In the last video, we talked about how the architecture of buildings can be
used to support the theme and story of a land, but buildings are just one part of
creating the spaces in which our stories take place.
Landscaping is another important aspect of themed environments.
It might look like the plants in a land have always been there, but every hill, tree, rock, and blade of grass is
carefully designed and placed to reflect the central story and theme.
We talked earlier about how the architecture of a building can make you feel different
ways, the same thing goes for landscape. For example, large trees might make you
feel like something's been there for a really long time, whereas thorny bushes could be scary and intimidating.
Let's hear more from a few Imagineers about how they approach landscape design.
Landscape's a particularly hypnotic art
form because trees and bushes so powerfully seem to be like they've
always been there, so when you walk through a finished landscape you have
this powerful sensation that it's always been that way, and yet of course in our
world it's entirely designed and every bit as much designed as any form of architecture.
We worked very very closely with our landscape designers, who not
only work the whole development of the site and how its laid out, but in the
choice of all the planting materials and the planting beds.
In creating a land like Treasure Cove, we go from very formal gardens, to very wild and tropical
settings around our canoe ride, which is intended to be set right in the middle of the jungle.
For Disney's Animal Kingdom and for Pandora we're working at
a very, very high level of photorealistic detail so we need things to look absolutely real.
absolutely real. So for example, when we were sculpting the floating mountains
and I am looking at the model and I'm looking at all the roots, and all the
vines, and they have this oddly fantasy look to them.
They look like they belong in a fairy tale because the designers are making them up and when you make
something up you're using your brain to
imagine how it would really be, but in the real world there are so many factors
affecting the way something looks that often while it's very real it doesn't make that much sense.
So we hiked around in the jungle and we photographed, and
observed, and sketch real tree roots, and real vines on real giant trees, growing
in a real rainforest, which are doing things nobody would expect.
They're past being logical and so we brought all that information and they redid all these
finds so that no longer did they look like an imaginary vine, now suddenly they
looked like real vines because they were coming from the observation of actual, real vines growing in a real forest.
As Joe just mentioned, Imagineers often do a lot of research to understand how things look and behave in the real world,
but our job isn't to recreate the real world. Rather, we use these observations to
inform our design to make our themed spaces more believable.
Sometimes Imagineers will use living plants in a landscape design, sometimes they'll use
fabricated human-made plants, and sometimes they'll use a combination of the two.
So in the case of Pandora, there was a very, very intimate collaboration
between the landscape designers who are working with real, living plants and the
show set designers and rock work experts who are actually creating artificial plants.
And the point was because they collaborated in this way, the final
product makes it very, very difficult for a casual viewer to identify which plant is handmade and which plant is real.
We will often times try to share a plant
palette with the designers for the artificial foliage.
A plant palette is the plant vocabulary that we're using to populate a land, so it's the species of
trees that we're concentrating on, any of the shrub, and ground cover species, that all makes up the plant palette.
There are also some interesting challenges and
opportunities when it comes to the practical issues of creating a landscape design.
For example, can we get water to where it's needed? Can the plants survive
in the local climate of the park? And how will the landscape change over time?
Landscape design is there to beautify. It's there to mask things that you don't
want to see, like say a big air-conditioning duct or a back of house door,
so you plant very thickly to to control what the guests see. And it also provides shade.
Somebody has designed all the underground plumbing to keep that
landscape alive, someone has figured out how to move these giant objects and put them in place.
Our story is set in the Caribbean, we wanted it to feel very
tropical but in reality, our land, Treasure Cove, is set in Shanghai which
has a very different climate and very different seasons of the Caribbean.
So there is a real science to choosing the plants than our Caribbean and look and
feel and maybe even indigenous to that area, that will survive the cold winters of Shanghai.
There are tricks to getting a landscape to appear grown-in
and old, like it's been there for a long time. Just one example, you can go find a
tree growing could be growing in somebody's yard next to their house it's
been growing there for 40 years, 60 years, and because of that it's grown up next
to the house and then it bends away from the house, and it grows up over there.
So you buy that tree, you dig it up, you put it on a truck, you bring it to your
theme park, you plant it, and then you build your building right next to it so
that the building follows the shape of the tree.
When you're done it looks like that tree has been growing next to your building for 40 years,
which means the building you just built that is less than a year old must be 40 years old.
Use the next exercise to explore how landscaping and plant life in your land
will support your story and theme, while at the same time remaining practical and functional.