Walking through the college campus-like, open office concept premises of Richmond-headquartered Whitewater West you get the distinct feeling that the serious business of being the globe’s pre-eminent builder of water parks, play structures and slides is also lot of fun.
As if on cue, a cell phone belonging to Anthony Marinakis, a senior designer with Whitewater, goes off to emphasize the point. And it’s not a boring old ringtone.
“I like to move it, move it. I like to move it, move it.”
It’s a musical burst from King Julien — voiced by comedic actor Sacha Baron Cohen — the foppish lemur from the kids animated movie franchise Madagascar.
“I like to keep things light,” says Marinakis a little sheepishly as shuts off the phone and continues helping lead a tour of Whitewater’s expansive holdings in north east Richmond where sales, design and fabrication of some of the world’s largest and most elaborate water parks and play structures takes place.
It’s a business that has gone from producing water slides for its first recreation park in Penticton in the early 1980s to creating a water park that incorporates a video game-like competition on slides aboard massive cruise ships — one of its more recent endeavours.
It’s big business, because, as Andrew Wray, sales director and partner of WhiteWater West said, “People have an appetite for entertainment.”
It was an opportunity Geoff Chutter, the company’s president and CEO identified and expanded on, starting in 1980, as water slides and parks rose to prominence.
Today, employees such as Marinakis, one of 600 or so who work locally, keep pushing the envelope of what’s possible when you combine slides, water, gravity and a whole lot of technical and creative expertise which has included hiring set and prop designers and makers from the TV and film industry to customize the products to meet customers’ requirements.
The bottom line is a lot of smiles from those zooming down one of the firm’s flumes in Dubai, zip-lining across a dry land fun park along Australia’s Gold Coast, or just riding a perfectly manufactured surfing wave at Disney World’s Typhoon Lagoon In Orlando, Florida.
The task is specific, and one Marinakis, who studied landscape architecture at UBC, has enjoyed during his 20 or so years with the firm.
“At first I was doing landscape architecture and thought what I specifically wanted to do was create children’s play spaces; create new attractions that would involve the whole family where parents could engage with their children,” he said.
That led him to Whitewater and the rest has been downhill — mostly on a water slide — since then.
“The job gives me an opportunity through theming, new products, and combining products and attractions to make these spaces really fun and interesting,” Maranakis said. “What we create gives kids, especially, the opportunity to develop their motor skills, and fire up their imagination.
“Being able to do that is a challenge, in a fun way.”
It’s one that also requires tapping into a creative vein. And when Maranakis looks for inspiration, he often doesn’t have to go much further than his school-aged children.
“You can draw a lot of inspiration from video games, a lot of cartoons, especially the ones that I watch with my kids,” he said. “And I really try to listen to what my kids and all of their friends are doing.”
But there are times when the creative juices do run dry. Thankfully, Marinakis has a constant reminder of how to re-energize them.
“We were doing a project for Madagascar and I was having a really hard time with it; struggling and having mental blocks,” he said. “And my daughter came into work here, because she had a day off form school and I was taking care of her. And she whipped up this (drawing) of a monkey character that I keep posted on the wall to remind me that inspiration comes from everywhere and not to get too hung up on things.”
It’s that kind of thinking about how to overcome challenges that are used on jobs such as the recently announced aqua park aboard a 4,100-passenger vessel for MCS Cruises.
Scheduled to begin service in 2017, the ship’s upper decks will feature five water slides, including an industry first Slideboarding facility. It will allow guests to race down a two-storey, 367-foot-long slide on a raft fitted with a game controller that has riders match its coloured buttons with the coloured strobe lights they whiz by.
“It’s kind of like playing Guitar Hero, but on a water slide,” Marinakis said.
Another feature is a twisting set of water slide tubes which partially extend over the sides of the ship.
Accomplishing all of this on a cruise ship — which is essentially a moving platform — provided a host of technical challenges since all of the aqua park’s structures had to made sturdier to withstand the ship’s movement across sometimes rough waters, and even the vessel’s vibration caused by the engines.
