I’m a little behind on the missions, but better late than never! For this week Mission, I decided to go with the Watch option, which is to watch a talk from Don Carson, one of the concept artists for Disney theme parks, who later started to work more frequently with virtual, rather than physical worlds. In this talk from UX Week 2013, Don talks about his journey from building real worlds to building virtual ones, and shares some lessons that theme parks can teach us when we look at storytelling in virtual spaces.
First off, it’s fascinating to hear someone with first-hand experience in design Disneyland theme park. I grew up watching Mickey Mouse and Goofy, and just a few years ago I was fortunate enough to attend Disneyland theme park with my family. The place was so big it took us an entire day to scratch a corner of it. I even noticed different smells, lighting, and sounds that created a magical and intriguing atmospherics. It’s my honor now to know the guy behind that great work, at least some of it. Even though he wasn’t the smoothest talker in the world, he express such deep passion about his work from the Disneyland themepark, MIST themepark-based game , or the newest ‘Tiki Archeture’ – hawaiian-themed VR experience.
I already got a dip into his creative process, and how some of the creation was made. He started out with a 3D-vision in his mind, then draw it out on paper as he goes. He paid lots of attention to details, in term of scales, color, and/or positions of objects. All of that was to communicate with different parts of the team , whether graphic designer, programmers, architectures, etc, so they can get the bigger picture right away. i like how he went the extra miles to include others in his project, which is fantastic. Then, he either rendered the 2D model into Unity/Unreal to see how things scale and position very quickly, as he said a 2D Model on paper can turn into 3D in Unity within as short as a week; or he hands over the 2D design into the architectures, which will soon turn that idea into a bricks&stone project at a physical theme park. His original model was detailed enough to allow that flexibility in the industry, making him a superior theme park designer.
I definitely learned something from this talk, and looking forward to next week’s mission!
Best,
VN
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Virtuoso Journal 