Category — Imagineering

It’s not often that fans of a particular artist get a chance to give back to that artist. But today us Disney fans get that chance. If you ever got a chuckle from a classic Chip & Dale cartoon or were wowed by a Disneyland audio-animatronic then you’ve experienced the magic of celebrated Disney Legend and Animator Bill Justice.

Justice is getting ready to celebrate his 96th Birthday, but he’s been in a rehabilitation home for the last few years and not receiving many visitors.

Here’s a note sent to me from a source I trust on how you can make a difference.

We need your help flooding Disney Legend Bill Justice with cards and letters. He has been residing in a convalescent home the past few years.

For those of you unfamiliar with his name, Bill Justice is best known for his work as an animator of Chip & Dale, and directed several cartoons including “What’s the Truth About Mother Goose?” He also programmed the Country Bear Jamboree, Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion. He was very active at fan events such as Disneyana Conventions and NFFC events in the 80’s and 90’s.

We’ve been asked to share an address where cards and letters can be sent. Please help us show him that we still remember him and appreciate what he has given us as fans. Perhaps send him a picture that you took with him or just a simple card. You can send the cards and notes to:

Bill Justice
Arbor View Wellness & Rehabilitation Center
1338 20th Street
Santa Monica, CA 90404

Thanks for helping out. Let’s show Bill how much we appreciate the joy and fun he has brought into the world.

Do you make a habit of chatting with strangers? How about someone you’re sitting next to on an airplane for a few hours? Perhaps you should. You never know who you might meet. In this case, Noah met a man he’s calling Mr. Q.

Mr. Q had a large role in designing the ambient sound for Walt Disney World and solving one of the big problems encountered when moving from land to land… where does one soundtrack end and the other begin?

In the mid 1990’s, the park started researching the problem. It would eventually find no existing solution, so the engineers had to design and construct, on their own, one of the most complex and advanced audio systems ever built. The work paid off: today, as you walk through Disney World, the volume of the ambient music does not change. Ever. More than 15,000 speakers have been positioned using complex algorithms to ensure that the sound plays within a range of just a couple decibels throughout the entire park. It is quite a technical feat acoustically, electrically, and mathematically.

As we land, I ask Mr Q what he considers the highlight of his career. He describes how he wrote some software for “manufacturing emotion” with the thousands of new speakers in the park. The system he built can slowly change the style of the music across a distance without the visitor noticing. As a person walks from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, for example, each of the hundreds of speakers slowly fades in different melodies at different frequencies so that at any point you can stop and enjoy a fully accurate piece of music, but by the time you walk 400 feet, the entire song has changed and no one has noticed.

More at How Mr. Q Manufactured Emotion.

(Via BoingBoing)

People sometimes ask me why Disney stopped producing video podcasts. I wondered about that too, but it looks like the video production never really ended. They just don’t call it a ‘podcast’ anymore. Now you can just subscribe to a couple YouTube channels and you’ll have quite a bit of new content from The Walt Disney Company coming all the time. The only problem with Youtube is it’s not really suited for longform video, but perhaps Disney Parks and Disney Living will get a Hulu channel of their own soon to solve that.

The latest to hit is a new ‘promotional’ video from Walt Disney Imagineering. The video masterfully edits in a bunch of stuff you’ve probably seen before but also tosses in a few new exciting items from the folks at WDI. This would work as a great recruiting piece… if only WDI was hiring.

I love how they snuck Joe Rhode in there at the end. That’s what an Imagineer should look like if you ask me.

Network World looks inside the wi-fi network that makes Disney’s Toy Story Midway Mania attraction such a hit.

Powering Toy Story Mania! are 154 graphics workstations running Windows XP that are used to render 3-D images on the ride’s screens at 60 frames per second. The workstations communicate with each other and with the four gaming systems onboard each vehicle using an industrial-strength wireless network based on 802.11 technology.

The wireless network integrates a huge amount of real-time information gathered from the ride: the exact location of the vehicles within one inch; the rotation of the four turrets on each end of the vehicles; and the pitch, yaw and activity of each onboard shooting device. This information is fed into the graphics workstations so they can accurately render images of pies or rings coming out of the shooting devices at accurate angles and with accurate projectiles.

Look for this technology to be implemented in new ways in future Disney attractions or even the queue areas.

Disneyland Park turns 54 today.  Disney Legend Marty Sklar is retiring from his position as Executive Vice President and Imagineering Ambassador at Walt Disney Parks & Resorts.  What better time for him to get the special Disney honor of his own window on Main Street, U.S.A. at the Disneyland Resort?  My report, complete with photos, is after the jump.

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Shameless plug time.  My latest column, a highly personal one, is up at LaughingPlace.com.  Disneyland celebrates its 54th Anniversary on Friday (more to come on that), and that also happens to be te 20th Anniversary of the original Splash Mountain.  I became obsessed with the attraction as it was under construction, so I have a lot of say about it and the late Show Producer, Bruce Gordon, a personal hero of mine.

The San Gabriel Valley Tribune profiles a team of three Cal State Fullerton Students who were finalists in a Walt Disney Imagineering contest to design and build a prototype of an attraction. Their idea is an interactive adventure featuring a guy named Otto.

Their concept, called Operation SNAP: Destination Dragon, would supplant riders as explorers on a boating adventure with Otto as he pursues a legendary Chinese dragon.

The real culprit is total immersion — in the ride, in the scenery, in Otto — something Berger would want riders to experience, too.

To that end, guests on Operation SNAP (Otto’s Society of Natural and Artificial Phenomena, of which he is the sole member) would be equipped with mounted camera devices to collect photographic evidence of all the mythical creatures residing in and around the professor’s Chinese wildlife preserve. The more photos, the more points earned by riders.

Click through to the article to see some of the concept art and storyboards from the attraction.

LaughingPlace.com has posted two reports from the Newport Beach Film Festival, and one of them is my column.  Two screenings were of special interest to Disney fans.  “the boys” (lack of capitalization intended) is a new documentary about the Sherman Brothers.  It is fascinating and very informative.  The Shermans were a songwriting team that Walt Disney himself literally brought on-staff to write music for Disney projects – both on big screen and in theme parks.  Enchanted Tiki Room?  Yup.  “it’s a small world”?  Them.  “Mary Poppins” and Winnie the Pooh projects… But their work hasn’t been limited to Disney.  They have worked on other live-action and animated projects, and pop songs.  Their work is being featured in major stage musicals as I type.

But the personal interaction between the brothers is also detailed in this film, and that is a fascinating subject by itself.

The other screening was mostly Disney animated shorts that haven’t been seen on the big screen in decades – going as far back as 1929!  Click through for the details about both screenings.  Doug Marsh also has his report as well.