Little Amal: An Interactive Journey

In partnership with Good Chance, Alchemy Immersive brought to life The Walk in an engaging digital experience: Little Amal – An Interactive Journey, to audiences across the world.

Join Little Amal, a 9-year old Syrian refugee, representing all displaced children, as she travels over 8,000km in search of her mother and of a hopeful future. Unfortunately, her journey is one made by many children just like her every day.

Acting as an exploration educational experience, delivered to Android and iOS, our application provides an accessible, exciting and interactive platform that highlights the key objectives of Little Amal: to unite communities, tell stories of hope, and bring attention to the valuable contributions of refugees to our society

Walk with Amal, from Syria to Manchester, in our interactive storybook.

Free to download on iOS and Android.

The Walk was a travelling festival of art and hope in support of refugees. In July-November of 2021, from the Syria-Turkey border all the way to the UK, The Walk brought together celebrated artists, major cultural institutions , community groups and humanitarian organisations, creating one of the most innovative and adventurous public artworks ever attempted.

Little Amal, a not-so-little 3.5 metre tall puppet, created by Handspring Puppet Company, and her 8,000km journey were recognised as the greatest distance travelled by a full-bodied puppet.

Amal means ‘hope’ in Arabic. There are tens of thousands of Amals, boys as well as girls, who need to find their way into education and to rebuild their lives.  If you’ve been moved by Amal’s journey please help young refugees like her find a more hopeful future by donating to Choose Love’s Amal Fund.

Documenting the experience of refugees requires sensitivity. The goal was to craft a narrative that would inspire compassion whilst accurately and sensitively representing people, places and cultures.

The art direction of the project was not to show but to imply. In the playground scene in Syria, a shot of the shadow of military aircraft, avoids a graphic scene with explosives going off, but implies the presence of air bombardment, especially as it is followed by scenes of a bombed-out classroom, and Little Amal climbing over rubble of what was once her school.

When it came to character design, our partners wanted Amal to be recognisable as both a little girl and as the 3.5m puppet on The Walk. Our team wanted her to be perceived as human, so avoided a Pinocchio-esque look, and designed a young girl whose features were as close to the puppet as possible.

The development of the app design had to maintain the interactive storybook format and it was important that the user experience was accessible and easy to navigate. The storybook format meant users would follow the narrative all the way through, following Amal on her journey across Europe.