Monthly Archives: July 2022

Installation Art

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Installation art begins in a space. What is the space? It is a space that has most likely been something before. As an art student, I have only installed art in a gallery space. However, the installations at Disney have more of a history. Let’s discuss Tomorrowland. Some of the attractions include The Carousel of Progress, Tomorrowland Transit Authority People Mover, Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, and Monster’s Inc. Laugh Floor.

The attractions are all installation art. They each have a different impact on the built environment and affect those who experience them differently. The Carousel of Progress (art installation) originally commissioned by General Electric and designed by WED (the original Imagineers) for the 1964 World’s Fair. The Carousel originally installed in New York in 1964, moved to Disneyland in California in 1967 and reinstalled in Magic Kingdom in Disney World Florida in 1975. The installation had continued modifications each time the art moved but the same concept of rotating theater telling the journey of a family and technology stayed true.

Behind the scenes of Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin are the skeletons of the past installation. It is in the same building and was an installation that was constructed in 1972. After decades of use, it was decommissioned and in 1998 Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin opened. Jumping topics to branding – Buzz Lightyear was popular when I was young with the Toy Story movies and now 20 years later still going strong with the release of the Lightyear movie this summer.

I used these two examples of installation art to show the extremes. One was designed and created off-site and installed in various locations. I am sure there were many more constraints in the installation that were addressed while not influencing the outcome of the art. While the second example of art installation actually had the constraint of the location, size and shape of the space. The theme was set and the design had to fit in those boundaries.

As an artist, I expect there may be more constraints than I’ve yet experienced in the studio space. However, I think some of the constraints could be a wonderful challenge for an art installation.

Mickey Mouse

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Originally named Mortimer, Mickey Mouse is one of the most recognizable brands worldwide. Most of the first week of training has been about branding and upholding the brand as cast members. Two items given to me and the other new cast members today are the nametag and the Mickey ears! A bit of detail on the nametag also contains the location or university you attend. Stetson University is a small school so I will enjoy seeing what connections this will make for me.

The Mickey ears are amazing. Mickey himself presented them to me and they have my name on the back. Disney is all about brand and the new cast training is intensive and focused on making magic. By teaching the cast in an intentional process, the brand remains consistent. Mickey brought the magic for me today. Today was the strongest example of making the magic. By Disney taking these small gestures of adding my name to these items, it made it all magical.

As we learn more today in seminars about the safety culture, it will be the most important thing for us to focus on with the guests. I will be interested in how this relates to the rides. As my passion is sculpture, I see the rides as installation art. The installation art at Disney defines a brand, delivers an expectation of quality and is experienced by hundreds of thousands of people a year. I will be getting the behind the scenes look at the installations, operations and management at Magic Kingdom this summer.

The Next Steps for Tech Savvy

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Now that Tech Savvy has opened, more work is, of course, to be done! One factor surrounding a gallery that someone might not think about needing to do is putting together a guide for the museum docent. A museum docent is a volunteer who gives tours on the the galleries at a museum, and because they’re going into it without any knowledge of the gallery, it’s up to the museum and those that made the exhibit to provide the most necessary and important information about the exhibit to the docent in order for them to provide the best tour possible. Putting together a docent guide isn’t always necessary for temporary exhibits but since Tech Savvy is going to be installed until December, the department decided that it would be worth it. Since I did a large amount of the labels for the exhibit, I was asked to help put together the docent guide that would go on file for the Tech Savvy exhibit.

After giving a tour today in the Root and Sloth exhibits, I spent a good part of my afternoon walking around Tech Savvy, imagining how to group the information together and how one might walk around the room so I could put all the information in a document in a fluent order. When putting the information in the document, a lot of it is copy and pasting or grabbing key information from the labels and informational posters on the walls. This part of the process doesn’t require any extra research, as it has already been done by the time the items are on display in the gallery. It’s mostly organization and thinking about the best way to present the information to the docent who will be reading the guide so they can present the information to those that they’re giving the tour to.

Organizing Fossils

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Now that the exhibit, Tech Savvy, has been opened, the office is looked for another big project to take up. Of course, the Summer Learning Institute (which is what the museum’s summer camp is called) is still underway, as well as any scheduled tours. This means that I’ve been busying myself helping out with the summer camp (watching over classes while they’re eating lunch or other tasks like that) in the afternoon while my mornings are taken up with tours of our Root and Sloth galleries with outside summer camps. A lot of aspects of the internship have become fairly routine and comfortable by this point. For example, I’ve become so familiar with the material I speak on when I give tours that I doubt I’ll forget it once I leave, so I’ll gain a plethora of new fun facts.

Beyond this, however, there’s a storage room that has some fossil material in it that’s part of the education department. It was mentioned to me upon first starting here that it might be part of my responsibilities to sort through it and organize it and, once seeing it, it is certainly a daunting task. I helped the department come up with a system that would help organize the materials in there. I found some affordable clear storage bins that could fit on shelves and have doors that open outwards (like a microwave) so it would be more easily accessible. They liked my idea and it sounded like they might go ahead and buy them, so in my future, sorting the storage room may be ahead of me.

Finished up the Video

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I finished the promo video for Young Sound Seekers last weekend, and I think it came out well. Rendering out the final cuts was a bit annoying, though. The first time I rendered it out, I forgot to change the first clip to something more stable and had to remove a walking clip because I couldn’t keep it stabilized. During this render, I muted the student interviews track so I wouldn’t hear that repeating as I worked on it. However, I forgot to unmute it after I finished working, so it wasn’t in the second final. So, I unmuted the interview for the third version and sent it over to Eve. When she got this version, though, the file size was half the other versions, and she couldn’t play it even though it was a .mp4 file. Something went wrong either when I transferred the file to One Drive or when Eve downloaded it because everything was good on my end. So, for the fourth and final time, I rendered the video just to be safe and sent it over using We Transfer, which worked. After I sent the video to Eve, she added some of the interviews she took and title and end cards. I am glad that I was able to get this video done and provide a quick turnaround for her to be still able to include the parts she wanted. Now that I am done working on the video, I will record a quick testimonial about my experience with Young Sound Seekers for Eve. 

Exhibit Opening

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Yesterday, on July 23rd, the exhibit titled Tech Savvy, opened to the public! It was very exciting. So exciting, in fact, that I took my mom and grandma to the Museum of Arts and Sciences to check out the exhibit in order to see how it would be received by the public. Finishing up the exhibit on Friday was a huge relief, as the project had been going on longer than I had been interning there. In fact, one of the first things that I did was write up a label on a vacuum from 1911 that ended up in one of the two vignettes in the exhibit. It was super cool to see a bunch of labels that I wrote up on display in the exhibit. In general, it was incredibly neat to be a part of that process and to work with a bunch of artifacts like the old typewriters, cameras, and phonographs.

One of the goals of the exhibit is to spark nostalgia from people, to get a reaction that makes them go “oh, yeah, my mom used to have one of those in her living room!” or something akin to that. Going to the exhibit with my family (ages 70 and 90), I got reactions like that to a few things, and it was very satisfying. Now that the exhibit is up, it will stay up for a few more months. A couple of my friends said that they’re going to try and stop by to see it, which is super cool! It’s fun to be a part of something that’s going to continue to be on display after I leave, even if it’s only for a little bit.

The aftermath of The Meeting

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I had a meeting with Eve this week and which was very productive. I was told that the video was good overall, but I needed to make a few changes. Some of the clips were shaky and required to be stabilized. I tried to edit them and apply a stabilizer to them but there wasn’t a good point that the effect could use as a reference so I just got rid of the clip. Another note I got was to remove some of the clips of the students recording sounds around Davis Hall. I had to change them not because they were bad, but because Eve wanted a larger focus on the students recording at the parks and the students learning how to edit the recordings. Eve and I worked on the video at Trilogy Coffee where we decided on what photos to add. She also told me that my student interviews were a little muddy and needed to be altered a bit. What I did before was throw the files into Audacity and use their noise removal because the AC was being picked up on the mic. This time I put the files into Reaper and EQed the files to remove the sound, while the AC is still a little audible it is not that bad and the student’s voices are not too affected. Today, I will recut the interviews and add them to this new version while adding some space to include some of the interviews Eve took.

James Webb Telescope Photo Release

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NASA released photos from the James Webb telescope this Tuesday that just passed. I heard about it immediately because education’s office where I have my desk is shared by planetarium staff, so of course they were talking about it as soon as the photos were released to the public, as well as the buildup leading up to the release. While the release was on Tuesday, it’s exciting for the museum, because we were able to already get the first four photos that were released from the telescope printing and put up in the planetarium lobby and replace four older photos that were taken from the Hubble telescope. The four photos we put up on the wall was the nebula, the quintet of galaxies, the deep field which the deepest and sharpest infrared photo of the universe to date (the photo contains galaxies that are billion of years old, created during the initial Big Bang), and then lastly, the most visually appealing, the Carina Nebula. We’re going to add labels to them soon, but they’re already up and ready to be seen.

While the James Webb telescope offered a nice getaway from a current large project, that doesn’t mean it’s not there. We’re currently in a bit of a limbo situation. We need to start moving objects into the gallery, as well as cleaning them up. However, they have a planned floor cleaning in the gallery, so our schedule got moved back a day, so we have a day less to get the Tech Savvy exhibit setup. So, between Tuesday and Friday, we will be cleaning the exhibit pieces and moving them into the gallery, and Monday they will be moving everything out, I presume, while they do the floor and gallery cleaning before the new items are moved in and arranged. It’s all very exciting! We’re getting very close to the opening of the exhibit.

Disney Traditions

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Before new “cast members” begin work inside the parks everyone attends Disney Traditions.

This is a big deal in Disney culture and for Disney employees. Every Disney employee goes through a Disney’s tradition. It is about 4 hour long class learning about the history of the company. Cast members learn about the five keys in Disney culture and careers inside of Disney. Disney also shares some insight on what other park employees do.

The class started off with an amazing hostess! As a general note all of the cast members doing the training are really fantastic for the College Program.

Disney’s five keys include Safety , Courtesy, Show, Efficiency and Inclusion. I’ll discuss these in detail later. The priority of the keys are not in order but safety is definitely the first priority of all Disney employees.

Even though we are all working in different locations doing different assignments they still go over the general rules of everyone. Some of the different safety procedures reviewed scenarios such as active shooter and fires and other life safety things.

Some courtesy training included when giving a guest directions we don’t point with one finger we point with two fingers or we use our whole hand.

After about the 4 hour meeting we had a special guest – Mickey Mouse!

Disney Traditions was definitely a very informative and good experience to have in to see how a big company runs. They communicate very clearly what is expected of their cast members. Disney has brand standard manuals including the “Disney Look” which I will share in a future post.

I was in this meeting with about 100+ other people. And even though I was in there with all those people the Disney cast made me feel like they were only talking to me and that I was the only one in the room learning. The Disney magic is an important part of the brand!

May 2 – Disney Move-in Day Flamingo Crossings

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Today was a big day – my arrival date. Not just starting a new internship but relocating onto the Disney campus.

Arrival day was assigned 5/2/2022 at 9:30 AM at Flamingo Crossings. The apartments are very very nice they come with LOTS of outdoor and indoor community gathering amenities – two pools with movie screens, a big outdoor area basketball court workout room, grills, lawn chess and seating areas to name a few. Branding is so important for Disney and is very obvious from the housing campus for the cast members. The Disney experience begins here.

After check-in I promptly proceeded to get my company ID and to move into my room which I share with another roommate named Gillian. We share the living space with 2 other women. I am the only new “cast member” today. The others have been here for 6 to 9 months.

I am so excited to be able to have this opportunity to work for Disney and see how their company runs inside and outside of the park. To observe all the work it takes to run such a successful “creative” business. 

The early afternoon meeting included all the new “cast members” who moved in today. It’s exciting to meet and make connections with other people that I can network with and keep in contact with for the future. Dinner was with some new friends I met from other states and other nations.

Networking will be an important thing to do this summer.  I am so excited to meet even more people! 

Today was exhausting in a good way. I also took time to explore around the apartments and took the campus transportation to see where I would be entering the park once work begins. I rode the bus to Magic Kingdom so I could time how long the commute will take me to be on time to work. Disney provides a busing system from Flamingo Crossings to the parks. I think is a very good resource and also will give me good experience navigating bus systems and public transportation.