Imagineering Theory: You're Just Projecting

I am not a big fan of digital projections and similar technology in theme parks.

It's not that it's not cool stuff in itself. I can definitely appreciate the accomplishments of computing and optics required for it to work, and some of its applications are downright stunning. It's thanks to digital projection that we can actually look into the eyes of Mara:

The Buzz Lightyear animatronic in the queue of his ride is pretty sharp, and his mobile face is achieved via LED screen technology:

So this family of technologies definitely has its place. What I dislike about it is the way it seems to be...taking over. Nearly every new attraction being built these days uses screens and/or digital projections in some way, and they have been added to several attractions that didn't previously use them. This would be fine enough if it were a reliable way of improving an attraction, but in practice the results are quite mixed, ranging all the way from “Wow, awesome!” to “Okay, um, why?” and hitting pretty much every point inbetween.

The thing is, there isn't just one reason why these types of effects can be underwhelming. It's actually a tricky realm to navigate, and I hope Imagineering treads carefully in the future so as to avoid the pitfalls and show off their new toy at its best.

As for what those pitfalls are? Read on...

Identity Crisis

In 2014, the Alice in Wonderland dark ride underwent an intensive refurbishment that included quite a few digital projection effects. Most of them seem intended to make the ride look even more like the animated film, including actual clips of animation projected on the walls:

Following the White Rabbit: film version

Following the White Rabbit: ride version

Arriving at the Mad Tea Party: film version

Arriving at the Mad Tea Party: ride version

Other instances of projections now in the ride include household objects swirling around the ceiling of the entry tunnel, flowers sprouting in the “Golden Afternoon” scene, and spear-wielding card guards glaring at you as you flee the Queen of Hearts, all of them very straightforwardly reproduced from their designs in the movie and giving the appearance of cel animation.

With few exceptions, I don't find these “upgrades” to be improvements. Many of them replaced actual sculpted props, which I consider to be a nearly unpardonable loss. Is not the entire purpose of a dark ride based on an animated movie to bring the movie to life in three dimensions? (Spoiler: It is. Arguably, the entire purpose of Disneyland itself was to bring Walt Disney's mental landscape to life in three dimensions...but that's another topic.) Why remove perfectly serviceable three-dimensional parts of the environment and replace them with two-dimensional ones?

Well, one reason might be that a digital projection of animation from the movie will by definition be more on-model and more, you know, animated. We used to have a nearly stationary sculpture of a rocking-horsefly, now we have an image of a rocking-horsefly that flits back and forth behind the flowers. Better, right? Maybe if you see fidelity to source material and/or visible movement as the gold standard of dark ride presentation. But what if you're like me and prize the uniqueness of theme park attractions as distinct from the films that inspired them? Then you might well prefer the nearly stationary sculpture...to say nothing of the weird, see-sawing giant Cheshire Cat head that used to serve as the lead-in to the ride's final Mad Tea Party scene:

"We're all a little divergent from the literal content of the movie here."

I feel very strongly that even rides which are based on movies deserve to have their own identity apart from those same movies. The “inaccuracies” imposed by both necessity and design liberties can be part of that identity; “correcting” them takes away some of the ride's reason to exist.

Coupled with the identity loss is erasure of a ride's artistic and technical roots and history. Older effects and props may be “primitive” and even appear corny, in comparison with their slick cutting-edge counterparts, but they provide a fascinating glimpse into the world of Imagineering decades ago. These people were making up Disneyland as they went along, finding solutions on the fly to problems they never anticipated in the journey from concept to reality, and the little signposts of that journey contribute a lot to the park's elusive charm.

Permit me an illustrative example: the shadow of a grasping claw that passes across the face of the Haunted Mansion's “13” clock. This effect is achieved in the simplest way possible, by having a “wheel” of hand silhouettes rotating in front of a spotlight so that literal shadows appear at the same rate as the Doom Buggies pass the clock. (If you twist around and look behind you at the right moment, you can spot the rig.) It's blurry and not especially convincing...but fans of the ride would likely riot if it were replaced with a sharper, more mobile digital effect. It's iconic the way it is.

Taken to extremes, digital projections can completely remove a ride's unique identity and replace it with another. The perfect case in point is Hyperspace Mountain, the current Star Wars-themed overlay of Space Mountain. It's only temporary, thank goodness (how temporary has yet to be seen), and it is genuinely clever how it's set up and executed, but there's no getting around the fact that Space Mountain, a brand originating in the Disney theme parks and having its own aesthetic (if a somewhat generic one), has been painted over with the Star Wars brand, which not only already has a ride (and is due to receive several more a couple of years down the line), but is already entirely familiar to any American who hasn't been living in a hole for the past 40 years. It's a bit chilling how blithely the Disneyland decision-makers can just shelve one of their most popular rides like that.

Dimension-Hopping

An even starker issue, and one that really stands out in cases like Alice in Wonderland that use digital projections in place of solid objects, is that the projections are, after all, flat images, and cannot substitute for three-dimensional objects where the eye is concerned. You will not see new sides of them come into view as you pass them, and there is no parallax effect. This looks especially odd when there are sculpted props and projected images in the same scene, as the presence of both inevitably invites comparison and it is obvious that the two do not really inhabit the same space. The aforementioned animated rocking-horsefly can only flit behind the flowers, not around them. If, heaven forfend, those flowers were removed and replaced with digital ones on even footing with the bug, there would still be no meaningful depth of field...just another entire wall of movie screen.

Magic is Only as Good as Its Limitations

The title of this section appears, with various wordings, in a lot of those “rules for writing fantasy” lists that have begun to proliferate since 2001* or so. The gist of the rule is that no matter how powerful magic can be in your fantasy setting, it still has to have some things it can't do, or can't do without a massive cost, in order to remain interesting to your readers. When magic is capable of everything, it's less impressive to see it do anything in particular.

The same is true of theme park effects.

There is a sense in which CGI, digital projectors, and other such technologies are victims of their own success. These tools are so powerful and versatile that purveyors of visual media, from magazine layout editors to theme park engineers, use them for practically everything, leaving no room for observers to wonder, How did they do that? We know from the get-go how they did it: computers. I'm certainly not going to begrudge theme park engineers, at WDI or anywhere else, their use of these amazing tools, but the unfortunate fact is that even the most elegant digital effects, avoiding all other pitfalls, are still recognizable as digital effects and, like anything that is overwhelmingly common, provoke something of a ho-hum reaction.

Granted, this is something that only really happens with people who enjoy the technical aspects of theme park design to being with. Plenty of people are more than happy to simply immerse themselves in the magic, not caring how they made it look like that so long as it looks like that, and more power to 'em. You probably don't get many of them reading blogs like this one though.

Successful Parkour

Digital projections and their cousins are not going anywhere. They're just too convenient—infinitely reprogrammable, no paint to chip, etc. Given this, how can the Imagineers use this power for good instead of evil going forward?

• Enhance sculpted objects, don't compete with them. Digital projections look their best when they are used for effects that would be flat or surface-level anyway. Mara's eyes are an excellent example. Arguably the biggest strength of this technology is this very ability to project an image onto a non-flat surface without distortion. There's still a luminosity factor that looks a bit odd, but I am confident that this will improve with time as optical engineers get better at manipulating color and texture.
• If you can't do that, use layering to achieve a sense of dimensionality. I'm not crazy about the “plot” of the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage (it's literally just rehashing the highlights of the movie), but there's no denying that the transparent LCD screens function magnificently to place the animated characters within the physically sculpted underwater scenery. The effect is helped a lot by the way the porthole constrains the rider's perspective, preventing the awkwardness of viewing a flat screen from an oblique angle, and further helped by the fact that most of the screens are not very large and depict the fish themselves in constant motion.
• If you can't do that either...less is more. The refurbishment of Alice in Wonderland went far overboard with the use of projections. The more recent refurbishment of Peter Pan's Flight also added digital projectors, but in a much more restrained fashion. The ride has always probably been the most immersive of the Fantasyland dark rides, literally carrying guests through the air surrounded by (fiber optic) stars, and the Imagineers must have recognized that a light touch was called for. Most of the projections added are for effects that would either be flat anyway (Peter Pan's shadow on the wall, the reflection of light on the surface of water), or take up little visual “space” (pixie dust). When it does resort to taking cel-animated images straight from the movie, they are small and viewed as if from a great distance. The upgrade masterfully avoids forcing the new effects to compete with the pre-existing sets and props on the ride.
• But! There are always exceptions. One of the largest and most elaborate flat-screen scenes in Disneyland at present appears on the initial lift of the Matterhorn Bobsleds. As the sleds reach the top of the lift on their parallel tracks, they pass by an image of a roughly faceted ice wall (actually two, one on each side), behind which the Yeti comes into view and reacts furiously to the intrusion. It's all animated in photorealistic detail via computers and projected onto the blank interior of the lift tunnel. This would seem to break every rule I've been propounding in this post...but somehow the effect works, with none of the problems of perspective or overall weirdness that you would expect based on the issues with Alice in Wonderland, etc. The key is the ice wall, which provides enough deliberate visual distortion to render moot the inevitable distortion based on changing viewing angles.

In Conclusion?

I lied at the start of this post. No wait...that's the lie. I'm still not a big fan of these types of effects...but the execution of the Matterhorn and Peter Pan's Flight refurbs suggests that the Imagineers are getting a handle on the best way to use these technologies. And that's fair. Every signature theme park technology was new and clumsy once and has undergone refinement since it was first developed.

That said, I'm still a little concerned about the proliferation of digital projections and screens. At the end of the day...they are “just” movies. From a business perspective, theme parks can ill afford to become no better than movie theaters at a time when actual movie theaters are struggling to stay relevant in the face of ever-ritzier home theaters and digital media distribution. From an artistic perspective, it would be a tragedy if more attractions went the route of Toy Story Midway Mania, with screens as the sole or main effect.

And from a personal perspective, I like my immersion to feel, well, immersive. Maybe a day will come when pure light can be made indistinguishable from a solid object, but until that day comes, projections alone will never make me feel like I'm really there.

* Guess why that year. Go on, guess.