For more information, go to our website. Announcer the Richard Nixon president ial library and museum in yorba linda, california recently completed a major renovation. Up next, exhibit and website designers discuss the museum and how the revised museum tells a more complete story about president nixon and his administration. The museum now includes a replica oval office, a gallery on nixon in china, and updated interactive displays. This is just over 90 minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new Richard Nixon president ial library and museum. Todays program will be introduced by ronald h. Walker, chairman of the Richard Nixon foundation, and david ferriero, the archivist of the United States. [applause] thank you, and good morning, everyone. Over the last four decades, Richard Nixons career in public service, there was talk about many new nixons. But this museum, which opened yesterday most of you were here is truly the newest and i think youll agree with us, its the best of nixon, all. This morning well be hearing from the thinkwell group, which were really pleased with, and the cortina productions, who designed and executed the new library and museum. And from the woo, the creators of our new website. How many of you got our web site . It is terrific. They will explain how to get it. In any project of this complexity, there are many without whom people whose involvement and contribution were vital in every way to the success of this completion. Unquestionably, the new Nixon Library, most importantly without whom is my friend and very dear partner in the planning and building of this new Nixon Library museum. And now it is my distinct pleasure to introduce the archivist of the United States of america, the honorable david ferriero. [applause] mr. Ferriero thank you, and good morning. Yesterday, when we were on the podium, i reminded folks of fdrs vision when he created the president ial library system, his faith in the capacity of the citizenry to learn from the past, that they can gain in judgment to create their own future. One of the most important ways we do that, continue to fulfill that mission, is through our exhibit programs across the president ial library. I like to describe our goals as to educate, to enlighten, to entertain, and to inspire. And my not so secret agenda is to inspire young folks to devote their lives to public service, and the exhibits provide a way for us to celebrate public service. A lot has changed since 1990 when this library opened, and more papers have been processed and declassified, resulting in new scholarship. Eric in his book who owns history writes about history as a process not cast in stone, but rewritten each new generation, and that is based on this discovery and rediscovery which president nixon himself talked about when opening this library and museum. Technological innovations have transformed the Museum Visitor experience, digitization has provided opportunities to share and reuse content in new and innovative ways, and most importantly, visitor expectations have changed. We now have limited attention spans. [laughter] mr. Ferriero we reject overtexted exhibits and the expectation of interactive opportunities have revolutionized the business of exhibition design. All of these factors help shape our design and redesign of president ial library exhibits, and each time we do one, we learn. Each new project raises the bar. Lbj, fdr, bush 43, and nixon built on the successes of the past, very much a collaborative process. Cracker jack consultants on the technology and exhibit design, stellar Historian Panel and foundation and National Archive staff, and not to be overlooked, generous supporters who believe in the mission and have invested in the future. It really does take a village. My thanks and deep appreciation for all of you who have made this possible and helped us invest in the future. [applause] please welcome from thinkwell group, the chief executive officer and the chief creative officer. Mr. Hanna good morning. Thank you all for coming out today on a nice cool saturday. Its great when the National Archivist steals all of your morning material. [laughter] mr. Hanna literally the first thing i was talking about this morning is how audiences have changed and it is harder than ever to communicate with them. Whether you have one or not, most everyone has some sort of mobile device with them. Their noses are in it all the time, taking pictures with it, looking up things i dont know what im going to sound like an old guy. I dont know what my kids are up to on these darn devices. But it really creates a whole different mindset for how we need to communicate with audiences. The job used to be a lot easier. Once upon a time, we did not get out much as a people. We could not travel as easily as we can today. Just getting to europe was a seven or eight day steamship cruise. Now we hop in a plane and we are in dubai on thursday. It was very easy to present objects that no one had or could see and be amazed by them, right . Back in the day, you put stuff on display and everyone appreciated it because they had no other way to see it. Today, we have a plethora of opportunities on how we are going to get information, whether it is on that ubiquitous device, on the internet, getting on a plane to be able to go and see the authentic thing in its home location. We engage people today we utilize Technology Today to engage people in a different way and allow them to go deeper. We look at this image and we say, oh my gosh, it is science fiction, but wednesday night of this last week at 9 00 p. M. , a Major Company sold, for the first time at major retail outlets, a home version of this device that is going to really be ubiquitous in a few more years, and Virtual Reality will allow us the opportunity to explore anything and everywhere as if we were really there. What does that mean for museums . We contend that it means primarily two things one, we all crave to do things socially together, so regardless of sitting at home and being able to see the greatest movie we could ever see on the nicest display with the best surround sound, i still want to come out with my friends and say, oh my gosh, wasnt that amazing . And the other thing is, the more we can do online, on our computers and see virtually things, the more, we contend, you want to see the real thing, and it makes the real more important. So, the importance of Something Like the Richard Nixon president ial library and museum is we can see these amazing items from the National Archive, on display up close, things that the president himself touched and used. Were able to tell stories in new ways that, socially, we can do together. Hey, come take a look at this, did you know this about the president . And that kind of engagement changes the way we look at things now, and it makes our jobs harder, dont get me wrong, but it also forces us to look at things in a new way. So if you cant beat them, join them. You cant get the device out of their hands, so lets encourage its use, and whether its an app like the brand new mobile app that is here at the museum, or whether its other technologies to create a connection between that device and the thing theyre looking at in the museum, is one tool at our disposal. Obviously, as i said before, we all have to take pictures of everything all the time and share them, whether you like it or not, with everyone else. Joe and i sat in a meeting with the head of social media for the smithsonian. First of all, she was a lot younger than i am. [laughter] mr. Hanna she said we do three things with social media we say, i am here, here is the thing, and i am here with this thing. [laughter] mr. Hanna and nothing else. I thought about it, oh my gosh, she is right. So we have to make sure that in todays age, we provide photo ops. Seems ridiculous, but we do. As you go through the exhibition today, youll see a few some selfie moments that you can do on your own, and others that you will hand your camera over to somebody that knows how to use it, and they can take a picture of you as well. Hopefully, we can bring those moments from nixons life to life in a whole other way that allows us to engage with a whole new audience in another way. Last but certainly not least, being able to talk to different audience segments is really important as well, including the differently abled. How do you see mona lisa, for example . These are just great examples within our industry of different ways people are doing Different Things to engage audiences in new and unique ways. Now, i would like to turn it over to joe, who is going introduce the rest of our team that worked on this project, and our partner, as well. Mr. Zenas thanks, craig. Well, were honored to have been selected to work on this project. Weve been working on it for nearly three years, and its a long journey and a very complex process that requires the efforts of dozens of people. But today, we are going to have the lead creatives who are involved in creating the exhibit here and will kind of deconstruct it and talk about some of the moments and how it came together. First, i would like to introduce kate mcconnell, the creative director. [applause] mr. Zenas a project like this needs deep divers, someone who can understand everything. We like to put ourselves in the shoes of the guests who will be coming there. As david said, how do we get the next generation of people to care . Kate is that generation we want to talk to. She knows as much about nixon as i think anybody in this room does. She will go oneonone with any of you. Then, if kate has the words in the concept and presentation, just like a film that needs a production designer of how it all comes together, chuck robert is is our art director. [applause] mr. Zenas chuck has worked on numerous museums and entertainment projects, the lincoln library. Again, it is how do you take a really complex story, the life of a man, all the details, and put them into a visually pleasing way that you instantly get when you walk up what the topic is or how you want to tell a story . And that is chucks job. I would also like to bring up our partner for all the video and media, cortina productions. We like to say we like to create emotional souvenirs. You want somebody to feel something. As craig said, putting out information is not enough. For this story, having the emotional power of the moment to really carry the journey was really important. Amy is principle and partner of cortina productions. [applause] mr. Zenas how many president ial libraries have you done . This is our seventh. I am tired. [laughter] mr. Zenas you have not seen the exhibit yet. The emotional power behind the video and films and the stories is phenomenal. I also need to have a shout out for the rest of our team, who is not here, but we also have the producer project manager, the conductor of the train. [applause] mr. Zenas this would not have happened without him. A little bit about thinkwell. When we got hired for this job, there was a mandate very early from the Richard Nixon foundation that Richard Nixon loved cuttingedge thinking and wanted to lead with creativity at its best. We are not that Traditional Museum design firm. Clients that come to us want something more interactive, a different way of telling the story, because we work not just in museums but entertainment, corporate environments, we do buildings and urban development. But it is always about connecting a guest with an intellectual property or person or story with something they do emotionally in the physical world. We are based in los angele we are a 15yearold company. We have about 200 employees. They range from being architects and master planners and Story Tellers and feeder designers, technicians, video editors, and all of that comes together for these projects that we work on. We also have offices in beijing and abu dhabi. A lot of the projects we do are around the world. You may not have heard of us, but you may have seen some of our projects. Just last year, on your left, we opened up in atlanta, georgia, the center of Puppetry Arts and museum, the largest collection of puppets donated by the henson family. They have a very successful puppet theater, but they want to be an american repository of puppets and the stories that go behind these. This is an ancient art form, and our job is to engage children in creativity and tell the stories of these collections. Also in atlanta, we opened up a childrens exhibit four years ago, a Natural History museum. It is situated on the largest urban oldgrowth forest, and our goal there was, how do you connect kids with nature, again . When we studied the demographics in atlanta, there was the innercity kids who are scared to go in the forest, or there were the privileged kids who came in and their parents did not want them to get dirty. I learned from nature by exploring it and playing, and kids were not getting the experience. So we created a 7000 square foot exhibit where you did that indoors. No text panels, but it was all Creative Learning and physical activity. Also at the museum of science and industry in chicago, we designed an exhibit sponsored by google on robotics where we are now on the history of robotics and where it is going in the future. One of our most known projects, in 2012 in london, was the making of harry potter. We worked with warner bros. At the studio. This was about 150,000 squarefoot factory tour of where the films were made, a very immersive way of telling the story of the craftsmen, the 10 years of filmmaking, how you make the film. If you were a harry potter fan, you get to go and touch all the sets and costumes and see behind the scenes how the magic came off. We have been working for the last number of years in dubai on the world expo in 2020. An expo is a museum. How big is the site there . 500 acres. Mr. Zenas a 500acre city theyre basically building. We were involved in the content and entertainment master planning. You will have an architect that is master planning, and our job is to master plan the do. What are the opportunities within the space . The project that launched us into the museum world was a small touring exhibit called sesame street presents the body that was for little kids, teaching them how their body works. It was meant to go into museums for about three years and be on the road for 10 years. That is really where we focused and got to know how kids and younger audiences learn and use the space. That became a very important launching point for this facility as well. How do you engage a younger audience to care, to want to dive deeper and want to learn . Amy . Thank you. I am thrilled to be here and be working with thinkwell on this amazing project. I will tell you a little bit about cortina productions. We are a media design and Production Company located in virginia. Classic American Dream story, three of us started in a basement. And today, we have office space, we have signed a longterm lease. [laughter] we have about 50 employees, programmers, graphic designers, writers, researchers, storytellers, filmmakers. The bulk of our work is for museums and Cultural Heritage spaces, so that is what we focused our attention on the last 15 years. I will run you through a few of our projects. We are honored to have been a part of the new Smithsonian Museum of African American history and culture that opened last month. We produced 25 exhibits for that, a combination of films, interactive audio scapes. My particular favorite is join the show now. This uses Gesture Technology through kinect, and visitors come up to these very large monitors, taller than i am, and you participate im not going to do it for you, but you can travel to d. C. It is wildly popular and a fun way to celebrate the culture of African American history. The next project i will talk to about is the San Francisco 49ers. Down at levis stadium, we produced their Interactive Media and films and are particularly proud of their learning lab, where they used football to teach science, technology, engineering, and math in an interactive lab, and they take 60,000 students a year through this program at the 49ers stadium, and we just love using technology and story telling to open up young peoples minds to new ideas and new careers, possibly. Next is the Muhammad Ali Center in louisville, kentucky. The focus of this project is to use muhammads life to teach concepts such as dedication and confidence, speaking up. Another one of our successful partnerships. Joe mentioned we have been very honored to be a part of seven president ial libraries. I will list them in alphabetical order. Bush 43, carter, clinton, fdr, lbj, and reagan. What is particularly important to us, for me as one of the owners at cortina, i was raised by two journalists during the heyday of print journalism, and they were also very politically involved, and i grew up at the dinner table hearing about the importance of democracy and the office of the presidency. And we have been its been so important to us to work on these, now our seventh president ial library, to reach out to young people to use technologies that joe and craig talked about to open up young peoples minds to the history of our culture and our country. Lastly, ill talk to you about a mobile app that we did that i think is perhaps our most visited exhibition, and we have the nixons to thank for that. Because it is the pandas that have made this project so popular, and i will leave you with a shot of mrs. Nixon with the pandas in china. In our wonderful zoo in washington, d. C. Im going to turn it over to chuck, and you are going to her a lot about partnerships today, and chuck is going to introduce us to a couple of partners that helped us create this immersive museum. Thanks, amy. [applause] good morning. I am going to talk to you about studio eis. Not ice. Studio eis is a company in brooklyn, and they did the original figures for the hall of leaders here at the library in 1990. And they ive wanted to work with these guys for 30 years, i think. Maybe 25 years. They do, i think, the best Museum Figures that ive ever seen. They work in bronze and other materials. But they are just extraordinary. The thing i think they bring more than anything a lot of people, you see sculptures and statues, and the likeness is good but it is very stiff. They have gotten better and better at just bringing a sense of life and natural you feel like you understand the character and the feeling of who this person is. When it came time to do the figures for our lincoln city room and put nixon in a chair, it was just a nobrainer to go with these guys. Some other examples, too, but we are going to talk for a moment about the fabricators for our exhibits. In case you are not completely clear about how this stuff works, we have architects and facility contractors, who did a beautiful job on this building. Most of the walls, a lot of what you see in the exhibit, was done by the facility contractor. That gets carried over by malti, who did the exhibits. As an art director, i do not always get to choose who we are going to go with. I did not know these guys. I knew some of their work, but we finally get into the room as we are getting close to production, and they are sitting there, and we start to eyeball each other. They are looking at me like if you can draw at all, we will probably be ok. It became a partnership. There is a couple of people i would point out. The project manager got under the hood with me on everything. We worked out the details. From my point of view, nothing in this museum is arbitrary. There is no maybe it would be ok. It is all carefully thought through, carefully planned. Lynn stuck with me on all of this. There are things i wanted, and he was like, no, i am not, and he was right. [laughter] he was awesome. And another person was hired by malti to do the site install. All of the exhibits are arriving from new jersey and toronto, stuff is coming in huge crates and boxes. Opening this stuff up what is this, where does this go . It is organized, but it is such a challenge to figure out how to build a museum when it is coming in box after box after box, and he managed to put it all together, things that were missing, he put in place, built them himself. It was an amazing, heroic effort, so i want to point him out as well. Thank you, chuck. [applause] this is a card game now. We have defined all the cards in the deck, and now we are going to play the game. We have talked about the partnerships. A project like this is so challenging because there are so many pieces that have to come together, and some of the stakeholders who have to approve and have an important voice that has to be heard. The team is going to go through the exhibit itself and peek behind the scenes on on how some of this came together. That is a polite term for lets do a little sausage making. Everybody loves sausage but dont like to see it made. But you cant leave, so we are going to do it now. One of the things when we started this project was to understand the man, his times, and the world he lived in and take another look at the president. We always start our process by putting ourselves in our visitors shoes and thinking, what do they bring to the table when it comes to any experience we create . In this case, we said as we started off, everyone has a kind of a one dimensional notion of Richard Nixon, including all of us, which was watergate, resignation, the end. I will admit, that was where i started personally from this. And we cant ignore it. We dont want to ignore it. Its not fair to ignore it. Its not honest to ignore it. So we chose instead to hit the nail on the head. When we sat down and had our initial brainstorming, we said, all right, lets think about the baggage we bring as visitors. Lets think about the things you would expect to see and the things you would see surprised to learn. In the course of that discovery that we did as a collaborative group, we found some kind of key things that came out of it. The first that we said, and we imagine the visitors could say coming to a new exhibition, is, i didnt know he did so much. And we were astonished to see the breath and depth of things that the president had done during his tenure in office. Next, we said we thought our visitors would say, i didnt know he was so interesting. First of all, the man had hobbies and passions and sports and other interests, including an outside of his role in office. We thought, well, that really shows the human being behind this at the time, one dimensional person and that will really help open him up into a three dimensional person for all of us to see and appreciate much the same way the people who knew him and his family knew him. Last, but not least, was i didnt know he did so many important things. This is something that i think was a turning point for us in our understanding of this man. We wanted to make sure we presented those things as well. Out of that, we began developing the concept. We had naysayers. We had president ial buffs. We had young people, families, senior citizens, all of which we have to talk to in different ways. We really do find audiences in three other ways as waders, swimmers, and divers. A casual person who is going to come here on president s day is going to be, like, Richard Nixon, i heard about him. Those are the waders. The swimmer is somebody who may be lived through his presidency. Somebody who went to college and studied history at the young adult and has a deeper appreciation or understanding or interest in the president and those times. They will have a different approach to wanting to navigate the exhibition. Last, but not least, are the divers. You will read every word that kate wrote, every piece of information that was edited, look at every object the National Archives brought into the exhibition. The diver is the hardest one to get because it is easy to scratch the surface. It is hard to make sure you appeal to and get enough for the diver. That is where a lot of the interactives come in interactives come in. That is for the website comes in. The sausage making begins with knowing who your audience is, understanding the different audience segments and the different types of audiences you have to deal with and that sets the stage for us to begin to explore how we are going to what stories were going to tell and how we will tell them and how physically we will put all of that together. You forgot one audience segment. Those are the merpeople. They go really deep. We start with the audience. We start with the guest expectations. We are digging into the man, and to his life, reading books, watching documentaries. Trying to discover who this man is, and we are seeing 1913 when he was born, feels really far away. It feels really distant to us. And he is elected president in 1968 and there is all of this turmoil happening in the country, excitement, passion, that is both distant something a lot of people forget about but also something that can really grab you. We thought, that is where we need to start. We need to start in that moment when he is about to be elected. Of course, we have a problem. We started in the middle of things and how do you get back to the beginning . Were brainstorming and we are thinking, wait a second, here at the next library, they have a unique treasure. They have nixons actual birthplace right outside. There are these windows, some of which were not opened up. What if we could have this time when he is born fall in the exhibit right there so you can look at those windows and see the birthplace and you will be encouraged to go outside and visited . And visit it . We had those two points and that gave us enough so we could form the structure of the exhibit. We are starting to make our concept art and create some of our models and flesh out those times in between. We have to come full circle and come back around. I wanted to show you this is a little bit of the magic for me. I am only surprised when i see this even though we have done this before. Its always really cool to me. To start with, this is a early concept sketch. We thought about, all right, in the vietnam gallery, we wanted to capture kind of the emotion of the difficulty of that war, the soldiers on the ground, the men and in danger on the ground, in action, in combat. And we wanted to capture the turmoil at home, the protests against the war, the conversation that was going on and we wanted to juxtapose those and put them together. So you see this early concept sketch and then we have our artist and designers, theyre using the program calling sketch this 3d program called sketch up. And then you have a work in progress installation photo and now it is coming to life. You can see the concept has come to life. Another aspect of the process that we all engage in is really integration. Visitors today are very sawvy. Visitors today are very savvy. We have the savviest visitor we have ever experienced and they are growing as i speak. They are getting smarter than we are. And so we hope you noticed that it is part of our approach, that media and the fabrication of objects are integrated. We have two stand alone theaters, really we have one big theater and theres a smaller theater where we see the domestic policy video. Everything else is integrated using all of the skills that we can bring to bear on this story. Well hope you see that as you move through. And this when you get to lincoln sitting room, youll notice it has everything in it. Well talk more about that later. But first, this is really in the sausage making. I am not even going to apologize for it because it is so critical and it is called research. [laughter] as soon as they request for proposal comes into our email inbox, we are already starting our Research Process because we love storytelling. What shows up for you may have dimensionality to it, it first has to be all rooted in story and stories have to be rooted in research. And so we begin our Research Process by reading every book that we can find and some authors are in this room right now that weve heavily from and read your work we pulled heavily from and read your work. We think it is important to look at the entire story, crossreference facts and dates and get multiple sources. We also look at hours and hours of raw video. Documentaries. And very important, in case you do not know it, we are in a National Archive. The nixon papers and documents are housed here. We go to those primary sources during our Research Process. We also rely very heavily on archivists and curators here to help us tease out the story. Lastly, i want to make sure you all know that we did not write the exhibition alone or in a vacuum. We are very happy to say that all the content was rigorously that it with four independent vetted with four independent historians. We are proud that this project went through that rigorous level of vetting. One of the things that came up for us in our research, and thursday, and some of you docents are over there, we discovered in our research of Richard Nixon that he used yellow notepads to articulate his thinking, to provide himself thoughts on his actions, to strategize. He has done this most of his professional life. We discovered this as a team and we were riveted by this information and we were allowed to read the yellow notepads. We were thrilled to be reading them. We believed the visitor needed to discover this as well. You will hear us talk about discovery because something happened in the mind of a human being when they discover something for themselves. It engages them and inspires them to go learn more. We do not want this exhibition to be the beginning sorry, the end of the visitors discovery. We wanted to be the beginning. We pepper it, we use it throughout the exhibition, starting in the orientation film. There are interactive stations for visitors. And in the lincoln sitting room, where nixon himself wrote on these yellow notepads. This is a way we use research to bring it forward for the visitors so that they are able to see an authentic element of this particular manner particular man, Richard Nixon. When we decided on 1968 as a starting point, and we knew we wanted to engage a younger audience, we said, how do we establish the context of the time . We will talk a little bit about the intro physical space and how we do it there. We decided the best way to immerse people in understanding the time to get their heads around the context of all of the things, the chaos and tunnel that was going on in the country was to do a film, and the music, the sound, the visuals, that talk about everything that was going on here and in vietnam really help establish all of that and really set the stage and that became kind of the opening volley for us in terms of the exhibition. Before you even step your feet in the door, we needed to set the stage in a way where we could focus you and deliver this message about win all of this was happening about when all of this was happening right up front. One of our goals here is to empower guest to make their own decisions. We wanted to lay out all of the information, the son of view, the primary sources, and place guests kind of into the moment for themselves and allow them to come to their own conclusions that way. We felt this was in the spirit of what Richard Nixon himself wanted for this library. When he opened the library in 1990, he said this quote, they can be passive, dry repositories of books and documents, i hope that the Nixon Library and birthplace will be different. A vital place of discovery and of investigation and contemplation of study, debate and analysis. And that is what we really wanted to do. Into that theater itself, we wanted to set the stage and introduce the sort of exhibit they would be going into. To do that, we could not have a typical theater like this. You guys are so far away, it is very presentational. It is talking down at you. If wanted to create a smaller, or intimate space, rap that screen around you wrap that screen around you, kind of immerse you in that space. Now, the Nixon Library had this beautiful big atrium space and we took it away from them. But we gave them a very lovely theater in its place. Back to this thing called research, as we were learning about Richard Nixon, there was a particular quote that left out of this and i will paraphrase it. He said that Richard Nixon had many facets. And this really interested us. Many of us many of our visitors will come with one or as many as three think they think they know about this topic. And when we heard that he was multifaceted, we thought, lets just go see. We started talking about it, cross referencing the things that we were reading, looking back at documentaries, looking more at scholarship that authors had used when they had come to the archives. What we found was that indeed, Richard Nixon is multifaceted, and we wanted to convey that to the visitor because we saw things like, and weve heard and read things, he was a fighter and he was empathetic. He could be tough, but he had compassion. There were these dichotomies and we wanted the visitor to get a sense of that. I will give you an example. In terms of empathy, Richard Nixon passed legislation to return lands to native americans. This is because he empathizes with the loss of their land and he believes they have been treated unfairly. This is something that comes from his heart. That was very interesting to us. Why did he pass this legislation . We developed a story arc around that. Do you want to talk about why we chose not to go into narration . It goes back to the divide between the audience and the screen. Think about your typical museum film narration. We did not want that. There are too many discussions. There are too many disagreements about history and its interpretation. I used to amuse myself all i was researching by going and reading all of the amazon reviews for different biographies of Richard Nixon. If you want to see the extent of disagreement and the many opinions that people have, just read those reviews. We thought instead of a single narrator, lets have a lot of them. Here it goes to young people. If you have a young person in your life, and i do, he has very little interest in what i have to say as an authoritarian. I was raised by authoritarians and it does not work anymore. I had to learn a new way. We had to learn a new way as film makers. We went out and found people come storytellers. There is a combination of them. Some of which were in the nixon white house, people who knew Richard Nixon. We have scholars and historians who have studied Richard Nixon. And then we went all the way to oxford to get a lady who had a particular interest. The other thing the storytellers helped us do is to contextualize the times. We did not just ask questions about Richard Nixon and his presidency. We also asked about the time and we asked our storytellers to share with the audience what was going on in that time in our history so that our visitors had a larger view and could put the presidency in the context. One really important part of the film that i want craig to talk about for a moment, about what we needed to do with this film. If we are going to go for this, we need to be audacious in our presentation and concepts. We said, it would be pretty audacious to do the unexpected. A visitor might think you are going to sweep watergate under the carpet. Lets not do that. Lets push the plunger and blow up that idea and start with watergate and the resignation and from there, we have shown you exactly what you did not think you would see and we can move on to talk about the legacy and the man and the career and all of the achievements that were there. Not sweeping it under the rug at all but hitting straight between the eyes exactly what you are coming in in the back of your head thinking. That became the starting things for the intro film. What is the primary thing of visitor thinks they know . Everyone who worked on this job, the average age is 32. They had not lived through the nixon presidency but they knew about watergate or they knew about nixon and pop culture. By starting with watergate, we acknowledged the one thing they know and then we are able to move from their and thing that inside from there and thing that inside the presidency. Before you head into the exhibit, you might download the app on your phone. At the Nixon Library, your app can do these things for you. Typical visitor information, but there are two things i want to highlight. It connects to the web. As you move through the galleries, if there is a particular topic that you are most interested in, and for me it is title ix, i am able to hit a button that says learn more and it will send the information via email on title ix. What is important about this aside from giving the visitor the deeper dive, visitors today want to continue their relationship with the content after they leave our exhibit. The app allows our visitors to do that. I want to point out to you the app is in three languages english, spanish, and mandarin. What is so important is that it harkens back to the authentic story and part of the nixon legacy, which is our relations with china. We step into the galleries themselves. We start with this area, this is about the 1960s and the turmoil and the chaos people were stepping into and we did want to create a space that was a little bit of an assault on your senses. I would love to get off that stool. [laughter] i want to this is one of the original concept pieces that we did. It seems obvious. We realized that it is not smooth and easy, it is jagged and fractured and we have problems and that really accounts for the shapes of the walls you are seeing. The library itself is very symmetrical and as you step into this gallery, everything starts to be a little fractured. And the color. It took us quite a bit of time to figure out what images we were going to use. You will notice the bands of color and the way we use the images, they are to one side or another. The place feels unstable. As you wander through here, and especially the visuals amy has brought in here, and the cacophony of sound, which is brilliant because it leaves you through the space leads you through the space. By the time you get to the end of the hall, you wonder, why would anybody want to be president . It is just crazy. So let us walk you through in case you dont recall, all the the things that were going on. Three assassinations president kennedy, dr. Martin luther king, bobby kennedy. Those are covered in the gallery. The march on washington for jobs. Of course, we have vietnam, soldiers in vietnam, and protest. We also have the draft. We are becoming aware that we are damaging our environment. The democrats were in a mess in 1968 and we cover chicago. You come to the end of the corridor and you turn the corner and you see the inauguration and you step into the oval office. The original library did not have an oval office and we thought it was a really important piece as a guest expectation, guests want to Wander Around and they want to sit down at the desk. There we are. All right. What i want to tell you about the oval office, this is largely their work, all the walls and everything you are seeing here, this is a highly accurate recreation of nixons oval office. This, to me, looks like, you know, and historical photo. It is not. There is just so much we have gotten in here that is accurate to the original office. From the blue and gold colors, the carpet, the rug was designed by pat nexen, the california blue and gold. Let me tell you how hard it is to find that kind of gold upholstery fabric these days. We started to look at this and thought, is this going to work . The other thing i want to point out, the light, the windows, the view, the way the room is handled, it has life just because of how we picked the time of day, late afternoon, and it just feels live. We have a lighting designer on staff who is a certified genius. Everything in this exhibit it would not look as good as it does. The other great thing about the oval office and truly unique part of it, you can walk through the whole office. You can sit in any chair. For a child, you are all parents. Some day, you might grow up to be president. Now your kid can go and sit the hind the president s desk, get their picture, post to social media. What an empowering moment for a girl or a boy to say, this is what it is like. I might want to consider doing this in my life. What a great opportunity for young people. [inaudible] the only library where you can explore the only oval office. The china gallery was a really important one for us. One of the landmark pieces of nixons presidency truly changed the Global Landscape and we wanted to create a space that really honored that. Some of you have probably seen the opera nixon in china. They stole it from history. We are stealing it back. No, we were inspired by. I keep forgetting. This just felt like the right way to do it. All of the elements you are seeing, the big red panels, were based on the huge red banners at the airfield when the nixons arrived. We have used those as a backdrop to be able to the elements on and tell the story of the trip. Chuck is humble about his own skills. I want to point out, if youre looking at a photo of this thing that happened, it would never occur to me to take those banners and use them to create a space. To create kind of the structural forms that organize that space and allow us to organize the information within it. Its just a really beautiful thing that he took this historical photo and turned it into, you know, the thing that i can put my text on and ruin it. [laughter] now im red, thank you. Thats great. One of the things that were, again, for the visitor, that were so happy about, is that the visitor gets transported in this museum to many places. And this is one of the places that they go. That one of the spaces that they get to visit. Yeah, literally a portal. And take the picture on the great wall of china