OM at the World Festival of Youth – 2024
Every day of a person’s life is filled with many small wonders. Some people notice them, others pass by and then complain that their life is dull and monotonous. Yet, perhaps everyone, one way or another, experiences being both a magician surrounded by magic and a complainer in a boring and gloomy world.
One of the simplest ways to bring a miracle into your life is to welcome the fragrant and sunny spring after a gray and cold winter—especially where spring arrives earlier. For example, in Sochi.
For the staff of
Omelchak Multimedia Studio, creating wonders is not a magical superpower but a daily job. That is why, on March 1st, we found ourselves in Sochi—not searching for fluttering petals of blossoming trees in the warm breezes of salty sea air, but working at the World Festival of Youth 2024, held in the southern capital of our country in the first week of spring.
The grand-scale event, however, remained almost unnoticed by ordinary guests and residents of the resort. Only taxi drivers complained about the closed roads, and a few non-festival tourists grumbled about the temporary alcohol sales ban. Yet neither the first nor the second group could attend the festival: accreditation was strict and limited, and
to receive the coveted badge and entry pass, every participant had to take a PCR test no later than one day before the event and have a negative result.
All festival locations were concentrated in the Olympic Park, situated within Sochi’s “Sirius” territory, where a special space called the “City of Youth of the World” was created, featuring campuses from major Russian cities.
One of the festival’s brightest spots was the Sirius University, styled as the “WYM International Airport.” Of course, it was not an airport at all, but a huge pavilion where everything was airport-like—check-in counters, boarding passes, beautiful volunteer girls dressed as flight attendants. And, of course, countless individual zones showcasing Russian regions, companies, events, phenomena, subcultures, and much more—too much to grasp or even walk through in a single day.
Omelchak Multimedia was not an ordinary curious visitor at WYM. We helped create a unique, engaging, and richly informative content-filled stand for the Novosibirsk region.
In the last six months, the country has been full of large exhibition-format events. Meanwhile, sanctions have brought unpleasant changes to those who ea
rned money by renting and selling multimedia equipment. Without the ability to purchase branded equipment, companies had to seek alternatives from Chinese suppliers. This process is lengthy and a lottery in terms of quality and delivery times. Moreover, due to changes in the country, many specialists have simply moved to warmer countries, skillfully adapting their expertise to remote work formats.
Perhaps these factors explain the relatively small amount of multimedia equipment compared to various printed formats such as posters, banners, and signs. Interactive installations became more manual and, in the youth festival format, even somewhat vintage. Phone booths with rotary dial phones, vinyl record players, curtains and tulle, fans, buttons and levers, postcards, and non-electronic books appeared on the stands.
Compact but cozy zones were allocated to the regions of our vast country within the “airport” territory. Each region tried its best to showcase its most vivid landmarks and achievements. The airport theme was rarely revealed, except at “our” stand. The Novosibirsk region decorated its zone as part of a modern air ha
rbor. For example, the sports zone resembled a baggage claim area: on an improvised conveyor belt lay various bags filled with items that immediately indicated which sport they represented. Each bag was tagged with a QR code. Using a special scanner, visitors could scan the tag of a particular sport and instantly watch a video about it on a screen above the “baggage.”
Monitors, styled as large airplane portholes, were decorated as “living newspapers” telling the stories of outstanding personalities who have changed and continue to improve the history of the Novosibirsk region. The pages of Novosibirsk press from different years came to life before visitors’ eyes, showing people from various eras living their own lives.
Visitors particularly enjoyed a quiz dedicated to job vacancies in the Novosibirsk region. A few simple but non-obvious multiple-choice questions with photo
s resulted in personalized career recommendations in various regional companies, along with the visitor’s own image as a satisfied specialist at one of them. The photo could be downloaded via QR code as a keepsake. In less than a week, nearly six hundred people answered the quiz questions.
Of course, we did not spend all our time at one stand. Naturally, we tried to cover as much as possible. Despite the wonderful weather and the fragrant, sunny mimosa blooming everywhere (which, it turns out, grows naturally as whole trees and does not req
uire “very meticulous and labor-intensive care,” as florists claim to justify their high prices), we had to return to our slightly less romantic March in Krasnodar.
The festival was very intense for us. We traveled many roads, paths, trails, and routes; completed a good project; met many colleagues and friends; explored dozens of locations, spaces, territories, and zones; touched, pressed, pulled, peeked, listened, answered, talked, took photos, made others laugh, and laughed ourselves. These impressions are a good companion on the path to inspiration, a desire to create even better, more interesting, brighter, more impressive, smarter, and more unusual work. See you at future events!