Venue: Marriott Hotel, San Diego
Attendees: 600 Honeywell sales employees
Audio-visual: Live Spark
Event planning: Honeywell Building Solutions


To engage the audience at Honeywell Building Solutions’ three-day sales conference in San Diego in January 2006, Minneapolis event-production company Live Spark created a character named Petey the Pirate. “The pirate provided continuity throughout the event in addition to supporting each presenter’s message,” says Dan Yaman, Live Spark’s president.

“The client came to us and said the theme of the meeting was a sailing theme—an America’s Cup yacht feeling,” Yaman says. “[Honeywell] wanted something that was going to tie in this theme of sailing with the rank and file. They thought a pirate would work really well.”

Live Spark’s challenge: To make Petey, an animated character, interact with the audience   via a large screen in such a way that the Honeywell sales force would “respond” to him. Live Spark worked with Honeywell’s vice president of sales to create the outline for the script.

Yaman and his client worked closely to come up with Petey’s backstory: He’s an entrepreneurial pirate, and modern to boot. (You’ve heard of software piracy, right?) He heard good things about the crew at Honeywell as he sailed around looking for the right ship, so he decided to join.

The kick-off-meeting speaker didn’t have much time to warm up his audience before Petey jumped in. “The [sales vice president] opened the meeting and welcomed the audience and started talking, and from behind him the character kind of peeked around on the screen,” Yaman says. “He was singing ‘Yo ho! Yo ho!’ And the [vice president] interrupts and says, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ And then the character introduced himself.”

The most memorable moment at the meeting was when the salespeople in the audience realized that the character on screen was not prerecorded. “The audience thought it was canned until he [Petey] starting pointing out people in the audience, and he asked them to stand up and started conversing with them, and they realized, ‘Oh wow! This is real.’”

Live Spark brought Petey to life with a high-speed computer, a talented voice actor, and some proprietary equipment. The system uses voice recognition so as the actor is talking, the movement of Petey’s mouth is synchronized with his words. The voice actor uses one hand to control the character’s position on the screen and its facial expressions.

The end result: Petey won over Honeywell’s salespeople. Yaman says: “They liked the character so much he’s appeared in two [other] videos for the company.”