This is cool, oh this is Animal Kingdom. I love these photos.
Yeah, those are cool. That's cool.
It's gonna get dark soon so figure it out. Oh, light.
Light, light there's some light. There's a light.
Not light, but like, like, the quality of light
Well, remember how they used to be all lit up?
Yeah, let's do that. Okay, let's do that light and lights.
Light is like smell. It is a very, very primal emotional
element.
When we smell something, we immediately react.
We have memories. We have visceral responses,
we have emotional responses.
The same thing is true with light because the human body's
response to light
is more ancient than the human body itself.
It matters to a living thing, whether light is coming from the
sun,
or whether light is coming from a fire.
So we have gathered around fire, around light,
since the various earliest period in human history
and rituals have been built around fire and light for as
long as people have been able to make them.
We spent a lot of time going back and forth to Bali.
And we're always there after dark and we don't work after
dark.
So there are rituals you can go see, there are performances,
there are temple ceremonies,
and you can see their extraordinary manipulation of
fire and light.
Now, in a built environment, like Disney's Animal Kingdom,
there are functional requirements for light,
you can't be open at night if you don't have lights.
So the lights have to be there as a physical object, there has
to be a place light is coming from.
Sometimes that is hidden, you don't know where the light's
coming from, it's just a building has light on it.
But sometimes the light itself, the thing is part of the show.
So that light has to be hanging there during the daytime, when
it's not lit up,
and you can still see it, you can still look at it.
So it has to be an object that is believable in the space that
you're walking around in.
And that's sort of the set design part of the light.
The fact that it is an object that is believable to be in the
place where you are like in Africa or in Asia, or even in
Pandora.
There's a reason why there is light coming from something that
you can believe and still be inside the imaginary world.
But that's not really what light really, really does. Light is a
form of emotion.
The color of light, the direction of light, what they
call the temperature of the light,
how much of it there is, all of that affects us emotionally in
very, very deep ways.
And that's just because we're a living creature, and all living
creatures have strong responses to light.
So the other thing we try to do is to be very careful, and very
deliberate about how we use light.
And that doesn't always mean that we want to be very fancy.
Sometimes we're trying to be very plain about what kind of
light it is and where it comes from
because we want that message about simplicity.
At Disney's Animal Kingdom, the most extraordinary light is the
light that you experience in Pandora, the World of Avatar
because that is a mysterious kind of light that seems to be
coming from living things,
as if it is bioluminescence.
Really a third source of light and one that we're not used to,
and that we have an odd reaction to because it's not sunlight,
and it's not fire light.
It's this third mysterious thing.
And Pandora is full of this third mysterious light. It comes
from living things, from plant material.
My favorite time to be there is at the transition from day into
night as the sun has gone down,
so there's no sunlight, but you can still see, you can see that
the light is coming from a thing.
It's a beautiful time to be there and watch the light change
as it gets dark
until suddenly you're surrounded by a world of mysterious light.
Very, very interesting emotional response.
So you should always remember, in a built environment, when
you're looking at a light,
you're not only looking at a function, but you are looking at
a little encapsulated emotion.