Would you ever think that you’d be going to Disney World for a school project? Me neither, but as you’ll soon see I was dead wrong.

The name of this project was “Change makers”, and our focus was to figure out how so called “change makers” imagine possibilities others don’t see and craft stories that shape the world. This was a split project between our Maker (A.D.S.T.), and PGP (Careers) classes as we focus on both how the park was ideated and created and how our project could relate to our future career.

We started this project by doing a lot of research on Walt Disney himself, his legacy, and how he managed to inspire people all over the world. We then looked at what made him successful like his passion, storytelling skill, and values. I’ve linked my notes here if you want to take a look.

We knew from the get-go that the big idea driving our project was: “Creative and collaborative careers turn ideas into reality and shape how we connect, experience, and imagine the world.”, and so we broke up into four smaller groups based on our interests to research smaller parts of our main idea. I ended up in the ‘Making the Magic’ group, where our focus was technology and how it can drive there creation of immersive and engaging experiences. I was really really excited to be in the technology group as it was where I had asked to be and it is what I’m interested in specializing in later in life.

Now this project had a bit of a twist that I talked about in my last blog post, but if you don’t read all of my posts and have perfect memory, shame upon you. I’ll let you in on what that twist is. This was another project that used project based learning which means things done in a slightly different format which led to more pressure being placed on our individual focus and our final product

After we finished researching Walt Disney, we moved on to doing more research on our group’s specific topic and starting to chose a personal focus for this project. My first thought was to focus on ride mechanics, as the inner workings of things always interest me, but after some thought I realized that it would be very hard to get any facts, videos, or interesting interviews about the topic as they try and stop guests from seeing those things, but that brought me another idea, What do they try and hide from you, and what’s the reason they do? This idea evolved into my final focus which was about how Disney (or anyone) keeps you safe but still immersed in an experience.

This seems like both a complex and simple idea in different ways. It was in fact easy to learn about some of the ways they protect guests, but once we were at Walt Disney world to do more research and capture footage for our video ( which was awesome and really fun. Overall a good, albeit tiring time ), it was hard to find things that felt significant but not obvious. In the end I found a few good examples of my topic:

  • Bumpers
  • Rails & Tracks
  • Themed Safety Videos
  • In-Character Staff
  • Visual Distractions

And that’s just to name few and not getting into some of the craziest automation on any rides anywhere! And so after capturing a lot of footage (it took around 4 hours to send all of the right clips to my iPad, I had to do a lot of editing, which was very difficult and has never been something I’ve enjoyed although I’m getting better. After all that work, and a lot of in-class revisions, I had a finished video to show:

Now I am happy with my end result, but I made a lot of big mistakes in this project that set me back, but I’ll first go over all the great stuff that I learned.

  • I learned how people can turn dreams into reality though ideation and innovation in many areas.
  • Gained some insight on how certain careers play a part in different sections of the creative process and how modern techniques and technologies can change how we engage with the world through engagement, distraction, pushing the limits of what is possible.
  • Disney World has really good buffets

But as I said before I made many mistakes (sorry for such a long-winded post, I tried to shorten multiple times and failed).

  1. First of all I did the wrong sort of research and planning in a way, setting myself up to learn as I went at Disney rather than just supporting my evidence which led to confusion and a less polished result
  2. I did not create a good schedule or filming plan which led to a lack of useful on-location footage which made things hard to edit.
  3. I left my interview until too late, and therefore forgot to check video quality until it was too late and I was stuck with what I had.
  4. And lastly the editing and storytelling could have been much more cohesive if I had layed out the plan earlier and had edited it slightly differently, and I don’t think I consulted my Pre-vis video even once.

Overall, more initial planning needed to be done so that more thought could be put into the final compiling and presentation

So in conclusion, I had a lot of fun, learnt loads, made mistakes, and gained a understanding of how to imagine possibilities other don’t see. I also drank some blue milk (It tastes like pineapple)