Imagineering is the combination of imagination and engineering know-how where we take ideas and bring
them to life and it's all about story we bring stories to life in a theme-park atmosphere where
people can come in and experience a whole day rather than just you know a couple hours in a
dark Theater a lot of our work we do here is very much like a traditional post-production facility
we do recording and mixing and pre dubs here but the challenge becomes the application for what
we do a typical length of a project can last up to five years from inception and working on the
very first scratch tracks to actual installation you know Walt figured out years ago that music
is a key device in storytelling and music and storytelling in the Disney theme parks is just as
important music can sort of cut from the head to the heart and go right to the emotion a situation
and it does a lot of storytelling that way you may not understand when you walk into a darkened
room what's going on but as soon as you start hearing the music of Haunted Mansion or prior
to the Caribbean it sets the tone and the time in the place about what's going on we may or may
not notice but when you go to a Disneyland theme park you're not going to see very many speakers
anywhere if you're seeing them it's because it was an intention to set up part of the storyline
when you're moving through an attraction if you're on a moving vehicle you need lots of
speakers everywhere because often the speeds are very close to you also often you don't want to
have to be too loud so you end up having lots of speakers everywhere and nobody wants to see them
and that's a whole entire art into itself that we work with our show set people and shows that
design team to not only hide them but then have them painted over properly so they blend right in
and one of the tricky parts about doing audio for these theme park attractions is you know with a
film you're only you're focused on one thing when you're going through a ride if you look over here
you're going to see what's happening there if you look over here you can see what's happening
there and the sound is always on for all of it so you can't just hope they're looking there turn it
and you know feature that line so we have to be really careful and orchestrating all of this so as
you go through you get just the pieces as you're getting them in a film you would crossfade between
seems you'd crossfade the music well for us our crossfade happens on the vehicle from the guest
perspective physically moving from one scene to the next pirates has over a hundred soundtracks
in it as you're riding through you get all these different elements that change from here to here
if we need a sound to come from a particular spot we can actually put a speaker over there and so a
typical theater show will end up being 42.2 sound mix so it gets very big very fast what a composer
has to do for an attraction is very different than what they would do for an album a sound
track anything linear because I chose do not work linearly one of the challenges with writing music
for rollercoaster for dissing theme parks is the coasters don't always move through the attraction
at the same rate of speed and so to accommodate that the music tracks on our attractions are
usually broken up into segments with long tails at the end to accommodate a transition point into the
next cue of music and our ride engineers and audio engineers have developed technologies to basically
reach rigor and resync the music at every had certain points throughout the attraction for Space
Mountain it's gone through a couple iterations and in early 2000 to 2003 we had the opportunity to
enhance the mountain as they were updating the ride track Michael Giacchino came on board and
wrote an original composition for Space Mountain and one of our fun experiences was kicking it
off they had already torn the mountain apart and ripped out all the tracks and it was difficult to
represent the experience to him so the only place we could do it was we had to fly to Tokyo to ride
Space Mountain to give him the actual visceral experience and part of our attempt was we had
to actually take some music with us put it on an iPod put some headphones on and ride around Space
Mountain to sort of feel tempo wise what were pacing wise what worked and what was the energy
to match the ride vehicle experience when I came here there was an old gentleman who was retiring
in the Jimmy McDonald the legend in sound effects Jimmy created more sound effects devices than
anybody that could have lived and more classic devices and so it was very difficult to get things
into the studio and record but when they were doing Bambi you couldn't have a forest fire in
the studio Jimmy had the brilliance to realize if he cut up a bunch of pieces of bamboo and bundled
them together he could create that fire and so that was very convincing and it really worked well
and I'd like to show you a lot of other effects Jimmy and I can show you some up right down the
hall here now this room smells old because it is old most everything in here is from 30s and
40s it's been around now this is just an old truck break crumb Jimmy would sand these things until he
got exactly what he wanted to this is an a-flat but this is a Peter Pan Clarion bells it's pure
this is the marching ants from T for 200 on this side you'll see it's got little brass tacks and on
the other side it's got rubber boots and for marching on the dirt this is a sound box and
you've got a string and of course your risings of Dao and you play this with your fingers
this was the classic quote can called a croak can because he used them to make frogs and you
can pluck it or play that this stick has normally it's played with a horsehair bow
but I just have to put a little rosin on this stick this is dental dam on top of
a wooden dowel and surgical tubing two different ways to do to do these birds
one is just with the ostrich feathers flying and the other for bigger birds was to take a
piece either a chamois or a piece of butcher paper that you've wadded up a hundred times
what do you stop in all of our attractions it's really critical to have super clean dialogue we
mornings we start off to the somewhat esoteric but we're using plastic tube microphones with
kind diaphragms the casting of the voices is really really important somebody like Paul frees
doing the Haunted Mansion is a classic voice that everybody knows and it's perfect for that
environment you know they tell the story on a gentleman Dallas McKennon is the voice of the
Big Thunder Mountain Railroad the one that says this here is the wireless ride and a wilderness
so you select a voice like that that really fits the story you're trying to tell it's a miner he's
telling you about this thing you're going to go on you're going to ride it it's going to be exciting
as far as mixing in the field and how we look at our attractions we they're pretty much one
offs as we go along each time you know a feature film may make a 5.1 mix that's going to end up in
4,000 theaters you know we build a theater and mix into it soren was an interesting attraction
it's basically an omni max film turned on its side and getting a console up into a position
you know 50 feet in the air to start mixing it was a challenge and we ended up building this gigantic
scaffolding and getting in cranes and lifting up our mixing console and actually setting it up in
this platform and so we're crawling up there with harnesses and actually sitting up there and mixing
we had two very interesting audio experiences on Hall of Presidents the first was with our narrator
we got we brought in Morgan Freeman to actually narrate the entire attraction for us and having a
performer of that quality and caliber raised the game for the entire attraction our second very
interesting experience was recording President Obama President Obama was sworn into office in
January and I believe it was March or April we had a team in the White House recording him in the map
so that was a really amazing experience to get him that quickly and to keep the project on
track and programming the figure and getting all that work done so fast after his being sworn into
office what I'm excited about for the future of Imagineering is the attractions we haven't built
yet we have so many new creative ideas on the books so many challenges that are technologically
a challenge storytelling challenges but musically we will weave that thread to bring them all
together you know as Walt said as long as there's imagination in the world Disneyland will never be
finished and it's that way with our attractions something that's really exciting about the future
for me is going back into a show like Star Tours where we're going to redo it it's going to be a
much more exciting thing there's secrets I can't tell you about but when you write it you're going
to be really really blown away the opening day watching people walk off the rides and that's our
reward we don't get a curtain call we just get the guest walking in and hugging their mommies
you
come