Art City makes big 'mobotron' to broadcast kids in Santa Claus Parade

Art City is planning something huge for Saturday’s Santa Claus Parade in Winnipeg – a mobile jumbotron that will move along with a float, displaying faces in the crowd.

“I was thinking about how much our participants love being in the parade. They grew up going and watching on the sidelines,” said Art City artistic director Eddie Ayoub. “I wanted to figure out a way to share the experience or the thrill of being in the parade with any child that is there watching.”

They’re calling it the “mobotron” and it’s designed to make people (and especially kids) in the crowd feel like they’re part of the parade.

“I just thought that a [jumbotron] was a really great way to engage a large crowd,” said Ayoub, who started a committee to figure out how to make it and keep it moving along a parade route in sub-zero temperatures.

Art City, a free art program for inner city kids nestled in the heart of West Broadway, has been in the parade for several years but never tried anything this ambitious.

“Not everyone can just get up and run along with us and wave and be a part of that dynamicism but they can, if they appear larger than life on the mobotron,” he said.

After Ayoub came up with the idea, he enlisted the help of Ted Barker, a local artist, and Robert Wilson, who has a lot of experience in construction. 

Next, they got the materials together from a bunch of different nearby agencies -- including a special projector, a camera that could wirelessly communicate with it and some large mirrors.

Art City couldn’t afford glass mirrors, so they used Plexiglas and had kids decorate the fabric that covers the bottom of the near seven-metre tall structure.

After fifteen hours of hard work and a lot of anticipation, the “mobotron” was finished Thursday night – but before it could be squeezed out the tiny door, it had to be torn down. On parade day it will be rebuilt and mounted on a truck to be driven down the parade route.

Handmade gifts to be handed out 

Not only will the mobotron broadcast tiny faces in the crowd, Art City volunteers will be handing out handmade gifts from kids in Art City and seniors who live nearby.

“We have everything from mixed media art pieces to semi-functional things like little plush toys that they’ve made,” said Josh Ruth, the managing director at Art City. “We also had a bunch of pieces made in the ceramic studio out of pottery and glazed.”

The kids have spent weeks carefully preparing their gifts and hand wrapping them.

“Anytime we ask the participants to make stuff for other people we have to sort of rationalize it in a way that makes them excited,” said Ruth. “Every kid who comes to Art City knows the Santa Claus Parade. They know what a big deal it is … I think there’s sort of this elf-like excitement of just having a workshop set up, cranking out tons of toys and giving them away to other kids they’ve never met before.”

“We received funding from the Assiniboine Credit Union and from the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba to do a series of workshops that give the opportunity to kids who participate in our program to be generous maybe not necessarily with money but with whatever resources they have – their time, their skills, their talents, their ideas,” said Ruth. “Even though they’re kids and they don’t have jobs and they can’t write checks they can still be very generous.”

As for the mobotron, everyone at Art City expects it to be up and running Saturday in time for the Santa Claus Parade, which kicks off at 5 p.m. on Saturday at Young Street and Portage Avenue.

As for what's next at Art City -- Ayoub is already coming up with ideas for the next big project.

“Every time we do an event people say, ‘How are you going to top that?’ and that’s our challenge, to figure it out,” said Ayoub.