Section News
Eric Rosenthal Talk Review (Provided
by Charles Gervasi):
This excellent talk informed the
attendees about the "Magic" of Disney Engineering. He
explained how Disney attractions begin with storyboard drawings
posted around a room. The creative team collaboratively identifies
which ideas are the best. People whose ideas were abandoned would
enthusiastically work on the ideas that were
adopted. The work on the attractions involved
creative custom solutions that resulted in a series of funny
engineering anecdotes which he shared with us. When he worked
on the Alien Encounter attraction, his first task was to make the
attraction less scary because people could not follow the story over
the audience screaming. They got rid of a large electrical arcing
display and installed “butt thumpers” and moving whiskers to brush
against the audiences legs. They configured speakers to give the
audience the impression the alien was walking nearby. They designed
a device to emit an “alien smell” when the the alien sounded like it
was nearby. The device emitted a freshener that eliminated the smell
as soon as the alien walked away. He worked on an Indiana
Jones ride that used 600W subwoofers to give the audience the
impression of a huge rolling ball. People were reporting vibrations
in homes miles away. They had to reduce the power by
10dB.
In another project, he worked on a ride with a large power
requirement. The design involved 11kV lines going to a transformer
on the roof to step it down to 480V. Noise was coupling from
the power lines to the communication system, which as a fail-safe
shuts down the entire attraction if communication is interrupted.
The shielding on the power lines was ineffective because the
electrical conduit that appeared as steel on the drawing was
actually PVC to accommodate Florida’s high water table. Reinstalling
power through steel conduit solved the problem. When he was
working on a 42nd Street New York ABC TV studio, contractors
installed soundproofing over electrical outlets. He believes they
did this on purpose, hoping to get paid to remove it, find the
outlets, and re-install it. To find the outlet locations, he got a
helium tank from a party store and connected it to the electrical
conduit, forcing the gas out the electrical boxes. Then he went
around with an inexpensive helium detector to find the locations of
the outlets. The idea we came away with is that show business
engineering projects are unique in that they have a very large
budgets, strict schedules, and subjective design requirements that
are evaluated by executives with a creative non-technical
mindset. For a copy of the talk slides, click here
(Warning: 12MBytes!)
