What does an Imagineer do?

You enjoy that, don't you. Yeah. So we have a little listener mail to lead into this podcast. So let's queue Liz with the sound effect. This listener mail comes from Paul, and Paul says, Hi, I'm enjoying listening to your podcast, and I wanted to add a new topic to the tech stuff agenda. I'm a fan of theme park rides and attraction show effects, and I always wanted to know how some of them work. I love the

ride Haunted Mansion at the Disney Parks. There's an effect called the Pepper Ghost where they make the ghost appear to come out of the wall and into your vehicle. I would like to know the tech behind this effect. Thanks, and hope this topic is fun. Paul. Paul, you happen to have sent this into at least one avowed Disney fanatic, which would be yours. Truly, I believe Chris is a bit of a fan as well. Yes, definitely so um. I have been to the Walt Disney World Park more

than thirty times. I've been to Disneyland probably around seven or eight times. I have not yet been to the ones in Europe or or in Asia. But yeah, clearly I have a special place in my heart for the Disney um, the Disney Park attractions. So we're going to answer your question about the pepper ghost effect. But actually before we do that, we thought we'd talked about a bigger topic, which is imagineering. Yes, well, imagineering um sort of a it's sort of an obvious portmanteau, if you will, Yes,

of imagination. It's always great to be able to use the word portmanteau. Yes it is. Yes, thank you very much, and I'm sorry i interrupted you just as you were explaining it. Please say it again that it is about imagination and engineering. And I'm not even sure that Disney was the first to have come up with this term. But they have embraced it wholeheartedly. Yes, to the point where there's now actually Walt Disney Imagineering. It's a it's an actual division within the company. Oh yes, yes, as

a matter of fact, headquarters. Sorry I didn't mean enough. That's okay, go ahead. And I have a had a friend in high school who whose dream it was to become an imagineer. So I'm not sure how far he's gone with that, but it's it sounds like any job. Yeah, it sounds like a pretty amazing job. Also sounds like it could potentially be a very frustrating job. But well we'll go into why that is in a minute. And

when I say frustrating, I just mean that. Imagine that your job is to come up with amaze attractions for the Walt Disney Company. And we're talking about from top to bottom, from every single element of design you can think of, including what sort of story it's supposed to tell or what sort of mood it's supposed to evoke, and then knowing that there's a fairly good chance that your idea will either only partially make it into reality or never make it into reality, because as we all know,

I mean, you can't. Not every idea is going to come to fruition. Some things are just going to fall down to budget, some things are going to fall down to space issues or timing. So, um, you know, it's it's it's a job that gives you amazing opportunities, but you also have to realize that not everything you come up with is ever going to see the light of day. But let's let's talk about imagineering in a in kind of a broad sense. So Disney himself, uh kind of

fostered this. This a set of disciplines and his his set of standards were very very high, very exact, and he wanted to be able to create a park where he could have families come and and enjoy themselves as families and experience attractions that brought them into another world. Right, So it's beyond the the basic uh amusement park, um uh paradigm. I was gonna say, so the amusement park paradigm. I was like, I was trying to come up with something besides paradigm because I didn't want to get to

uh to snooty. But I mean, I guess I'll just embrace it. So yeah, the amusement park paradigm where you've got all these different rides and and you know, maybe some food stalls and things like that. There's not really any rhyme or reason to the way it's laid out other than the fact that you don't want to have all the food areas right next to all the rides that spin you around and around and around. Yeah, that

doesn't seem to stop people anyway. Well, yeah, some park designers actually get that, and they don't put the stuff that makes you get nausea nauseated rather right next to the food. At any rate, Disney wanted to go beyond that.

He wanted to have a park where you had very specific areas that kind of had a thematic continuity to them, and that you would have a real experience as you moved through the park and it wouldn't just be you know, making a bee line from one ride to the next and maybe stopping to eat some time along the way.

And uh, this is really a revolutionary idea at the time that we're talking about, the nineteen fifties right now, back when Disney was was working on on the parks the originally UM and he really stressed this to the people who worked for him. Um, he said that this is something that really is important. He's not gonna compromise on this at all. Disney is not known for compromising, and so that's kind of where the whole concept of

the imagineer came from. Now, at the time, there wasn't really a formalized, you know, set of criteria that you know, what makes an imagineer apart from someone who's working for Disney is trying to create attractions. Well, yeah, as a matter of fact, I'm not sure that it is, uh you could really call it a standardized thing. Now I read uh some information on Disney's website about the the

imagineer core as they're calling it. I mean, there are more than a hundred and fifty disciplines uh that make up the imagineer group. So I mean with that, you've got a very broad sense of you know, what an imagineer may be asked to do. Um. You know, there could be anything from design, visual design, to the mechanics, you know, the planning, the planning like Disney did, where you were orchestrating the the entire environment and an immersive

experience for the park visitor. Uh, you know, those kinds of things. All sort of fall into the purview, the overall purview of the here I am being snood the purview, um but really into into their field of imagineering. So they could be you could have a mechanical engineer and an electrical electrical engineer and somebody who's into the graphic design of the whole thing, and they're all working together within that whole unit. So it's really diversified quite a bit.

You could even have a writer, sure, because a lot of you know, a lot of the attractions at at the Disney parks tell a story, and in some cases it may be that the writer is not necessarily writing dialogue, but is instead writing the progression of the story and how the story moves from one element to the next, and that kind of defines the experience that the the writer,

that the guest in Disney terms, is going to experience. Well, go ahead, and so I was gonna say that, um As I was preparing for the podcast, I watched a video interview with um an imagine your named Asa Kalama, who has a whole series of DVDs out called The Science of Disney Imagineering. It's a it's an educational series for kids people who are interested in uh science, and trying to trying to get kids interested in science in school.

Um by sort of putting it in the framework of what an imagineer does and how they do cool stuff for Disney. Well, um, he said, the very first thing that they start out with is the story. That is the most important part because that's basically where they jump in and take off. So you know, you're right, I mean, in a writer writer's perspective is one of the very first things that they look at because it people come to them with ideas and say, we want to make

this happen. And it's a very cinematic kind of experience with a lot of these attractions. So when you're talking about a writer, you may have dialogue. For instance, they're plenty of rides that have lots of dialogue in them. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride has lots and lots of dialogue and and a lot of it is really funny, clever stuff that you have to kind of listen for it to pick up on because it's very directional. Right, you know, there might be a pirate that's often one

corner who's muttering something and it's absolutely hysterical. But if because there's so much other stuff going on in your field of view, you may not even notice it, um, which is you know, you do tend to notice it if you're like me and you have ridden parts of the Caribbean more times than you can count, sometimes more

times than you can count in a single day. UM. So the writers will write not necessarily just the dialogue, but also the everything, like the action around it, and you know, like there's a sword fight going on, like if you if you ride the Disneyland version of Pirates of the Caribbean. Uh, there's a point in the ride, pretty early on in the ride where you can see the silhouettes of people fighting. Uh. And it's projected against

a sale. Uh. So it's in this you see this, and you see the silhouettes of of figures fighting each other, and it's actually a pretty amusing fight. And there's several different sequences to the fight. It's not in the Disney World version, or at least it wasn't the last time I wrote it. Uh. But the that kind of thing again is something that the writer would have to come up with. And then of course you've got things like actors who are involved in this who have to record

all the different voices or act out the parts. And really, when you when you factor in all the elements that come into making an attraction work, you really start to realize how huge a task it is for these imagineers. And now, when when we talk about the early imagineers, they were multitaskers, Like we have very specific kind of roles that imagineers take up now, Like you've got like an entire department of illustrators, departments of you know, graphic designers, um,

you know, the engineers, all that kind of stuff. The early imagineers were sort of jack of all trades. A lot of them, I mean a lot of them were doing multiple roles in order to build the early early attractions like Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion, things like that, or it's a small world after all, or just it's a small world that after all is the song um any rate they had, those early ones had to do a lot of these things, all them

by themselves or in small groups. So it's actually kind of a monumental task for a small group to to be able to come together and design and build this sort of thing. Um often as as Chris said, they'll start with an idea for a story, for an attraction, or for an area of a park. Because they don't just design the rides. They also design everything that Disney does that has a physical presence. Right, So like if you walk down Main Street, main Street was designed by imagineers.

You know, it's it's not necessarily that you don't just think of the rides. You gotta think about every single element of the park. Or the Disney cruise ships. The cruise ships were designed by imagineers who were working with ship designers because clearly you can't just you know, you can't just take someone who has great ideas and tell them build a boat. They need to know the principles behind the cruise ship industry in order to really design

it properly. Right. But at any rate, uh, everything Disney does, even to the Disney stores, imagineers are involved in credit there has made Disney stores now as there used to be. Well, the Disney has decided to end its contract with the company they were using to outsource the stores too. So the Disney stores now, uh, as far as I know, are all being run by Disney itself. But they cut down the number of the stores results of that, which

I imagine is part of the imagineering. Um, it's not quite as much of a tangent as you might think, because I think it's probable that the imagineers will have a greater hand in the Disney run stores than they wouldn't necessarily have had with a third party to be able to guide that experience, and that it actually is representative of what Disney, the Disney philosophy is. UM. Once they have the story idea, then they have to start thinking what what kind of direction are they going to

move in? Like when it comes to coming up with an attraction, UM, usually they'll they'll try and think of, well, what sort of experience do we want the guests to have? And then how can we achieve that? And uh, there are a lot of really interesting examples of that out on the parks. I mean, Sore in California is a good one. Oh, that's an excellent that's an excellent example. They wanted to create a ride that would give guests the the feeling that they were flying over the California countryside.

But then they had to figure out, well, how are we going to do this? And uh, it was one of those things where various imagineers were working on the problem trying to come up with a viable solution, and several were proposed, and the one that was ultimately chosen was this interesting arrangement where people would sit down and what looks like a theater, but then uh would be raised up off the floor in tears. So each row

would become a level of of this ride. We're not we're not talking crying here, no no t I E R S tears. But it was it was a really neat approach to that idea, I mean, because you really do start thinking like, well, how do we achieve this this effect? Um And there have been a lot of proposed Disney attractions that never went anywhere that I still would love to see. The one that I still kind of want to see, and I can understand why it

would Disney has not done it yet is a Villain's Land. Yeah, yeah, there there. There's been talked before about creating a Disney Villain Park or a Disney Villain Land within an existing park that would have a lot of thrill rides in it. They were themed after the Disney Villains, and I have a soft spot in my heart for the Disney villains. UM, Captain Hook in particular, I can't imagine why it's a bad form shooting a man in the middle of his candenza.

But yeah, and I would love to see that happened. Uh. But again, that's one of those things where imagineers have worked on these ideas for years and years and years. It may never happen. So that's kind of that frustration element we were talking about. Um. Now, Disney's coming through the imagineering program, They've come up with a lot of technology. They've developed technologies that were pioneered by Disney. Imagineers were talking about things like audio animatronics. Well, yeah, because I

mean that's one of the earliest, right. Sure, they use audio animatronics and a lot of their early early attractions like the Tiki Room, parts of the Caribbean Haunted Mansion. Um. I believe you didn't mention a Lincoln I was going to get their Hall of Presidents. Um. Yeah. The this audio animatronic technology was was revolutionary and um, it's also really complicated. It was mechanical as opposed to electrical. Um. We since have moved beyond sort of the audio animatronic

age to more of a digital age. But that's that technology is still in use in many of the Disney parks. But yeah, that was that was pioneered by Disney imagineers, and and that's not the only technology that Disney kind of really pushed forward and developed. That's true. Um yeah, I mean they're they're the examples that they use on

the on the website to um. Another would be the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, although I don't know that I'll ever Actually I've never been a fan of the free fall ride, so I'm not sure that I will

go to see it in person. It's really not as bad as you think, because I had a really bad experience on a free fall ride and I was reticent to ride Detailer of Terror, and then I went ahead and wrote it and realized, you know what, this is actually a fun ride, and it it's way more gentle on your system than you would expect it to be.

The breaking system in particular, there's really really gradual and and gentle on you, so you don't feel like that horrible jerky motion that you usually get with free fall rides once you get to the bottom. Yeah, I'm more familiar with the haunted mansion style, you know, which we're going to get into in just a second. So we've we've kind of talked about what imagineers do in the

sense that you know that they they embrace many different disciplines. Uh, they're all about telling a story or creating a show. Because Disney parks are supposed to be a show. That's why. Uh, the employees are not called employees at Disney parks. They're called cast members because they're part of a show. And they even will refer to things being on stage versus backstage. So you can take backstage tours of some of the Disney parks. I've taken one and it was fascinating, But

you can't take pictures. You not in most areas. Yes, in most areas you are not allowed to take photos. Also, uh, a backstage tour is not recommended for people who don't want the magic ruined, and a sense that if you know how it works, if that's going to ruin it

for you, you should not go take the tour. Also, I should mention that when we get into talking about the Haunted Mansion, if you don't want to know how the effects on the Haunted Mansion work, stop the podcast because we are going to talk a little bit about some of the things that Disney does in order to give you those effects. And if you don't want to know it, please stop, because I don't want to spoil

it for you. There are some people out there who just you know, they don't want to know how the magic trick works, and I completely respect that. So, but the backstage tour does give you a lot of the information about what the imagineers had to do in order to to create these effects. And uh, and I do highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in that. Also, they have a very good intern program and what I understand, so for students, college students, if you are in California,

the headquarters is in Glendale, California. UM. If you're a college student, you may and you're interested in engineering, graphic design, that kind of stuff. Uh, and you want an internship, an interesting internship, you can look into interning with the imagineering program at Walt Disney UM company. They from what I understand, it is a really intense but very rewarding program as far as you know, really getting an idea of what goes into these designs. UM. No, granted I'm

not eligible for that. I haven't been a student student for many, many years, so I can't really take advantage of it. Yeah, but you certainly couldn't choose a program with a better pedigree, because they have won thirty four awards over the course of the years for from the Themed Entertainment Association for their different rides, most recently for Toy Story Mania at Disney's California Adventure Park, which, since I haven't been to any of the California parks, i'd

really like to see at some point. Well, they have it at Disney World, do they really? Yeah, it's in the Disney Hollywood studios, but is it the same one? I believe. So it's a right which you walk through. Uh. The the Q theme is that you're in a big toy box. You're in Andy's room and you're in a toy box you're walking through, and there's a big audio animatronic Mr. Potato Head or actually animatronic Mr potato Head, who is pretty phenomenal as far as the sophisticated movement

movements he can do and things he can't do. And then you go through a ride where you see three D images and you shoot little darts at targets and stuff. Um, it's cute, cool, it's it's kind of a digital version of the buzz Lightyear ride that that preceded it. So it's another one of those rides where you ride and you you shoot stuff. But it's cute. Um. Yeah, all right, So we're going to talk about the Haunted Mansion now again. If you don't want to know how it works, stop

the podcast now. So, Haunted Mansion had an interesting history. It was part one of the original concepts for Disneyland before Disneyland even opened, but it did not. Um, it wasn't there when Disneyland open because it it was one

of those that had kind of a contentious history. Uh. The original idea was sort of a walk through haunted house attraction, and there was some arguments within Walt Disney Imagineering between imagineers rather since the Walt Disney Matineering was not a formal institution at that point, whether it should be a legit, legitimately scary attraction or if it should be whimsical and funny. Ultimately, it kind of became a

mix between the two. Yeah, I really did. Yeah, there's some scary elements to it, especially if you're a little kid. There's some of the things that happened that are kind of freaky, and then there's some really silly stuff that kind of helps you, you know, relieve some of the tension that you would get from from looking at the scary stuff. Um. The original idea kind of came from

Ken Anderson. Um. Actually, well, I guess Harper Gooff really had the original idea, but Ken Anderson kind of picked took the ball and ran with it and came up with a lot of the concepts that that eventually made their way into the ride. Uh. And there was a story to the ride originally which kind of has come back in recent years and in recent updates to the ride.

This original story involved a sea captain, a ghostly sea captain who had jilted his his wife, his lover, and she had killed herself as a result, and they are both ghosts now and and the wife is actually I believe, haunting the ghost of the husband. So you have a double hunt going on. And uh. And as you progressed through the ride, you would learn more about the family. Uh, you'd find more about the story behind the the two

the husband and wife. You would also discover more about Madame Leota the gypsy who whose head is in a crystal ball as you make your way through the ride, and all these elements kind of tied together. Once the ride eventually made it to construction, most of those elements were abandoned. Um, you can still see hints of it. There would be little bits and pieces where you'd say, oh, well, that was supposed to be the bride at the very end of the ride when you know come back, Uh,

that was supposed to be the wife. Um. Recently, at least in the Disneyland and Disney World versions, they've kind of reincorporated some of those elements, and now you've got sort of a black Widows storyline. There's a woman who has been marrying men and offering them for their money and uh, and so there's a little bit of a

story element inserted back in. But really now it's it's still just uh, mostly a ride where you're going through room by room and seeing all these various ghostly apparitions and effects. So let's talk about a few of them now. The one we were specifically asked about was the pepper ghost effect, which uh, they use a couple of times in the ride, but the most famous, I would I would say. Version of the effect is the ballroom sequence.

On the ballroom sequence, if you're not familiar with the ride, what happens is you're you're writing in these things called doom buggies, which is a version of the omni mover. It's this never yeah, it never stops moving unless they have to load in someone who has a mobility issue. Otherwise they're constantly moving, and you step on a moving sidewalk in order to get into the ride. All right, so you're you're riding through this attraction is no longer

walk through, so that that was abandoned. Um, and you come along a you're you're going along a ballroom sequence where you're looking down into a ballroom. You can see a long table where there's a apparently a birthday party going on. There are ghostly dancers dancing through the room. You can see a couple of ghosts. Uh. There's two portraits of men holding pistols and occasionally ghosts pop out of the portraits and fire pistols at one another. There's

a ghostly organist playing the organ at one end. Um. So there's a lot going on in this scene, and all the ghosts look really amazing. You can see through them, and they appear to have physical presence, but at the same time, you know you can you can see through them, and they can pass through objects. So it's a very interesting effect. It's also incredibly simple. Really, the technology is

not that complicated. It's not even recent. No. Pepper's ghost is a trick that dates back to the nineteenth century, and what it involves is you take a pane of glass as clean as you can possibly make it so that it looks practically invisible if you're looking straight at it. Then with lighting you can create make it a reflective surface so that only reflects certain parts. That depends on

how you've lit the scene correct. So the ghosts that you're looking at when you're looking down into the room are actually below you and above you physically where you are in the omnimover right, you can't see them because the floor and the ceiling block your view of them, right, So so they're not at the same level. No, they can't be at the same level because if they were at the same level, you'd be able to see your own reflection. That the reason why you can't see your

reflection is because you are not lit the way they are. Okay, So those ghosts are really just mannequins or animatronic figures, and they are moving in a very well lit area, and just by changing the lighting levels, you can make the ghost fade in and fade out of existence. And so what you're looking at is a reflection. You're not looking at the real figures that are creating the effect.

So the the dancing ghosts that are dancing in a circle, uh, towards the right end of the ballroom if you've just entered it. At least it's the right end for both Disneyland and Disney World. I can't speak for the other parts. Um, those are actually dancing directly below you or dancing they're moving in a circle directly and as they increase or decrease the level of lighting, they start to fade in and out of your vision. As you go through the ballroom.

All the figures are that are that way as well. So technology actually is pretty simple. It's the lighting and it's the glass. You would think that would be way more complicated because they look like holograms and you're like, how did they have achieve this effect? And it's actually deceptively simple but really cool. It's amazing how sometimes the simplest effects can turn out to be the most effective use of your of your imagineering dollars, if you will.

I mean, because you didn't need to go into c G I or anything fancy like that. It's just you know, the pain of very very clean glass and a couple of well placed lights. I can give you. I can give you one other really cool, actually two others. I'll just do it really quickly because we're running out of time. There are a series of rotating but busts of people who are who they appear to turn these you know, busts being like the stone statue, right, they appear to

turn and watch you as your omnimover passes by. Yeah, I remember those. Uh you know how they do that effect? It's actually pretty cool. Okay. So instead of being a bust where it projects out towards you, they're actually recessed into the wall. It's an optical illusion again by the lighting and and it's recessed in, so it's carved into

the wall. Because the way it's carved in and the way the lighting hits it, it gives you the optical illusion that you're looking at an object that's pointing at you. And that's why it looks it appears to turn I guess because your perception. You're it's all about angles. Yeah, it's all about angles. I had I had a thought

and then it just erupted. There are actually several videos on YouTube that show various ways of creating this effect by by making an origami figure or whatever, and it looks like it looks like a head of a dragon or whatever that's that's biting at you. And then if you just move a little bit off to the right or to the left enough so that you are at a completely different angle of viewing, you can see that it's not pointing at you the way you thought it was.

It's pretty cool. Um. And the other one was I was going to talk about the scrim and the stretching room. Yeah, the stretching room. By the way. Interestingly enough, in half the parks, the floor moves down, and the other half of the parks the room moves up. That's that's weird. Yeah, well, it seems like it would be easier for the floor to move down, well, and it would, except and here's

another reason why imagineers have a tough job. They have to consider the space they're working in, all right, So for instance, in Disneyland, they could dig down and so, and they needed to because the the the mansion that houses the ride is not big enough to house the ride. The actual ride building is kind of behind the mansions, behind the wall. You can't see it from where you are, so you have to take an elevator down to get to the point where you can move into that other building.

That's why the floor goes down in Disneyland. You can't do that disney World. But because of one major geographic feature of Florida swamps the water table. Yeah, if you dig down in Florida, you hit water, So you can't have rides that go down in uh in in disney World. So the instead what they did was they made the wall go up. Well, the top of the of the room is not a solid wooden uh ceiling the way

it appears when you first walk in. It's actually something called a scrim which is a sheet of fabric that, when lit one way, looks like it's you know, opaque, but lit another way, becomes transparent or at least translucent. So at the end of the stretching room sequence, you hear a scream you look up and you suddenly see someone hanging from the very from the rafters at the

top of the room. The way they achieve that as they turned the lights off at the bottom, they turned the lights up at the top, and the light coming through the scrim allows you to see the figure. Neat stuff. As as a matter of fact, imagineering sort of uh is behind Walt Disney World anyway, because because you can't really dig down, they had to they built the underground level on the main people floor around and then built the park on top of it. Right, Yeah, that's that's

pretty fancy stuff, and you never know. I don't think the average visitor knows that. Yeah, they built they built one whole administrative system uh on the ground floor, and then they dumped a whole bunch of sand that they dug up in order to create the lagoon system. They dumped all of that on top of it and built the Magic Kingdom on top of the system of corridors, the Utilo doors. Yeah, I've been through those. They're pretty cool. Like I said, that was part of the backstage tour,

which again really really a neat to are. Yeah, So that kind of wraps up our discussion about imagineers. Uh. I think it's a really awesome job. I would if I were more you know, architecturally minded or design minded, I would definitely want to try it out. Sadly, I

can't draw with a flip. Yeah, I found myself wanting to read a bunch of books that I found, uh, including um, the Imagineering Field, Guide to Magic Kingdom and Walt Disney World and uh another one hold on Designing Disney looks interesting and I mean for other people who are interested in learning more about this, and the Walt Disney Imagineering Behind the Dreams look at making More Magic Real. I added all three of those two my cue with Good Reads, so I will be checking those out sometime.

And if you want to know more about this great, um, pretty specialized field, you know, you might might check them out. I don't know how good they are, they seem to get pretty good ratings. Yeah, if you get a chance to see some of the old wonderful World of Disney shorts as well that Disney would actually walk through and talk about the design of these attractions, um, those are also very useful. Yeah. But anyway, that wraps up this discussion about imagineering. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Paul,

Hope that answer your question. If any of you have questions for us, you can send them into our email address that's tech Stuff at tell stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. If you're a tech stuff and be sure to check us out on Twitter tex Stuff hs ws R handle and you can also find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech stuff h s W for more

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