Margaret Kerrison is currently a senior creative director at TAIT, a global leader in the live entertainment industry. She previously served as Walt Disney Imagineering’s managing story editor for Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. In 2019, she successfully opened the expansion at Disneyland and Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Imagineering and Lucasfilm used films, novels, and comic books to create the backstory for the Black Spire Outpost and Batuu.
“This is part of our way of creating that history,” Kerrison said. “We want to give the impression that this planet has always been around. We’re coming into it as travellers for the first time. There are layers and layers of history and all these familiar and new characters who have come and gone to this planet.”
After working with museums and in corporate branding and themed entertainment, Margaret Kerrison applied for a writing position at Walt Disney Imagineering. She joined WDI in 2014 and developed stories and details for a number of projects.
“What’s most important to me, as a storyteller, is how people feel when they walk into the land,” she said. “We want our guests to feel encouraged to explore and discover every corner of Black Spire Outpost.”
She has written two books on immersive entertainment: Immersive Storytelling for Real and Imagined Worlds: A Writer’s Guide and Reimagined Worlds: Narrative Placemaking for People, Play, and Purpose.
“The idea for this book came about from a question that someone asked me during one of my presentations,” she told blooloop about her second publication. “That question was, ‘It’s great that you had IP like Star Wars to work on. But what about the rest of us who are building public places: town squares, libraries, malls, theatres? How can we apply the tools and insights on telling immersive stories and narrative placemaking to ordinary places?’