- All right, hi everybody.
My name is Emily Salvadore.
I'm a second year master's student
in the object based media group.
I am so excited to bring some my friends
from Walt Disney Imagineering here to speak to you all today
about experiential storytelling.
I wanted to thank a couple people.
So, thanks to my friends, family, and colleagues at the lab
who are watching, both in person and online.
Hi mom and dad.
And so, we're gonna have a live Q&A panel
at the end of this talk.
If you want to use the hashtag MLTalks on Twitter, go ahead,
and then we have a website that's gonna be posted
on the screen up there with a link to get to.
So Disney recently became a member of the media lab
through Michael Abrams at the Walt Disney company,
and we're very happy for them to join our member family.
And now I'm going to have Sarah Thatcher,
Dave Fisher, and Amy Jupiter introduce themselves.
- Thanks so much, Emily.
Thanks for having us here.
This is really great.
What a sensational place to be.
Thank you all for opening your labs to us,
inviting us in, and coming to hear us talk.
My name is Sarah Thatcher.
I'm a creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering
research and development.
- Yes, thanks for having us.
I don't want to make any gender assumptions
but you might know who I am
based on the names that are up there.
I'm the guy.
I'm Dave Fisher.
I am a story editor.
I am in the story development studio
at Walt Disney Imagineering,
and we'll talk more about that later.
- I'd like to also thank you guys for having us.
I'm Amy Jupiter, and I'm an executive producer
with Walt Disney Imagineering.
(bell ringing)
- Somebody is excited. - Next question.
Times up.
- Oh, and before we get too deep into the talk,
I am just like overwhelmingly happy
by how many people have showed up.
We're working on getting more chairs so hang tight,
and head on up to the fourth floor
because there's a little bit more space up there.
Great, so, let's get started.
Earlier today we were talking to Joey Edo,
the director of the lab,
and he mentioned sort of the driving forces
of the media lab is uniqueness, impact, and magic.
And I wanted to ask each of you
what that words mean to you in your role as imagineers.
- I'm gonna start.
I just want to talk a little bit about I think unique.
And people often ask us about what the Disney difference is.
And I think that we take
very traditional things and use them uniquely.
Uniqueness is a part of sort of what imagineering is,
being a state of mind.
So using things in unique ways.
And then having them impact our guests.
And magic, obviously, unexplained science.
So those actually are really meaningful words
to us as well I think.
- There's gonna be a pattern here
when we start to answer these questions
because one of the reasons is
I probably am gonna be providing
a lot of the historical perspective on Imagineering
just because I've been there so damn long.
I've been with Disney for 40 years, and yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I'm only 39.
And so, you talk about magic and uniqueness,
and I think back to how Imagineering got formed.
I mean, you think about Walt Disney.
You know, Disney,
first and foremost considered himself a storyteller.
But hand in hand with that storytelling
was creating new ways of telling those stories.
I mean, this dates all the way back
to 1928 with Steamboat Willy,
which was the very first synchronized sound cartoon.
1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,
which was the very first animated feature length film.
So, when it came time to do Disneyland,
he was again doing something different,
something radically different.
A lot of people called it Walt's folly,
and the reason they called it Walt's folly
was because that thought that it was just going to be
just a spectacular failure
and no one was going to come to this place.
So it's in this spirit that the Walt Disney Company
and Walt Disney Imagineering particular continues to exist,
is it not only are we continuing to tell stories
in magical ways,
but we're also looking to tell them in unique ways.
And one of the unique ways we do that is through,
you know, changes in technology,
changes in philosophy,
changes in the way people experience
the things that we do.
So I think we're gonna spend a little time
talking about that today.
But that's sort of, again, the historical perspective.
- Yeah, and honestly, when we were hearing
that kind of credo of the media lab
and just in kind of taking in the ethos of what it is
that everyone here does,
I just felt so much resonance,
and I feel so much similarity between
my work as an imagineer and what I see going on here.
There's so much joy in living in that area
between art and science,
between engineering and imagination,
and each one of those kind of credos
in the way that Dave was just talking about
kind of enter into both the experiences that we create
but also our kind of methodology of creating them.
So I feel a lot of kindred souls out there.
- And to pick up on Sarah's talking about,
when we see something on YouTube,
or we come to the MIT Media Labs and we see stuff,
the gears start, like, oh, what can we, you know.
Because you guys are doing the same thing.
You're trying to figure out practical applications
for the things that you do,
things to make the world better,
things to help us in what we do.
You know, we're doing the same thing.
Well, maybe not make the world better.
Happiness makes the world go round, though.
So we're thinking about ways
that we can take some of these brilliant ideas
and turn them into the stories
that we tell in our theme parks.
- And I would say a lot of media lab students
are storytellers because you meet
with lots of different people,
and other students, and other companies,
and we need to be able to explain our technologies in ways
that these people can imagine them being in their lives.
So I'm curious how each of you approach storytelling,
especially being from such different departments,
and how you integrate technology into your stories.
- Sure.
Well, I guess I have a similar,
coming from advanced develop and research and development,
have a similar task of figuring out what the story
and what the experience is that technologies enable.
So, I feel like technology,
it's another tool, it's a paint brush,
it's another piece to build an experience with.
And a lot of the work that we do
is figuring out, well, here's a new, cool thing.
What is it good for?
What could it be good for?
And experimenting, and then figuring out
how to convey that to people,
like Amy and Dave, who are ultimately going to take those
and bring them to the field, bring them to the guests.
- For me, I often, you know,
I specialize in large format ride films.
And so, when we get a story from our writers,
oftentimes we are charged with learning
how to express those using different forms of technology.
And often, that is how we approach storytelling
from an experiential standpoint.
We're really gonna move you, literally and figuratively,
with these large rides.
While we call them attractions,
which is the integration of all of the movement,
and the film, and the sound,
and all the other aspects of effects that we use,
oftentimes that expression is the story.
The guests experiencing it is how we deal with story.
So, it's really quite interesting.
- It's amazing, because as Emily said,
storytelling is a part of all of our lives.
We begin telling stories even before we can speak.
For me, I, you know,
certainly I was very interested
in writing when I was growing up,
but when I was in college
I went to the University of Southern California,
a little school out in LA,
and I majored in English and journalism.
And, you know, I really thought
that I was going to be a journalist.
This was the time of Woodward and Bernstein,
you know, people were breaking these fabulous stories
about Watergate and things of this sort.
But at the same time, I grew up near Disneyland,
and as a senior in high school
I got a job at Disneyland as a sweeper.
You know, the guys who go through the park
and they sweep up the popcorn
and everything that our guests drop,
and keep the park really clean.
And it was fabulous because
going to the University of Southern California,
it was very close by,
so I was able to live at school
and work at Disneyland on the weekends
to pay my way through school.
And when it came time to graduate, two things happened.
One is, as I was joking with them earlier,
I got the opportunity,
this was way back in 1983,
I got the opportunity to go to Japan.
We were just opening Tokyo Disneyland,
and I got to teach the Japanese how to sweep.
Don't argue, you know.
There was a lot more to it than that,
but it sounds kind of cool, right?
Teach them how to sweep
because they don't know how to sweep.
And at the same time I had graduated.
And now, when I came back from Tokyo,
I'm ready to move on.
I'm not gonna be a sweeper anymore.
And so I started, you know,
as many of you have done, will be doing, looking for a job.
I was interviewing with newspapers.
An opening came up in marketing at Disneyland
as a marketing copywriter.
And I ended up taking that job,
and it took me in an unexpected direction in my career.
Not only writing as marketing,
but also the fact that three years later,
on the recommendation of my boss at that time,
he said, you know what,
you're doing much more for marketing then we deserve.
You belong in Imagineering.
Which, you know, I was like, thank you for saying that.
And I found myself at Imagineering.
I've been there for about 30 years.
And during that time I really got a chance
to explore storytelling, not only practically,
creating the attractions, the shops, the restaurants,
that I hope all of you enjoy when you go to the parks,
but also studying storytelling itself.
I mean, internally we do mentoring programs.
I host an entire program on storytelling
where I tell imagineers, no matter where they come from,
engineering, architecture, about storytelling.
And like everyone else in the world, I also have a podcast.
It's called Storybuilders.
Unfortunately you need to be an imagineer to listen to it.
But we talk about story.
And it's interesting because usually
I'm on your side of the microphone, so to speak,
I'm doing the interviewing,
so it's kind of strange to be...
- You'll have to let me know how I did after.
- So I may end up asking you questions.
So anyway, I hope that sheds a little light on story.
- Earlier, Amy was mentioning that
imagineering is a state of mind.
And I think that storytelling is really about
creating these emotional connections.
So how do you adapt stories
to suit such a wide range of audiences,
from children to adults,
different genders, different cultures?
How do you approach that?
How do you make emotion accessible to everybody?
- Well, I guess since I'm the center of story,
I guess, so to speak, I can kind of start to tackle that
and then you guys can jump in.
You know, everything we do at Disney is based in story,
whether it's motion pictures, or it's television shows,
or even our parks.
We may not literally tell you a narrative story
when you get on something like Pirates of the Caribbean,
or The Haunted Mansion, but it's based in story,
it comes out of story.
And many of the characters and stories we bring to life
are stories that were brought to us by Disney Animation,
Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars,
all the wonderful intellectual property companies
that Disney owns.
So, the idea for us is to take those stories
and to turn them into something
that you're not just looking at,
but something that you're experiencing.
And hopefully you're experiencing it
on a more and more personal level,
which I guess you can speak to.
- Sure, yeah.
So, I think one of the amazing things,
we're such narrative creatures.
We're constantly telling ourselves stories.
Every day you're going throughout your day
constructing this narrative of your life.
And the same thing happens.
I think about what we do as constructing kind of
the tools for you to tell yourself that story.
We're giving you environments, we're giving you characters,
we're giving you perhaps a way to move through that.
But really, you, the guest, are the storyteller.
You're actually putting all of those things together.
When you're going through, say, The Haunted Mansion,
what you particularly notice
becomes your story of that attraction.
And so, each person gets their,
in that way, gets their own individual experience.
And then as we've been kind of pushing forward
and exploring more new frontiers and new varieties
of ways to bring those stories to life,
there's some more opportunities to make those more personal,
and more responsive, and interactive.
A lot of my work focuses on this.
- Not to take your job, Emily, but...
Funny you should mention The Haunted Mansion, right,
in terms of a project like that.
- Sure.
We'll see how we do here.
Can you bring up the Ghost Post?
Thank you.
So, thank you.
(laughter)
So, in trying to figure out...
So, The Haunted Mansion, it's turning 50 next year.
This is an attraction that has been around
for generations at this point,
has reached guests in all sorts of different ways.
- Survived Eddie Murphy.
(laughter)
You didn't see the movie?
- Aww. - Aww.
- So, it's been through many generations
of both imagineers and also guests
who have fallen in love with it.
It has a really deep group of fans out there
who the six minutes worth that they spend on the attraction
could never be enough.
They're looking for how do I,
how do I live The Haunted Mansion?
You see just some amazing guest creations
of the rooms of their houses
are given over to Haunted Mansion.
And there's a lot of passion and love
for this story and this place
that imagineers brought to life over half a century ago.
And so, going into this with a lot of respect
for imagineers before us,
we said, well, how do we offer those guests
who really want to spend more time with that
and actually be a part of that world,
how do we offer them that opportunity.
And so we put together this project.
We consider this as a live prototype
that we put out into the world.
It was a limited run.
We call it the Ghost Post.
And it what it was was,
a few years ago we basically made an offer
to 990 foolish mortals
who wanted to be part of the world of the ghosts,
to actually help the ghosts out
with a very grim problem that they were having.
And they could receive these boxes at home.
And these boxes were filled with artifacts.
We can go to the next slide.
Were filled with artifacts from the attic, from the mansion.
And so, really putting pieces of the mansion
in our guests hands.
And going beyond that,
in the 50 years since the mansion opened its gates,
we now have these personal computers in our pockets,
our smartphones, and so leveraging that as a way to
have all of these objects interact
and have them interact with our guests' devices
so that they could bring a little,
those ghosts could actually come
to visit them at their houses.
And then as they're playing along
as all of these objects are interacting with each other
or interacting with their phone,
they're tuning in through their phantom radios,
they're able to help the ghosts out with their dire problem.
And then, anytime that they're coming to visit the park,
their experience of The Haunted Mansion actually changes.
So we're able to change the audio onboard the attraction
so that it would dynamically change to suit
what our guests had been up to at home.
So they're building a relationship with the ghosts
as they're playing along at home,
as they're helping the ghosts out with their problems.
So, they're not just any old visitor to the mansion.
They have a special relationship with the ghosts
and so the guests address them in that manner.
And so, as this unfolded over the course of three months,
they could come back as many times as they wished
and that story would evolve in the park as well as at home.
- Very cool.
Individualized. - Yes.
- Yeah, I think that's the idea.
Because that's one of the challenges we have
as imagineers as well,
is that when we're creating our parks,
we want to make very personal interactive experiences
but at the same time, we need to get, you know,
2,000 of you an hour through our particular attraction
because if we don't,
we're gonna have some very dissatisfied guests on our hands.
So, we're just constantly trying to think up
and leverage new ways to bring a little bit more
of this personal interactive nature to these things.
And this is one of those ideas
that we've been working on, as well as many others.
- Speaking to personalization and interactivity,
how do you constrain that narrative experience
so that everybody still has the high quality
Disney standard of storytelling,
even though they have control of where the story is going?
- You're way ahead of us.
(laughter)
What, are you looking for a job?
(laughter)
Boy, that is sort of like the million, or, not million,
billion dollar question now.
- You know, we talk about personalized experiences
or individual experiences,
and interactive or real time responsiveness
in the attractions.
(clears throat) Excuse me.
I think that is where we're starting to go.
And if anybody has been on Flight of Passage,
which is at the new Pandora World of Avatar,
there are lots of different interactive, or real time,
or responsive effects in the whole land.
The whole land is sort of on what we call an interconnect.
And we have control of all of these aspects
that sort of respond to you, or talk to you,
are respond to the time of day,
or if when you get on the Flight of Passage ride,
there's a piece of technology that acknowledges you.
The seat turns on, and there's a camera,
and you can see yourself.
So everything that sort of makes it so that
you're having this, while in a very big communal experience,
the individualized experience as well.
And I think that it's not necessarily,
like, the evolution of using technology
to further the creative immersion into these attractions,
I think that that's where we're,
you know, where we're going, what's important to us,
that the attractions actually,
you have a relationship with them.
And so, as you get on your banshee
using all of that sort of personalized technology
to have you feel like you're in control of it.
And so, what is it to fly.
I think that that's, for me, and in this iteration
of the use of that technology.
And as we find more and more ways to use it,
I think that's really special for us too.
- I think we're starting with a good base
because really, just visiting a Disney park
is a personal experience.
John Hench, a Disney legend, once said that, you know,
Disneyland was the very first form of virtual reality.
Because if you think about it,
if you're going to a movie,
or you're watching a television show,
I mean, you're looking at a screen.
The director is telling you where to look.
Wherever he points the camera, that's where you look.
But when you come to our parks,
you're actually walking into the movie so to speak.
And so, you're building your own story,
you're your own director/cinematographer.
And I think that already gives you a personal experience
above and beyond what you could have before.
And I think our next step is, as Amy said,
to take our individual attractions
and try and push those boundaries, push those margins,
so that, you know, you get an experience
that's drastically, or maybe not drastically,
but different from the person
who may be in the car behind you
or maybe even sitting next to you.
- The guest is the protagonist in the story.
We're building a world and you guys are navigating.
You're creating your own plot.
We don't use plot like a traditional linear storytelling.
You're creating your own plots.
And depending on the park,
and depending on the experiences,
or the land that you're going to,
you're creating your own experience, your own plot,
throughout the land.
And so, I think that that in and of itself,
it's not just like you're distant.
We're composing as if it were sort of a screen.
Like, we have wide shots, and we have medium shots,
and we have cross dissolves between our lands.
So, we use a lot of the same vocabulary
that traditional media or traditional filmmakers will use,
but again, this whole,
you can look wherever you want,
and so you're creating your own adventure
inside of our parks.
- And in terms of, you know, taking a story,
I hope all of you are familiar
with Pirates of the Caribbean,
which is an attraction that opened in 1967 at Disneyland.
It's considered one of, you know, one of the classics.
And when you think about that,
there's no narrative storytelling going on there.
You're taking a journey in three acts.
So, there are still some story structures.
You know, the first act you're going through a bayou,
very quiet, then you go down a waterfall into caverns
where you see these skeletons, act two,
and then finally act three is the pirates coming to life
and pillaging and looting a town.
So we do have story structure,
we're just not telling narrative stories often
in the context of these rides and attractions
that we're creating.
- Maybe to evolve on that,
one of the things that I've found interesting
being the relative newcomer to Imagineering
compared to my colleagues on stage here.
One of the things I've been fascinated by
is the evolution of how we think about
our guests' role in the story,
and how our attractions and experiences have evolved
as that has happened.
So, you look at one of the opening day attractions
at Disneyland was Snow White's Scary Adventures.
- That's a good one, yeah.
- And in the original, there was no Snow White.
There was a big, big sign over this big stone.
- It said Snow White's Adventures.
- And there was no Snow White. - No.
- And early guests were, you might understand,
a little bit confused. - Upset.
- On the label, on the tin,
said Snow White's Scary Adventures, where is Snow White?
And the intention of the imagineers
was that you were Snow White,
you were the person who was being offered
the apple by the witch.
And so this was, you know,
was a little bit confusing.
We're still getting our sea legs under us.
I'm trying to get back to Pirates.
Of how to do this.
That the desire was there from the start
of how do we give our guests a role to play in the story,
a part, not just make them sight seers
but actually make them participants.
- You also touch upon a good point is that,
you know, when we take these familiar stories
and put we put them into our parks,
what do we do with them.
In that particular case, Snow White's Scary Adventures,
let's just say there isn't a long wait for the attraction.
And we actually put Snow White in the attraction
when we redid it way back in 1983.
We completely redid Fantasyland at Disneyland.
And we put her in,
but essentially what this attraction is
is what we call internally a book report.
It's basically just telling you what the movie was,
which is very difficult to do on an attraction.
And besides, you're not giving me anything different
that I didn't already see
by watching the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
And it led to some funny problems with this attraction.
You're going through it, you meet the seven dwarves,
you meet the witch who offers the apple to Snow White.
And in the very last scene is the hag,
she's up on top of some rocks
and she's trying to pry some rocks loose
to go down on you and the dwarves.
And we ran out of room in the attraction
so then you came out and said,
and they lived happily ever after.
So, I think one of the things we try and do as imagineers
is to somehow bring something new,
something fresh to these stories.
And it's nothing new.
I mean, Walt did it back in 1955 with Mr. Toad's Wild Ride,
which has always been one of our most popular attractions.
You get in this little vehicle
and you careen through the countryside
and through Toad Hall,
and it has a truly unique Disney ending
because it's the only attraction where you end up in hell.
Sorry, spoiler alert.
- It's for the kids. - Yeah, it's for the kids.
But what the imagineers did
is that they didn't try and retell the story of Mr. Toad.
They took an element of the story,
which was Mr. Toad wanting a car,
and they turned that into an attraction
using his personality, because he's wild and he's crazy,
and what would Mr. Toad be like in a car.
And so that was I think a very successful way
of taking an existing intellectual property
and enhancing it in our parks in a new and different way.
- You mentioned Pirates earlier,
and that's an attraction that's had
a lot of evolution, both in the original and lately.
- You're trying to get me in trouble, aren't you?
- I'm trying to queue we actually have media.
- Oh, do we?
- She's directing the conversation, yes.
So Amy was actually very integral
in creating a totally revamped and innovative
version of Pirates of the Caribbean for Shanghai
and we're hoping that she could share
some of her lessons from that.
- Do you want me to set it up first with the old one?
- Yeah, please.
- So, Pirates of the Caribbean, as I said, opened in 1967.
And then in 2001, 2002, our studio released a movie
called Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.
Very, very successful movie.
Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow.
And so naturally, now people didn't necessarily
associate Pirates of the Caribbean with our attraction.
They were associating it with the movie,
especially since there were going to be
more movies coming out.
So, while filming was going on
for Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest,
we made the decision, let's put some Disney characters into,
let's put some of these new Pirates characters
into the attraction.
So we put Captain Jack Sparrow, and we put Captain Barbosa.
But this was sort of a band-aid.
This was just introducing these characters.
But now, with Shanghai Disneyland,
we had an opportunity to completely rethink Pirates.
- We did.
We wanted to take you on a journey
as Jack Sparrow has hidden his gold.
And we are on this adventure
and he is protecting it from Davy Jones,
And he has to go on this adventure under the sea.
So, we have a huge attraction
which is very technologically advanced,
but we're still going on a journey,
and we're gonna take you on a journey
to find the treasure.
And then we're gonna battle.
It's called the Battle for the Sunken Treasure.
It is a huge, like in the footprint,
it is a very big attraction
so we're able to use a lot of projection technologies,
a lot of huge sets,
a lot of advanced animatronics, to tell this story.
- You actually go underwater.
- We actually take a dive underwater
and there are people who have come,
our guests who have come,
and wanted to know if we were actually going underwater.
They'd look and they'd try to find
all the places that we dug down
into actually going to this very amazing journey
because these domes are 100 foot wide and 75 feet tall,
and you are absolutely emersed in these giant battles
with all these effects.
It's really immersive, and it is an emotional experience
for people to actually be transported down into the water
and mesmerized by these huge sets.
And if we could have built everything, we would have.
But the mixed media of it
is actually part of the illusion,
the creation of illusion of this journey underwater.
And you can see how big these domes are.
I wish we had actual video to show you,
but I don't think we do.
We worked with our partners at ILM,
part of the Disney family,
to create these amazing scenes.
If you want to ask about
what it is that you want to share about it
because it is, there's so much to share about it.
- Yeah, I think something that everybody here
would be interested in is how do you merge
existing workflows and processes
with the unknowns of exploring new technologies?
How do you approach that when you're building an attraction
that's as innovative as this one?
- Hmm.
So, everything you see in our attractions,
there's a lot of traditional film,
at least in my world of ride films.
There's a lot of very, very old,
100 year old methodologies that we use.
And really, you know,
our job is to make the technology disappear
so you feel like you're in these worlds.
And so, using technology to empower the creative process,
make it shorter so that you can get more out of the time
that you're spending on the attraction.
Even though, you know,
you're convincing the people who are our stakeholders
to invest a great deal of time, and energy,
which translates to money, into these attractions,
so you want to get as much refinement as possible.
And the technology really empowers us
to learn more about our attractions earlier on
so we'll build them in what we would traditionally call,
and I can't believe we're saying traditional VR.
And so we're using some of these immersive technologies
that we're using in our design process.
You know, if we could have done this
in real time, we would have.
So, we program in real time.
We use these real time tools to empower
the iterative process so that we can explore what it is,
how we tell the story, where I put your eyes.
How do I make the illusion of moving and diving down?
So, in order for me to learn this,
you actually, we're either in a headset,
or on what we'll call a holodeck,
to understand the attraction earlier, in a digital version.
And then we use the large attractions as they're building.
Remember, we take these parts and pieces.
We design these things traditionally,
like on pieces of paper with paintings,
as targets for us to hit,
and then we have to figure out how to dimensionalize them.
And so, we do this really early in our process,
and then we go away, and three years, four years,
it takes to actually realize these huge buildings.
And so then, traditionally we would come back and go,
okay, so this is where we are,
and we'd start from scratch,
to say, okay, let's start to program this from scratch.
And now we can actually start really early in our process
using like what you guys would use as
the software that you guys know, like Maya,
and we'll work with all of this sort of technology upfront
to sort of design in real time,
or in the digital world.
And we use the attraction to verify
that what we've imagined
and what we've built actually works.
Remember, we're moving you, literally and figuratively,
through these environments.
And in order for us to know if they're in sync,
that they work together,
that the emotional impact that we're trying to take you on,
journey through, actually is working.
So, technology really just empowers our design process,
and our iterative process,
and then obviously the display.
The display, we use a lot of technology in the display.
- And I would say just as a...
I didn't work on this project so I get to gush about it,
is just the blend between.
And really, it's a testament to how successful
that merge process is,
and using those digital pre-visualization tools
to be able to understand something
that may be something at this epic scale.
These, how tall are the...
- They're like 75 feet tall. - Whoa.
It is a scale that is, you know,
architectural, beyond architectural.
And combining that with equally epic sized media
and understanding how those elements interlace
just wouldn't be possible without these...
It wouldn't be possible to end up on opening day
as successful as it is
without these pre-visualization tools,
without being able to ride it together before it exists.
And I think that's the uniqueness
of sort of the Disney difference,
the ability to use all of these tools,
glue them all together, the infrastructure.
Like, if you think about all the inputs that we control,
all of the photons we control,
and I'll call them eartons, because eartons, photons,
the control the rides, the ridetons.
All of that data.
There's so much data that we're controlling.
It's not that the complexity of that in and of itself.
You know, there's this static asset set
of the building, and all of the sets,
and how those things go together.
Those are different groups.
There are 140 something disciplines
that make up making a theme park.
So even just as a communication tool,
as a team building tool,
all of these things helped us collaborate.
What is group collaboration,
and how do you use the tool sets to collaborate,
communicate, and I think that that's really...
These are communal experiences
and that is something about sort of they're social,
and heads up, and you really want to,
you know, that's where we're using our technology I think,
is illusion design.
- So, another question for Amy and Sarah.
I'm curious to know how to take something from R&D
that's been prototyped and demo'd to maybe a couple
tens or hundreds of people,
and then robustly proof it to be put into the parks.
Because I know Amy has championed a couple of projects
and moved from this R&D space
into a space where guests get to enjoy them.
- Sure.
So, we'll take two examples
at massively different scales
that have transitioned from out of the lab
and into the world, under Amy's care.
So the first one, if we can go to the Na'vi shaman, please.
So, the first one is this figure.
She represents a step forward Imagineering has been making,
what we call audio animatronics,
since the very early days, since Walt got fascinated with...
- Do you want me to step in?
- Please step in.
- Historical basis, please.
- So, audio animatronics dates back to 1963
with an attraction called the Enchanted Tiki Room.
The name, like the name Imagineering,
which is a combination of imagination and engineering,
the name comes from animation and electronics.
The audio portion comes from its early operating system,
which was actually tape.
So, imagine, you know,
for any of you who remember 8-track tape,
I believe that Abraham Lincoln was a 12 track show,
and Enchanted Tiki Room was a 24 track show, I believe.
So at any rate,
these early versions were called A-1 figures.
They were very limited in movement.
In the 1980s we went to A-100 figures,
which incorporate compliance technology
in order to allow them to move much freer.
But at that time,
they were also just pneumatics and hydraulics,
and that sort of picks up the story now.
Are we calling this an A-1000 figure?
Is that what we're calling it?
We're on A one million?
(laughter)
- I think she's the shaman of songs.
She is the shaman of songs, so...
- There you go, story, not technology.
- Absolutely, it's like she's her individual.
- And as we're looking at this evolution, you know,
Walt was fascinated with this being able to capture
something that felt alive, this liveliness.
- We wanted a consistent performance for all of our guests.
- So, in going after this figure,
we're sitting at R&D and going, okay, well,
this film by James Cameron
just places a massive gauntlet.
And when it came out, if you remember,
just the incredible emotion that he was able to get
through that motion capture process,
be able to bring this world,
but also the creatures that inhabit it, to life
in a way that really, I mean,
I remember going to the theater and going,
I've been transported.
As we're thinking about how do we make this
a place that you can actually visit,
and how do we bring these Na'vi to life, they're enormous.
And they're incredibly expressive and emotive,
and how do we do that justice?
And so actually going back to the very same techniques
that the filmmakers used to be able to do motion capture,
to be able to capture the humanity of that performance
and create an animatronic figure
that can actually perform in an equal way.
We don't have any video.
I encourage you all to go look at video,
or just visit her in person, she's in Florida.
On Pandora in Florida.
Because the expressiveness of her face alone is astonishing.
- And as you guys, I don't know, show of hands,
how many people have been to Disney's Animal Kingdom?
Nice.
Okay, so, animals are to Animal Kingdom
like magic is to Magic Kingdom.
So everything starts with the animals.
So, when we make story, or when we make parks,
we talk about the themes of the park.
And so for Disney's Animal Kingdom, it is about animals,
so it is the sanctity of nature,
that nature is immutable,
that everything starts there, she always wins.
And then, of course, the transformation through adventure.
And so, you're gonna go on your own adventure
and because you have done this
you will go see the world through new eyes.
You're going to a place called Africa.
You're going to a place called Asia.
And you're going to a place called Pandora.
So how does Pandora fit into this really, you know,
sort of that IP?
And also, sort of like, okay, so,
how do you fit it in?
And so we start with like themes.
So, the immutability of nature,
transformation through adventure.
And then when you know better you do better,
so the call to action.
So we talk about, you know, protecting indigenous folks,
we talk about protecting animals.
So, everything that we did in Pandora
goes through the same filters
so that it fits naturally in Animal Kingdom.
And so, part of our audience that were Avatar fans
told us that they wanted, you know,
the things that they wanted to do were meet a Na'vi,
go to a bioluminescent forest, and, of course,
fly on the back of a banshee.
And so, things that you're like, that's a really...
- That's a tall order.
- Yes, exactly, that is gonna be really hard.
But if you go back to the basics,
and part of, you know, going to see a Na'vi,
and the shaman of songs,
there's a whole sort of, the Na'vi culture.
What is that to immerse our fans,
or the fans, our guests, into that culture?
So those themes are rampant.
Everything in Pandora runs through the same thematic work
that we worked on for Disney's Animal Kingdom.
So I think that that's a really good place to start.
- Well, and maybe even talk a little bit about
where the story of Pandora takes place
and the timeline of the Avatar films.
I think that's really interesting.
- Yeah, so, you know, again,
at Disney's Animal Kingdom
we're introducing you to the world,
and we're hoping that going to Africa,
and going to see the animals of Africa,
and going to meet the people,
you know, it started out thematically
as a Swahili first park.
So if you'd address someone in Swahili
they would speak back to you in Swahili.
So, you know, you want definitely cultural authenticity.
And so, when you go to Pandora,
it can't be just about Jake and Neytiri.
It has to be about Pandora
so that you can bring your own story to Pandora.
So, the land takes place way beyond the conflict,
way beyond, like this is now sort of a clean up site.
You can see nature starting to take back the RDA
to clean up from this, the polluters that were there.
And so we separated it completely from the movie
so that other stories could happen in Pandora.
And then also, other stories are gonna happen on Pandora.
Like, we knew that the world would extend.
We knew that there would be sequels.
And so, we wanted the world to be evergreen and ever fresh
so that different stories could happen on Pandora,
much like different stories happen on Earth
when you go to Africa, when you go to Asia.
- Yeah, and so, I feel like it might be easier
to make something feel evergreen,
or like it can stand the test of time a little bit more
when we're dealing with places.
But how do you approach making an intellectual property
evergreen when it's about the characters?
Right, so like Star Wars, or Marvel, for example.
It's so much about...
- I mean, I would actually say Star Wars is about the world.
I mean, yes, there are many characters
that exist within that world
you may feel an emotional connection to,
but it's the world as much as any other piece of it.
And that's really in thinking about
how to bring that to our parks
where we're building a planet you've never seen before,
but it feels familiar because it's that world
that you have fallen in love with.
Things like Star Wars have iconic characters.
You've seen varying versions
of the smuggler archetype before.
You've seen varying versions
of somebody going on that hero's journey,
and that happens throughout this world.
So it's about visiting the world
rather than about visiting the character.
I think there's some great examples
where the characters are very key,
but Star Wars I would actually argue
is very much on the world, on the world side.
- Well, you can also expand your definition of character.
I mean, you can show the Millennium Falcon,
which, you know, for a lot of people that is a character.
And to Amy, you know, when we were scoping out
Pandora The World of Avatar it was like, okay,
our themes and also our sort of must haves,
what would people want to do here.
We went through the same exercises
on Star Wars Galaxy's Edge,
and of course, one of the top things there
was, man, I want to go in the Millennium Falcon.
And we're gonna take it one step further.
We're gonna actually allow you
to pilot the Millennium Falcon.
And again, to Sarah's point,
again, not necessarily retelling the stories from the movies
but building this world, this new world,
which is the great thing about Star Wars,
building this new world
that's going to have a whole bunch of new stories
that are guests are actually going to be able
to personally experience.
- And where you can live your own Star Wars story
is really the goal.
- Yeah, I think it's really interesting, this transition
to where guests are becoming characters in the universe
as well as being visitors to the park.
Do you guys think that that is a cool evolution
and how are you expanding on that,
or how do you explore that,
as maybe Dave, you as a story writer.
How do you try to create these moments
for guests to be characters?
- We're giving them opportunities
both formally and informally.
It's not something new.
For instance, you can be a Jedi right now
in any of our parks.
You can become a princess at Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique.
So there are these opportunities
to take an active role immediately.
But I think Star Wars is gonna take it to another level
in terms of actually making guests feel
like they're part of that landscape,
part of what's happening there,
I think more than we've done in the past.
- Yes.
And then you have, you know, the Marvel universe.
And so, that becomes a little bit different
when it comes to that is a character based universe.
- It's hard to build that world.
I mean, what do we got?
We've got Asgard.
Well, Asgard doesn't exist anymore.
- And a lot of that world looks like ours.
- A lot of that world looks like ours, it certainly does.
- There you go.
How can you tell it's an alien place?
Like, all of our design vocabulary, but, you know,
the connection to the world
and the connection to the characters.
You know, we talked about experience.
You guys, you know,
our guests really want to be connected to it.
And actually, connection, at least in Pandora,
leads to these sort of wanting to do something
for them, with them.
And I think that you guys in Galaxy's Edge
are gonna really, like, be participating in those worlds,
participating with each other.
Remember, this is a social sort of medium,
a communal medium.
And I think that what's different about that and games,
and then you extending the medium.
We work in a very social and communal medium,
and I think that you guys are really pushing the envelope
as far as interacting with each other
and interacting with the world.
- So, speaking of interacting with the world,
sort of combining a lot of these things,
interactivity, characters, and storytelling.
Can you talk a little bit about your robotic characters
that maybe can feed off of
emotional resonance of your guests?
- Why sure.
This is another project that
started as just a little bit of wild R&D brainstorming,
and, well what if.
If you can go to the Mission Breakout...
And ended up actually getting incorporated
into another thing that Amy worked on.
And really, this project started with this
concept of, wait, not the building,
but this is where they live.
This is where they ended up living.
But before that they were in the lab
and it was really about how do we have,
we have so many characters that are just performers
that will try and make eye contact, but it's...
- Can you bring up the tiny life flag,
the bird like creature?
- The space bird chicken looking things.
- The little vyloos. - Yes, little bird thingies.
- There we are, perfect.
So they live in that big house.
They've been collected by The Collector.
But before that they were this idea
of how can we make our animatronic,
or our audio animatronics, how can we make them responsive,
and alive, and really continue to go after
this living quality.
And part of what we said at R&D was, well,
part of being alive is reacting to the world around you,
is being present.
And so, giving our little vyloos
a little bit more sensitivity to the world
so that they can respond
so that as guests are walking by them
they're in the queue area
as you're going through The Collector's collection.
So as we're playing with them...
As you're walking by them they do actually make eye contact,
they do actually react to, and we actually, as R&D,
really want to give the creators of our attractions
the widest possible pallet of tools.
So, looking at the emotion of these characters
and how that's portrayed
so they can actually be dialed in
so you can have one that's a little shier,
you can have one that's a little bit more aggressive
and kind of bombastic,
and give that to our creative directors,
give that to our designers,
to be able to dial those personalities in.
- This is actually a really sort of good tale
of how something will go from
things that are in complete development,
and how we have, like you guys have open houses.
And so what we did was,
while we were making
Guardians of the Galaxy Mission Breakout,
which is, you know, obviously you can see the tower.
It's about The Collector, which is from the films.
Has this collection, this fortress,
where he collects things,
and they're held hostage, or collected.
We were going through open house that year
with Kevin Feige, the person who is the producer
from all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
We looked at the...
Yes, there it is, the tower, or the fortress.
We were like, what are those?
Those are cool.
We actually spent like an hour talking,
an hour talking to these creatures,
and these little creatures are responding to us,
and we're like, so...
Very quickly realized that we could put them in the movie
and that we could put them in our attraction.
And so actually it was a really good
sort of relationship between both from an R&D perspective,
from an actual practical making of things
that work in an attraction,
and then also informing the cinematic universe.
So the dimensional universe and the cinematic universe
starting to have a dialogue with each other
so that extending the world building that we're doing
just based on the Marvel universe.
So now you can go to The Collector's fortress
and you can meet the vyloo.
You can actually, while you're standing in line,
you can actually interact with them
and if you're really loud and boisterous,
they're really sort of like loud and boisterous
listening to you.
And if you're sort of like really quiet,
they're sort of just in rest mode.
And so, you know, it really becomes something
that the dialogue between development and implementation,
and then also sort of emotive, experiential storytelling
that extends our universe,
both from cinema and into dimension.
It was a great sort of example of how this happens,
and organically too, which was awesome.
- Absolutely, and I'd say, from the R&D side
it's also a great story
of starting from an experience first, of going,
well, we just made,
we had all at R&D lived with that shaman figure for years.
And, you know, we've made some large expressive things
and thinking about, okay,
if we go after something that's small and expressive,
and what does it mean to be small and expressive,
and just how small, and how minimal can we get
in terms of giving it life?
And so, this started out as,
colleagues Leslie Evans and Corey Rouse
with a literal, just a hacked together puppet,
a little felt hand puppet going, okay,
how many ways does this need to move,
how many different expressions can we make
out of a relatively small range of motion,
and how can we create that connection?
And then using that to inform, well,
what kind of sensors do we want,
what kind of motors do we want,
how do we want to make these come alive
and literally give them the tools to grow into the dream.
- I think it's also an evolution of,
again, audio animatronics.
I mean, these guys see their genesis
back in a character that we created back in the early 2000s,
Lucky the Dinosaur.
I don't know if any of you were able to see Lucky.
And the tremendous thing about Luck was he was autonomous.
But he was autonomous in terms of his movement.
In terms of what he did,
we had complete control over that.
Lucky was the last remaining dinosaur.
That's why his name was Lucky.
And nobody even cared about the technology.
He pulled a cart, and in the cart were his batteries,
his operating system, and his operator.
But when you got together, like, you never thought of that.
You just thought about this wonderful personality
that this dinosaur had.
And then from there we went into Muppet Mobile Lab
based on The Muppets, Dr. Bunson Honeydew and Beaker,
WALL-E from the movie WALL-E.
So evolving up to this point where now,
those were all controlled.
So, just a convergence of all of these things
for your smaller scale,
running independently, completely autonomous,
boom, that's where we end up with this.
- I don't know if we got the Jake...
- Oh yes, the next thing.
Oh really, we can talk about that?
- We can.
He's been out at the parks. - I know he has.
The next generation.
- So, in thinking about how our animatronics
and our characters can become unanchored.
- Totally autonomous.
We're headed to West World territory here, aren't we?
You guys are all working on this too, right?
- Yeah, so, to give everybody in the audience
a little bit of context,
Jake is a robot that Disney is exploring
to be able to put in front of the guests
in a way where guests can walk right past them
and not have it collide and cause any injuries
but also have it be interactable.
- He's completely autonomous.
He's not being controlled by anyone,
he is just merely out in the area.
- And so a lot of that work is really
still on this very core of how do we express character
and emotion through movement and expression,
and how do we do all of those things, of course, safely,
and with all of the challenges
that a theme park environment presents,
and people are unpredictable, and crowds,
and all of those things, and all that character to roam
safely and interact with our guests.
So giving us, again, continue to increase
the pallet of tools that we have.
- He's roving around.
He's had a few maiden voyages out in (mumbling) R&D.
We do a lot of things inside of the lab
but because so much of our work is about people,
and interacting, and understanding
how our guests interact with things,
if we leave it in the lab too long
then we miss out on all of that,
and we don't understand the thing that we're building.
And so, Jake has been out on
some maiden voyages in Tomorrowland,
and getting to see him interacting with guests
and seeing how guests respond to him,
and continuing to iterate on how we think about
continuing to develop that so that it's ready
for folks like Amy and Dave to take out to the field.
- As a lot of master's students
are learning at the media lab,
evaluation is critical when
you're making any new technology.
Shout out to thesis prep.
So, I want to ask one more question,
and then we're gonna move onto the Q&A.
So everybody remember that you can send in questions
on Twitter using the hashtag MLTalks,
or go to Slido
and enter the code X052 to ask your questions.
So my final question to you all is,
for better or for worse,
people have a relationship at this point with their phones.
It's something that they have in their personal lives
that they bring with them to the parks.
Do you think that that is a distraction or an enhancement,
and how do you, as storytellers,
either draw them away from their screens
or integrate screens into the experience?
- Sure.
- Well, first of all, it's a reality,
so we have to deal with it.
- Yes, it is part of our guests' lives
as much as anything else.
- So acknowledging it I think is the first thing to do.
But I think as, you know,
as we have more and more successes with some of the,
sort of our handheld devices, our mobile devices,
and releasing things on them,
I think that we often, in our theme park environment
or in the parks' environments,
talk about heads down behavior and heads up behavior.
And it really is about when it's appropriate
to have heads down behavior and heads up behavior.
And remember, you're with your families.
We want you to be with your families.
We're really into that sort of communal experience,
and so, we don't want it to be antisocial.
So really, just knowing, sort of physiologically,
how you use it, when you use it,
when it's appropriate to use it,
and acknowledging that it exists
and it's a really big part of our lives.
- And that it's also a designable surface.
And this is something that's a little new for us
as imagineers who are used to controlling the whole world,
literally building it from the ground up,
that this is a device that our guests are bringing in
that they're bringing their own lives in along with it.
They may be streaming something
that is not a Disney thing,
and what's going on here is
we finally said, well, you know,
that's a designable surface too.
We don't have to ignore it or be scared of it.
We can actually use this to create
and enhance your experience of the park.
And so we put out Play Disney Parks,
which is, you can all download it
and take it on your next adventure to the park.
And it basically brings a little bit of the park
to your personal device
so that you can, instead of being heads down,
actually gives you a new way
to interface with the environment.
We're being able to build in some little special effects,
some magic that the phone can interact with,
but also really encouraging you to interact with each other.
And so, our parks are really about
having an experience with your family,
with your friends that you're there with,
and using this to enhance that.
- And I think that's a key point,
that we do have this Disney Parks play app
where you would be looking down at your phone,
but even in its interface we're encouraging you
to play the games with your family, with your friends.
In fact, you can't play the games without them.
So even with your phone,
we're encouraging you to not solo yourself,
or silo yourself in the line,
but to actually communicate with the people near you.
So even then we're trying our best.
- And it enhances, also, I think the experience
of navigation, you know, how to get to eating.
It's not the practical aspects
like you use your phone for anyway,
like getting a car, or getting transportation,
or knowing when things start.
- Making reservations at the Blue Bayou.
- Absolutely, you know, how to enhance your,
and make it easier for families to navigate the park
and make plans with other.
So, I think that too.
And also, like to check your memories.
Collecting your memories, you know,
which are these, sort of they grow in value,
they're an investment for you, they're an intangible,
but we're giving you a way to make sure
that they're safe and collectable
and that you can share them
when you're at home and with each other.
- Great, well, so now at this point
we're going to shift gears a little bit
and we're going to move on to the Q&A section of the talk.
We've got people sending in questions online.
Remember, use the hashtag MLTalks on Twitter
or go to Slido to ask your questions.
So, the first question I think we want to look at,
somebody had asked before, I just want to answer it
just so that everybody knows,
somebody asked what was the relationship
with Disney and MIT, and, you know,
we're happy to share that Disney
has recently become a member of the MIT Media Lab's
member community, and that means that hopefully
this is the start of a very awesome partnership
where students can learn from imagineers,
and in turn, imagineers can learn from our students.
And so now we're gonna open up the questions
to our panelists.
Let's start with from anonymous.
What do you think is the most important,
interesting, or impactful new technology
that you've seen introduced at the park
since you started at Disney?
- Oh my goodness. - I'm gonna toss that to you.
- Oh, don't toss it to me.
(laughter)
- Again, what I'd love to just reiterate about technology
is that, you know, there is, if you...
If you knew how much technology
is actually in all of these attractions,
obviously we're using a lot of technology.
And newness, and being able to use it,
and sort of the little de-democratization of it,
the accessibility of it,
it really is just about using a lot.
There's so much available to us as makers
and that is way more accessible.
And so, using a lot of technology.
There is technology everywhere
but we don't want to put that between you
and the experiences that you're having.
We're using it to empower the guests to have
a more individualized experience,
or a more connected experience, a more engaged experience,
how do we engage you.
But also just to make the attractions do more.
And so, there's so much technology in there,
and we really, like,
we don't like to acknowledge it only so far as
at some point it's really
all the glued together to make the experience.
That's where we want to talk about technology, I think.
- If we've done our jobs right, it fades away.
Or it feels like magic.
- And the technology that helps us tell our stories
is also helping us, they're giving us tools
that help us do our jobs even better.
We mentioned the Digital Immersive Showroom
a little bit earlier on.
And I mean, one of the impactful things there
is if any of you have been on Radiator Springs Racers,
which is part of Cars Land at Disney California Adventure,
all the way out in California, of course.
This attraction opened in 2012.
We actually started writing, so to speak,
this attraction in 2008.
And when we started writing it
we were able to make some substantive changes
to this experience during its development,
like adding at the end, adding in one more dip
through a cavern that wasn't there before.
So tools like this are enabling us
to figure things out way before we build them
because obviously we want to make
the best possible attraction that we can
and it's a lot easier and cheaper
to change it in the design phase
than it is to change it in the construction phase.
- And also, has anyone been to
Guardians of the Galaxy Mission Breakout?
Anyone? All right.
So, there's a Halloween show as well
called Monsters After Dark.
And that is a 30 minute changeover
to a night time experience.
A whole new show.
And the reason we can do that is technology.
But literally the experience becomes 180 degrees different.
And so that, technology lets you do that.
And that was empowering to us as creators,
to be able to change the whole feeling of a whole attraction
by just pushing a button.
So I think that that too,
so that you guys have different experiences.
Like, you go during the day and you see one thing,
and you go at night, it's a completely different experience.
- Okay, great, we're gonna take another question.
So, Catherine wants to know,
can you talk about the tension
between personalization and scalability,
and how do you see technology helping
to change that in the future,
expand on that in the future?
- Yeah, I think we touched on it a little bit earlier.
- Sure.
Yeah, I mean, our business has to work at scale.
We have many, many visitors to the parks every day,
and so, designing for that scale,
obviously, is a requirement.
For me it was a big mental shift.
My previous company also made immersive experiences.
It was a three person company.
We made immersive experiences for
maybe several thousand, at the most.
And so, the difference between those scales is enormous.
And I think one of the pieces
that's really something that I think about a lot
is being able to, as designing interactions,
and designing for interactivity in that personalization,
is how do I give choices that are clear,
how do I make that interactivity accessible
so that I can teach you and invite you to play
in this quickest time possible.
And it's a great design challenge
because if you can do that, it's like,
it's the old Mark Twain thing but for design.
Well, attributed to Mark Twain.
If I'd more time we would have made it shorter.
If you're a really great designer,
you can make it succinct, and make that invitation,
and how do I interact, and how do I play.
- And also, the personalization aspect,
you need to put it in context as well, as Amy said.
You know, one of the reasons you come to our parks
is for communal experience with your family, with friends.
So when we design something personal, like Toy Story Mania,
where you're actually competing with your friends...
I mean, you're competing with your friends, right?
You want to get the high score.
But also there's a friendly thing going on,
a friendly competition.
So I don't think we ever want to eliminate the fact
that the reason these parks exist in the first place
was for adults and children to have fun together
in an environment such as this.
So, it's this constant balancing act
that I think we're doing in our parks.
- And I think at the heart of it,
our parks are personal because they're visceral,
because you're there and you're there with your family,
you're there with your friends.
But that visceral quality is really,
it's the special thing about getting to be an imagineer
of being able to have that.
It feels personal because it is,
because I'm experiencing it.
And whether or not, you know,
it's not about sticking your name on a thing
or allowing you to, you know,
the feeling of it being there just for you.
- Cool, so, we'll take another question.
The questions have been rolling in,
so thank you everybody for asking
all these amazing questions.
A really fun one that came through was,
what is the craziest or weirdest hack that you've done
to prototype or prove something out?
(laughter)
- You know, what is it to prototype a ride,
what is it to understand a ride, you know.
And that's like driving through parking...
There are crazy things like driving through parking lots
and swinging things around, you know, in safe ways.
- She's talking about the Seven Dwarves Mine Train
rollercoaster down at the Magic Kingdom in Florida
where we literally got on the back of a pickup,
a flatbed truck, with the ride system,
and some guy drove us around.
- To see what a swinging thing would do.
So definitely, you hack everything, like gaffer's tape.
A lot of gaffer's tape, string.
There are all crazy things.
I mean, like you guys.
Like, what else do you guys...
There are a lot of crazy things
going on here that you hacked.
I think there's some tradition at MIT about hacking
and taking something that may look like a car
that you put on top of a dome somewhere.
This is a thing.
- There's the legendary story of Soarin' Over California.
- Yes, that's a great example.
- One of our engineers, he was trying...
Soarin', in case you're not familiar with it,
is an attraction in which you are,
you're supposed to be on a hang glider
flying over California, and now around the world.
So we were working on this ride system,
and Mark Sumner, who is the head engineer for that,
you know, these guys are working on,
gee, they tried out using a dry cleaning system,
they tried this and they tried that.
And well finally he, over Thanksgiving one year,
he went home to his parents house for Thanksgiving dinner
and he pulled his Erector Set out of the attic,
and he started fiddling with it.
And by the end of that four day weekend
he had assembled, with his Erector Set,
what became the ride system for Soarin' Over California.
So, you know, that's a hack, right?
- Absolutely.
I mean, imagineers sit there
and make K'NEX versions of everything.
- Absolutely.
- At think at the heart of it is
we're challenged with this job
of making things that don't exist.
And so, virtually everything starts as a hack.
And how do I, you know...
We know eventually we're gonna invest a bunch of money
and do it the right way.
How do I do it the quick way
to understand what this thing is.
- Right, what does rapid prototyping
of a really expensive right system look like.
- Riding around in a pickup truck.
- Right, exactly.
So you can absolutely imagine what that might look like.
I mean, you guys, if someone said to you, you know,
you have to make a flying banshee,
what do you imagine that prototype might have looked like
before we could actually put a machine to it?
You know, what is it like to fly?
- So see, bottom line, we all share the same DNA.
(laughter)
- That's why we're here, I mean,
because we do share the same.
We were as interested in what you were doing
as you are obviously, and sort of,
we're doing that dialogue.
We're really excited to be partners here,
and we are members,
because I think that that partnering,
like, imagineers are everywhere,
you all are imagineers, it's the way you think about things.
And so we encourage all imagineering, you know, everywhere.
- So, another great question that came through
was how has your career in storytelling
impacted the way you tell stories about your personal lives?
- Just make it up all the time.
(laughter)
- Those terrible hacks that we're now trying at home,
right, about swinging from a roof or something.
It affects the way you approach your life,
I think, in storytelling,
and the narrative of your life, or how you live your life,
and what your focus groups of one.
I find myself really watching so many more people
and how people use transportation,
how that use, you know, anything,
how they use anything, how they experience their spaces.
We walk around here.
How do you use your spaces?
What does the public space mean?
What does private space mean?
What is collaboration, how do you get people to collaborate?
How do you get introverts to collaborate?
How do you get people who are super, you know,
sort of not used to articulating?
It affects everything in your life
when you're constantly thinking
how to watch how people are in the world,
how they experience the world,
so that you bring that narrative back into your work.
And so, a lot more observation, I find for me, definitely.
- For me it's been more of a practical application,
as I said from the start, is that,
I've got this fascination with sort of
the science, the emotion,
how we build stories, and how we tell stories.
You know, doing a podcast,
and doing an entire presentation to imagineers.
I mean, I thought I was just gonna write stories,
and now I'm trying to help people
mentor the next generation, this is how we do the stories.
You know, and not to mention that, like a lot of...
I'm sure we have a lot of...
There were so many people out there who creative writing,
I mean, we're all trying
to eventually write the great American novel,
although I don't know what
that's gonna look like in five years.
That could be the next hack.
- Interesting.
So somebody also asked,
where do you guys see augmented reality
fitting into the parks in the future?
- Well, I mean, I think in part,
it's actually easy to see our parks
as being augmented reality already.
- I completely agree.
You're taking people out of the mimetic
and moving them into this fantastical universe.
- Right, so in that way,
I think we've been thinking as creators of augmented reality
for a long time, before there was XR, VR, AR,
as a discipline, obviously.
You know, Disney had its own part to play
in the emergence of VR
back in the day of DisneyQuest,
and enormous CRTs counterbalanced with a big counterweight
so that you could fly on Aladdin's magic carpet.
- That was actually the Walt Disney
Imagineering Lab at Innoventions.
- There you go. - 1994.
- But we've been making...
We've been augmenting reality
to transport you to different places
since imagineering started.
And again, just to harp on it,
to answer the heart of the question,
the specificity of the question,
like everything, it's another tool,
it's another technology, it's another paint brush.
- I mean, some of you may be aware of,
if you've been on the Disney cruise line,
we have two ships, the Disney Dream, and the Disney Fantasy,
where we actually use augmented reality
in the inside cabins.
Because obviously if you're in an inside cabin
you have no view.
But what if you put a porthole with a virtual view
and you augment that with Disney characters,
then hey, you've got a new way to sell your inside cabins.
- And the ocean is suddenly a little more alive
and more character full.
- Exactly, there's a storm brews,
and all of a sudden there's characters
from Nemo out your window.
- And you see the same thing happening
throughout the ship, the Midship Detective Agency,
or throughout the Sorcerers of Magic Kingdom,
where you're bringing, you're augmenting little places,
little niches where you felt like, oh, that's just a wall,
or that's just a painting.
And now they're coming to life as you play,
as you interact with them.
- So, it seems like all of you wear
at least a couple of different hats.
How do you balance your both technical expertise
and creative passions in the day to day at Imagineering?
- I mean, I personally, my job is about creative expression.
I just happen to use all these different technological tools
to help bring all of that together.
They're so connected, storytelling,
but again, we're creative people
first and foremost, I think.
Even if you're a technologist,
you're being asked to hack or bend your mind in some way,
that some sort of, like, interpretive dance storyteller
is trying to tell you what to do.
When we made Flight of Passage, we have Joe Rohde,
he's a very expressive person.
The last, sort of third act of it, is a ballet,
and he kept trying to explain the ride profile
of what it was doing
by doing this interpretive dance
of this ballet of the banshees.
And so we're like, heh,
we're gonna go down Lightstorm Entertainment
and we're gonna put you in a motion capture volume
and we are going to capture your interpretive dance
so that the most direct way is
to give a director the tools to express
and have that become our first ride profile
so that we really were like,
sort of it's really meta.
Technology helps us to separate
the different parts of this creative process
into very focused sort of tasks.
And then you sew them back together
but it really helps this direct expression
of a creative person.
Like, what is the fewest amount of words
that this person has to use in order to express themselves.
And technology really helps that.
- And I would say, as a creative director
within Imagineering R&D,
my role is doing both, and actually going both directions.
As often we start with that emotional place
and we have an experience that we want to create,
we have this Ghost Post
that we want to allow the ghosts to communicate,
and then we go out and look for, well, what are all...
We have these computers in our pockets,
what are all of the ways that we can
use and abuse those sensors
and all of that computing power to create the experience
of the ghosts coming to you and visiting you at your home
and how can we do that.
So that involved both
going out there and asking that question,
inventing some new things.
And two, it works the other direction of,
well, we have this really cool thing.
I don't know quite what to do with it.
I work with so many talented technologists,
artificial intelligence experts, roboticists,
who are constantly thinking about what's the new technology.
And I get the amazing job to say, well,
what experiences can we make out of that,
and inviting folks in from the larger group of Imagineering
to help us think about that, and figure out,
well, what are the experiences that this enables?
- So, Dino wants to know if you can tell us a little bit
about how your test your attractions and interactions
before you put them out in public.
- Well, we have people called golden butts.
(laughter)
Are you gonna back me up on this?
What's that?
- Play testing. - Play testing.
I was starting with the specific.
Starting from, if you are going to move somebody around,
having somebody who is super sensitive to movement
and can really articulate, all right,
this movement is making me feel this way,
and this movement is making me feel this way,
and then taking that out to every discipline.
And you start with the specialists.
And then you go out and play test, and understand...
- Among ourselves even.
We're our own best little test audience, right,
gotta be tested.
- And imagineer kids are some expert
play testers at this point.
The amount of articulated critique
of a new attraction that a 12 year old
imagineering kid will give you is humbling.
- Very.
But I think you're right
about us actually being the guinea pigs in many cases
because, I mean, most of us,
there's a reason we work at Disney.
I mean, we're big fans of what we do.
I mean, it's a great company to work for.
And I think we want to see everything succeed,
and we really want to like these things as well.
But I mean, testing ride systems is one thing.
There are other attractions that we can test in house.
Going back to Toy Story Mania,
which we mentioned a little bit earlier.
Did you work on that?
- That was before my time.
- We actually had one of the pods setup in our concept lab.
And not only did imagineers play it all day long,
but we invited people from the neighborhood,
and imagineers' kids, as Amy said.
So, there are many different ways that we can do this.
But sometimes it's instinct, like a rollercoaster.
- Right, we all want it to be finished before it's done.
Again, technology empowers us to try to experience
some of this early on.
And we use a lot of off the shelf type of things
to test out what is the least amount
that you need to move people.
Move them emotionally, move them physically,
what is the least amount.
So, we test all the time
to see sort of like what's working
because there's a lot of parts and pieces.
- We each pride ourselves in being experts in our own fields
and bringing our kind of depth of experience,
some of us longer than others,
and being able to bring that to bear
on what we're designing.
But we're all, at the end of the day, individuals,
and because the story, because that experience
is ultimately happening in the minds
and in the bodies of our guests,
being able to invite them in,
invite them whether in the form of our peers,
in the form of our peers' families,
to be able to test and play test those things,
and understand, being able to ask afterwards,
well, you tell me, what happened?
How did that feel?
- And remember, a theme park is a living thing, it evolves.
We're able to sort of modify it
and evolve in ways that our guests tell us
everything we need to know about what's working.
- Change out attractions that aren't working.
- Exactly, there's an iterative process.
I mean, it is a living thing.
And so the dialogue between our guests and us
is an ongoing thing.
Like, it's a requirement to really,
like, reading guests' letters,
and reading the way people feel about the attractions,
and how they respond to instructional videos.
We always are, like, making sure that people
understand what they're doing.
So the testing goes on.
- We're running short on time.
- Well, I guess we could sum it up with Walt Disney
who said, you know, he loved working on the parks
because he could shape them.
I mean, when he did Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,
it was in the can, I can't make any more changes, it's done.
But the park is a living, breathing thing
that we can continue to change,
and improve, and make better,
and have people come back again, and again, and again.
- As is with all of our work, I imagine,
at the lab and at Disney.
So, one final question
because we're reaching the end of our talk.
I imagine there's a lot of you in the audience
that are interested in learning more
about how you all became imagineers.
Do you have advice to the students
about how they should practice,
or what you learned that made you
exceptional imagineering candidates?
- Sure.
I mean, my story is, I guess, the more recent,
so I'll start.
I never thought I'd be an imagineer.
I had no idea, I didn't grow up in a family
that went to the parks.
I didn't grow up in a Disney household.
Most of my Disney parks experience
has been as a professional imagineer.
But it was one of those moments of it was perfect,
and I was out making experiences,
I was out making immersive experiences.
It's so nice that we now can all agree that that's a thing.
And actually, you know, getting,
I got a call from an imagineer
who was trying to do something and had heard about my work,
and said, hey, would you come consult.
And then one thing led to another, and it's worked out.
My parents are also really glad
that they finally can understand
and explain what it is I do because for them,
saying I make immersive experiences wasn't really helpful.
So saying I'm an imagineer
and being able to ground that in the parks,
even though they don't go themselves,
that's a thing that they understand,
so that was very exciting for them.
- I too never thought I would be an imagineer.
I did not know what it was.
We were not a Disney family either.
But I got an internship because of
just things that happened in my life.
And I tried very hard not to be an imagineer forever,
like thinking, this can't be it.
And it just kept getting more and more interesting,
and more and more engaging.
And so, like, the access.
You know, you guys all have access to us.
And I think that that's the really important part
about this, the membership, is that you all have access.
And there are people in the audience, there's Emily.
If imagineering is what you want to do
or a place you want to work, remember,
I believe that you are all imagineers just by being here
at the lab or at the school.
And that is just a state of mind.
So if it's access to the company, you already have it.
We're already sort of in dialogue about being
like access to Imagineering.
- And I would add from my experience
interning at Walt Disney Imagineering,
part of it is just being curious
about a lot of different things
and wanting to pursue many different skills
because at Imagineering you wear a lot of different hats.
And so, being able to both practice
and create works that you can talk about to other people
that involve many different process and disciplines
can only help you if you're interested
in becoming an imagineer.
- In just the spirit of being really curious
and going after something that fascinates you,
there are over 140 disciplines at Imagineering.
If you're fascinated about something,
chances are it overlaps
with something that Imagineering does too.
So, be fascinated, be excited about what you're making,
and try making new things.
- Yeah, do something, you know, just make something.
And that already is the first step to being an imagineer.
- That was my story.
- All right, well, thank you, everybody,
so much for coming to our talk.
Can we all give a big round of applause
to the Walt Disney imagineers who made it?
- Thank you.
- Thank you, thank you guys.
- This has been a real treat.
I'm very, very appreciative to our guests,
Sarah, Dave, and Amy, for making time for us.
And I also want to say a big thank you
to the media lab community,
especially the director's office and the communications team
for giving all of us this incredible opportunity
to engage with Walt Disney Imagineering.
- And thank you, Emily.
Nicely done.
- Thank you.
All right, thanks, everybody.
(applause)