered to build Imagine. “We commenced developing some of our staff, as well as doing licensing deals. We licensed Angry Birds from Rovio, to begin with, establishing that exhibition in Dubai and then Qatar: it’s miles nevertheless traveling nowadays. Then Lionsgate requested us to introduce a Hunger Games exhibition and be their advertising and marketing and excursion operator. We opened this in New York City, San Fransisco, Sydney, and Louisville. Then in 2014, we licensed the Jurassic World logo from Universal Studios and created a surprise hit and file-breaking exhibition, which was bought in 2017.

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