D23 Interview: Tony Baxter Reveals Surprising Details About Disney Attractions

I love that you referenced the ice machine yeah those were legends no it was a resume and if you were on it for the first 45 days you have to watch it because it definitely was and it was really cool yeah it worked. Surprisingly: that would work on knee support projection, it wouldn't work, yes, and now the Raptor's ejection is pretty good, but there are new ways to do it in higher definition and that's the constant problem with technology: you're chasing it all time. I'm sure one of the things we tried to do when we could do it was create a situation where Mara's eye, you know, breaks the ceiling and a lot of the ceiling gives way and falls right into the right path and breaks. and I had been looking for a way to do it because if you use foam or whatever, they all get rounded up into balls, you know, and all the fluff and everything that goes on revealing that Dirty is in the room, so we came up with the idea that ice is essentially a rock and a liquid and a gas depending on how hot it is, the same as any other mineral, so it's a little bit lower, its hard temperatures are a little bit lower or higher than most rocks you know like you.

You can melt aluminum and all that, just like you can water, so we did it and it looked fantastic when those rocks weighed a hundred pounds and when I hit it it broke into pieces that went everywhere and it would have actually been built. after about four hours or so and then there would be an avalanche of everything sliding down the mountain so if you were on a bridge you would look back and there would be a give, you would think you just left oh my god how are they doing it? This is amazing, so I was very disappointed when we found out, you know, but the attitude was good, there's a lot of other things happening and people are so surprised that you know that others voted, you know that it's expendable, so, well, you desire. some and you lose, you said that was there for a month, so there were months of people that yes, oh, yes, yes, and it was every 18 seconds that we had to go to Salinas and we found a good machine that was used in the collection . of broccoli and other vegetables that had to be frozen immediately and they were able to make 100 pounds of ice every 15 seconds, you know, and then once it hit the bottom, there was a screw that went up and reached the top and mixed with water sweet and compacted into a block and colored with tea, which was, you know, a plant substance, it wasn't toxic or anything and it looked like a big old round strawberry, Brown Boulder, you know?

We talk about something that is actually there and that would not have entered if it had not been for work. We do a lot of mockups and if so, it was demonstrated in our parking lot and it worked well, you know? it's just that when you run it all day and night, the ice lowers the temperature of the whole area, so the Disney type maintenance had to come in and try to break up the ice at the bottom and get it flowing, and I put a heater in there, I think that would have melted it and then I would have just sent it back, that wasn't my responsibility, so you know, but in terms of all the projects we go through, you don't just come up with the idea. but then you have to time test it and get reliability over a period of time that you know, so that you can walk away from it for weeks or months and that every day, when you turn it on in the morning, it has to be something that they do not do.

It doesn't have to be in Hollywood like an explosion in Hollywood all at once and after filming it from every possible location, they walk away and say that's a summary and they throw it all the way in and they usually set up their filming so that the disaster off the set is the last thing they do you know we're good we're blowing it up tomorrow so you better film all the good stuff before this so you know it's a one time deal but with us it's forever and with all the many .

attractions

you've been involved in you can't even summarize how the process of creating something like that has changed over time well, in some ways a lot, in some ways no, so technology gives you a lot of new tools to use in the Wrights. like we were using a lot of digital image integration into the

attractions

, you couldn't really do that very well with film.

We liked the old arrivals like Haunted Mansion, which have some instances of real movies that were projected on a normal movie projector with film loops running and it was doable, but nowadays, the fact that it's all, there are no moving parts , it's just digital storage of data and the resolutions are getting higher and higher, so you can do things like what Luke showed you today. in the pirate voyage that maybe five years ago you wouldn't have been able to get to the resolution to where you could know that people can walk into a space like that and totally believe in something that you know for what it was, he said twelve times the size of a screen. , so those kinds of skills are constantly changing, they open new windows, but on the other side it's like thinking about an idea and figuring out how we're going to demonstrate it, you build the models, you make sketches and you do all the same things and those tools, no believe.

Oh, obviously, you know we have what we call a plate where you can put on a headset or go into a virtual space and that helps, but in the end you know it doesn't. you really get this idea of ​​what it's like to actually see the thing fully rendered better than with a little cardboard model and a cardboard model you can have control and everyone picks it up and looks at it and like they're saying, Could I mention that you could roll to the only person down between the boats so you can see it and so we use it all?

You know, if you want to do it really fast, that crew then you use a digital lock. Oh, and then if I really want to talk about where the barnacles look best and how many of them you need a model, a real model, you have to put all that in, so you've been a part of so many iconic attractions. I'm pretty sure it's just all of us. I know your attractions because I am one of the oldest. I never got to experience the Wonderland of nature. Oh, Big Thunder is Disneyland to me. Do you have a favorite attraction of yours or just don't you?

I tell people everyone has their moment where it's like. having a new child, you know, while you have that child, it's what your whole life is about, you know, and then it becomes one of the children and you can't say, well, this child is better than, but having said that , I can tell you. What was the most fun or challenging thing to work on and would that be, from a travel standpoint, making Indiana Jones? It had so many bases that it was probably one of the most interesting things to do and Disneyland Paris from the challenge of Bringing the innocent American view of things to a very sophisticated Western point of view, you know, in some ways, going to Asia was bringing something where you know the ability to read it is a little dull compared to how well Westerners can read something that's designed for Westerners, it's like I'm looking at four different dynasties of temples there, it wouldn't have the refinement to go well, that It's the Ming Dynasty and this is this one.

I don't know, they're just all temples. and I think you know, Asia is a little more forgiving of that, whereas going to Paris, you know if that gothic column and the castle is wrong, then you're in trouble, so I said, let's not do gothic columns, let's do it. . walkable trees and hold them up so we don't compare ourselves to any Dom tree or chart or any of the ones you know, the show notes or Shawn addresses castles and you know by staying away from that and having a dragon in the basement and storybook walls. fairies and stuff, it was better than saying 12 isn't the world, which is based largely on a lot of real castles in France and that's fine because you'd have to travel 5,000 miles to see them and while we're only about a hundred miles away distance from all of them, so in the creative process all these projects that you have worked on, in which phase do you find it most rewarding?

Would it be brainstorming to come up with concepts or research and creation? of this or the ending where everything is done and you can see the results of all your hard work, that's a bit of a strange question because I like the beginning and the end, I hate the middle, it's great to have the idea and you say. I sold it, oh my God, let's do it and then the next day you're like, how are we going to do it? You know, I have no idea what we're going to do and then there's a point and it was fun. because I was walking through Animal Kingdom and I walked into the avatar area and everyone is worried about how we're going to end up.

I said you're done. I said all this from now on will be fun making it more beautiful by making it beautiful. Seeing all the things come to life and all that, the last part is because you know how all the systems are going to work. You know how all things will work. Yes, you have your film or whatever, your figures. and all of that is starting to be visible and every day it's like what gift are they going to install or light up today to make it something cooler and cooler until the end, so yeah, I would like to go. from when you came up with the idea to decorating the Christmas trees, what do I call it, you know, ooh, that's going to look great, cool, they're along those lines, what ideas have you had that maybe make it to the living room floor? assembly, so to speak?

I really regret the earth pavilion we are going to do on ecology when ecology wasn't a big thing. It's about the day of my discovery, which was a Jules Verne themed area that came to life at Discovery Land in Paris and downtown. from the volcania volcano in Tokyo, so all these things get used to it and recently I've been working on a race where 40 people could compete against each other, anything where you see friends passing you and avoiding you and all that, and we got a patent on but I haven't been able to convince anyone what to do, it's time