Case Study
Chick Fil-A VR: Our Recipe
VR Video Production
THE ASK
How do you experience culture?
Since it’s first restaurant in 1967, Chick Fil-A has been continuous across the US. But with it’s recent international expansion into Canada, Puerto Rico, and Singapore, it was met with some unusual challenges – customers didn’t really understand what makes Chick Fil-A unique. Most customers were unaware of the company’s unique history and fanfare in the US.
What could we make to help Owner-Operators and team members understand the Chick Fil-A culture?
How does Chick Fil-A create consistently good food, a positive and warm atmosphere in their customer service, and a successful culture?
THE APPROACH
The forward-thinking Learning and Development team at Chick Fil-A engaged with the MEDIUM Films team to develop some new ideas to communicate the culture and history to help the international effort. After many meetings, Chick Fil-A began a unique Virtual Reality pilot program with it’s operators: use VR headsets to train and educate new owners and team members about their deep history and culture. We named the project Chick Fil-A VR: Our Recipe.
Because our sister company MEDIUM Labs has been creating VR apps for businesses since 2016, we decided to combine our teams and produce cutting-edge VR180 video production with an interactive VR app featuring an interactive Chick FIl-A restaurant..
THE CHALLENGES
Capturing customer stories live at various Chick Fil-A restaurants around the county is very tricky. You don’t want to intimidate anyone with camera gear, but you also want to capture authentic feelings from customers and team members.
Also, there are significant challenges shooting high quality 8KVR180 video on location; the lenses are 180º, so the field of view is much larger than regular cameras; the camera can only move very slowly and steady at all times, so it doesn’t cause motion sickness with users.
THE PRODUCTION
The MEDIUM FIlms crew spent a week at the Chick Fil-A headquarters in Atlanta, GA, interviewing key team members, historically important locations on their campus, and the first restaurant The Dwarf Grill, started by their Founder S. Truett Cathy. We then organized key shoots at various Chick Fil-A restaurants in the US to capture real customer’s opinions on what makes Chick Fil-A unique.
MEDIUM Labs’ digital crew began creating a photorealistic VR digital twin of a modern Chick Fil-A store, where users could navigate inside the store to launch VR180 snippet videos about unique Chick FIl-A features and history.
THE RESULT
Innovative vision drives empathy & awareness
The team leaders debuted this VR pilot app to the company, and users were stunned by the quality and concept! Most people have never experienced high-quality VR180 video before – it’s an incredible immersive format that makes the user feel transported to a different place and experiencing that moment themselves.
