Piloting Submarines in the World of Tomorrow

Last Wednesday my phone rang while I was reading, and I was surprised to see that the call was from Disneyland. Being a seasonal cast member, my last day of work had been on New Year's Day, and I wasn't expecting to work again until starting the Disney College Program at the end of the month. I picked up the phone.

"This is so-and-so from the Disneyland Resort. I'm calling about your training schedule for the college program. You'll be starting on the tenth."

"Excellent," I said. "The tenth of February, I presume."

"No, actually the tenth of January," came the reply. "This Sunday." Unexpected, but not at all unwelcome.

"Sounds good," I said, pulling up my calendar.

"You'll start at 6 a.m. and then you'll working these hours on these days to train for your new attraction."

"Okay, and what attraction is this for?" I asked. I had been gunning for the Haunted Mansion ever since I applied to become a cast member.

"Oh, you'll be working the submarines."

Inside, I broke down a little. Kinda like Space Mountain. I had really hoped to continue working at Splash Mountain throughout my time with the Disney College Program. The New Orleans/Critter Country area had really begun to feel like home, not just because I spent so much time in the area but also because I really liked the atmosphere of the place. And now I was the kid who was told by his parents that the family was moving out of the state. In less than a week. One phone call had suddenly thrust me from home to the other side of Disneyland.

Of course, I didn't go down without a fight and asked if it was possible to stay where I was. Unfortunately, this year happens to be the year that the Rivers of America get drained for routine maintenance and will be down for several months. That means everyone who works a river-based attraction has to find a place at the other New Orleans/Critter Country attractions, and sadly there was no room left for me. So I took the defeat graciously (I'm in reality quite mild-mannered when it comes to fighting) and accepted the loss.

Okay, so I make this sound like it's a tragic ordeal. It's really not. The situation has been bittersweet at worst. Yes, I was disappointed to no longer wear the burgundy suspenders and work at Splash Mountain, but that disappointment was eventually overshadowed by the excitement of piloting the legendary submarines, Walt's original fleet of eight. So far, after one day of training, the work has lived up to my expectations. I think I'm really going to enjoy working the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage in the world of tomorrow.

Here's to the future!
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World of Color Fire Test

As mentioned in my last post, one thing I'm really looking forward to this year is the premiere of "World of Color" at Disney's California Adventure. Below is a test of the various flame spurts installed throughout the show platform - take a look!



Pretty incredible, huh? Can't wait for this one to open!
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Ten Things I'm Looking Forward to in 2010

10. 21st Birthday
9. Debut of "World of Color" at Disney's California Adventure
8. Iron Man 2 ('Nuff Said)
7. Continuing Development on Custom Ball Tower Design
6. Possible Investment in Camera Equipment
5. "Heroes and Saviors" Metatorrey Class
4. Disney College Program at Disneyland
3. Potential Cross-Training on an Additional Attraction (at last, a job at the Haunted Mansion)
2. College Graduation
1. Pursuit of Career

Happy New Year, everyone!
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New "Small World" Marquee

According to the OC Register's site arounddisney.com, "it's a small world" will be getting a new marquee along with its new sponsorship from Sylvania early next year. I'm more or less a fan of this. The marquee brings out a fresh styling of the original poster for the attraction, and best of all the freakish Disney characters that have been scattered throughout the ride are not present. However, I feel like whoever did the art made an artistic misstep in that the graphic weight of the entire thing feels off. The "small world" logo seems to overpower the boat of children, and splitting the tagline to either side of the boat strikes me as a major disruption of the flow of the text.

Compare the new marquee to the original poster. The two are similar, but everything about the original poster seems to work a lot better, and if the marquee was retooled it could work better too. I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I felt like griping about it here. If anyone feels differently, speak up now.
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A Miniature Look at Epcot

A couple of months ago I posted a video that featured tilt-shift photography, which makes everything appear to be a miniature model. Recently, the Disney Parks blog released a similar video, this time featuring a day in Epcot. Check it out!



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Finished at Last!

At last my work is finally over! Well, pretty much. I’ve finally shot every last photo I need and compiled everything into its proper page layout, with only a couple of minor edits left to perform on a couple of pictures. Tomorrow I’ll review my descriptions on each page and make any edits that are necessary there, but for now I am essentially done with this! I must say I’m mighty pleased with it too. I like a lot of the pictures I took this semester, and I think they all fit nicely into each section. I’m feeling like this book could be a strong portfolio piece if I apply for a position in photography or something similar, so I have definitely achieved something worthwhile!

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Getting Closer...

A couple of nights ago I tried out an idea I had earlier in the semester. I set my camera up in front of a console full of colored lights and zoomed in over the course of a long exposure. The results were something like this, which I found to be quite fascinating. The entire venture was pretty much just a big experiment of me trying new ideas. On some shots, I would pan or tilt the camera during the exposure to get some interesting curves in the lights. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
Ultimately, I got enough good shots to fill up an entire set, and I’m hoping to get a few more elsewhere. The theme for this will be “Alien Lights”, featuring photos with bizarre, unearthly lights such as this. The trick is to decide which shots are artistic and which aren’t. That’s usually harder to tell with modern art, but shots that still fall under basic photographic principles such as the rule of thirds are usually acceptable.

On a more conventional note, I also recently added a new theme titled “Heartbreak”. I felt like I underperformed when I shot the “Depression” set, so I created this additional set to either supplement or replace “Depression”. Right now I’m leaning towards replacement since all the “Heartbreak” photos together carry a story much better than “Depression”.


The picture above is one of the shots I plan on using as a main spread for one page. In this shot, you can see all the elements I’m using to tell my story. The flower represents the subject’s lost love, and she travels through a variety of emotions as she looks at the flower, strokes it, and finally leaves it behind. The books play a minor role. I simply used them to give the subject a little depth and establish her role as a student. Finally, I gave each picture in the set the overall look you see here, making use of colder, desaturated hues.

This project also marked the first were I slowed down and made sure my levels were perfect. Too many times I have shot a photograph too hastily and ended up with a picture that was too light or too dark. This time, I took a few test shots and checked my histogram to make sure my lights and darks weren’t peaking. The few minutes I took to do this ended up being very worthwhile, and I’m definitely doing this in the future.
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One Job Finished in Photoshop

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll just say that this picture was my first major piece of work in Photoshop. While I’ve dabbled around in Photoshop in the past, this is by far the most extensive project I’ve completed. Heck, I even learned a bit of new stuff in the process, making this picture a double-win!

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Wrapping Up "Power"

Today I headed back into the studio and did some supplemental work for the “power theme”. I wanted to flesh out the story of the original photo a bit since it seemed just a bit ambiguous. My immediate thought was to devise a series of photographs such as the scene on the right in which this glowing orb comes and descends to the subject in the chair.

It turns out there’s a bit of post work to do. The “glowing orb” was, of course, nothing more than a studio light mounted on a stand, and it seems that the stand was visible in some shots. Perhaps even more urgent is the distinctive glare present in some of the shots such as this one. It seems to be isolated against the solid dark areas, so I think it shouldn’t be hard to take care of, but it could be a tad problematic.

All in all, I’m satisfied with today’s work. In fact, just looking at the progression of shots is giving me chills. I think I’ve told a good, simple story here, so we’ll see how it holds up.
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A Slew of Photographs

Over the course of the last week I’ve taken quite a few photos, which is nice because I hadn’t accomplished much with regards to this project earlier in the semester. As of now, I’m about two-thirds of the way done, and hopefully I can close out the last third sometime in the next couple of weeks.

As for this week, I’ve had some mixed results. I already wrote about the guitar shots (many of which were amazing!), and between now and then I captured four more sets of shots, which I have mixed feelings about. The shot below represents the first of these sets. I’m fairly pleased with it, and the lighting turned out better than I thought it would. The composition isn’t quite what I hoped for, though. The idea is that the subject is holding some sort of glowing entity in her hands, but you can’t see enough of the glow on her hands to consistently get that idea. It’s a little easier to see when the picture is larger, but I may nevertheless want to reshoot this and fix the problem. Also, as of now this photo represents the entire set, so I want to develop some ideas to make the concept more elaborate and involve more pictures. Those may be in by next week, so stay tuned.

Two of my other sets were a bit rushed, so I’m not as pleased with them. My lighting wasn’t perfect for the second set, which was themed to creativity, but it’s adequate. If I had more time, I might have tried to diffuse the light more or bounce it off of some surface above the camera so I didn’t get so much glare, but alas, I was hurrying too much to do that.

I dunno, part of me likes it anyway. True, it’s not what I pictured, but I still think I captured the spirit of the concept, maybe even in ways I hadn’t considered. I had wanted these shots to look incredibly clean and organized, and they’re still organized and relatively clean, but the fact that there’s a bit of hard glare and even a little noise (I accidentally shot on 1600 ISO!) lends itself to a harder, grittier aspect of art and creativity.

I imagine that I’ll do a little Photoshop work to clean up the shadow at the top of the picture and make that area more even, and I definitely need to cut out some of the glare on the protractor. No kidding, it looks horrible!

Anyway, on to the next set. My intention was to shoot a subject looking gloomy and depressed in the backseat of a car in order to capture the emotion of (what else?) depression. I was waiting for a cloudy day so that the gray clouds would match the theme, and lo and behold come Tuesday I got one. Then, to my chagrin, the sun came out right as I was setting up. Curse you sun!

Irregardless, my subject showed up, so I decided to go ahead with it, and the shots actually don’t look too bad. I did a little post work to bring down the colors and warm tones, which helps the pics out a lot. In fact, in the shot below you can’t even tell that the sun was out (and I guarantee that it was!) So I lucked out this time.
For this set, arrangement on the page is going to be a big deal. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the shots exactly the way I wanted them in order to achieve the arrangement I had in mind. I was afraid that sort of thing would happen considering how hard it is to shoot in a car. Hopefully things will work out anyway, but I won’t really know until I actually go in and do the book work next month. We’ll see…

I don’t have anything to show for my fourth and final set as it requires a lot of Photoshop work. The concept behind the set was to have playing cards slowly floating down through the air against a black background, and that turned out to be really hard to capture on camera. I tried throwing the cards in the air in front of the camera, which didn’t work at all. If I was lucky, I could see a couple of white streaks in the frame. So instead I took pictures of each individual card held in a “floating” position. I’m currently in the process of cutting out each card that I want, cleaning it up, then compositing against the black background shot I took. So far it’s looking good, but I’ve still got a little ways to go. It’ll be done soon.

So as of now, I’ve got a quick shoot over the weekend and maybe a reshoot next Tuesday. In between, I’m sporadically doing Photoshop work and slowly getting this thing done! I made a lot of progress in the past week, so here’s for the final push!
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The Look of Rock

Last night I began photographing once again, and for the first time on the project I took the camera into a studio setting. After capturing the themes of nature and industry, I wanted to capture the concept of high-energy music, a theme that has an edge yet still maintains something of an artistic side.

So I brought in one of my friends, set up a few lights, and had him strum around on my electric guitar while I got a few shots. The first picture shown here captures the spirit of what I was going for. Much of the technical work is actually similar to my industry theme. High contrast, which is emphasized by the black-and-white nature of the shot, as well as a solid black background. I set up the lighting to be fairly direct on the subject to create harder shadows as well.

After a first round of shots, I put together a harsher lighting set-up that essentially backlit my subject entirely. I was hoping to get a progression of shots moving through an epic jump, but I discovered that my camera was far too slow to capture anything between the peak of the jump and the beginning and end of the jump. Instead, I opted for a variety of jump shots provided by my friend, the shot above being my favorite.

All-in-all, I think the jump shots turned out surprisingly well, and enough of everything else I got was at the very least decent. Tomorrow I go in for a little more studio work, so we’ll see if I fare as well as today. Here’s hoping!
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Horizons

Recently I discovered a long-gone attraction at Walt Disney World's Epcot that I found to be quite incredible! Located in Epcot's Future World, the name of the attraction was "Horizons". Boarding omnimover vehicles (much like the Haunted Mansion's doom buggies), guests were taken on a fifteen-minute journey through the future. The experience began with visions of the future as it appeared to those of past generations, then continued with glimpses of our own future. The elaborate detail is quite stunning, and you can see the entire ride in the two videos below:





And for those who are still interested, here's a great site full of details regarding Horizons.

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The Photographic Journals

All this semester I'm working on a massive photo project covering a wide variety of themes that will eventually end up in a bound book. I'm also writing a journal of my efforts to track where I've been, and I recently realized that such material would be perfect for this blog. And so I present the first entry of many to be featured here on this blog.

10/8 – Lessons in Lazy Observation

Today I learned to do a better job cleaning up my frame. Yesterday evening I headed out to wrap up my collection for my “Nature” theme near a stream that flows alongside campus. I took a few shots here and there, including a shot of the cattails I had been eying for a while. (note that the cattails shot didn’t really turn out how I hoped) Then I stumbled across a cluster of lovely blue flowers and decided to try my hand at photographing those. To my surprise, the photo turned out really well, and I left satisfied.

Earlier today, I uploaded my pictures from the outing to my computer to take a look. At first glance, the “blue flower” picture didn’t disappoint. Good colors, good lighting, good composition, interesting background (which has been problematic in the past).

Then I noticed the, um, errors. See those little white hanging things? I have no idea what they are, but one crept into the edge of my frame and was now sitting very close to the front of the picture, out of focus to boot. It wasn’t highly noticeable, but good photography is like Mary Poppins – practically perfect in every way. “If I’m going to be a good photographer,” I thought, “that thingy has to go.” So I cropped the picture. I hated to do it, because that limited the scope of a picture with a pretty elaborate background.

At that time, I noticed culprit number two: a couple of dead, withered flowers hanging lifelessly just to the right of the big blue cluster! At this point, I couldn’t crop any more, so those simply stay for now. By this time I’ve learned my lesson, however. Whenever you’re looking through that itty bitty hole that represents your frame, check it to make sure everything (repeat: everything!) unsightly is gone. No dead flowers. No white thingies. Nothing else that will compromise the perceived perfection of the picture.

I might go out and reshoot this, although I may still end up using the original. I’m seldom satisfied with reshoots. Some how the spontaneity of the first time is lost, resulting in an inferior piece. But this picture wasn’t too hard to get, so we’ll see…
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Tilt-Shift Photography

Ever hear of tilt-shift photography? It's an interesting type of photography that makes everything in your picture appear to be a miniature. Disney recently posted a video comprised of tilt-shift images on their blog, which you can find by clicking here.
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The World is a Stage

All the world's a stage, at least that's what they say. In the day of TV and YouTube, this statement is now more true than ever. I was reminded of this after the memorable mishap of Kanye West at the VMA's just a week ago. In case you missed it, here's a video of the incident.

<a href="http://www.mtv.com/ontv/vma/2009/" target="_blank">Kanye West Storms The VMA Stage</a>

Kanye West Storms The VMA Stage

Everyone's put their foot in their mouth at some point, but very few have ever done it on national TV. And now that our society has become so in touch with the Internet, news of Kanye's blunder has spread like wildfire. By Monday, not only had everyone heard of the incident, but also began to mock it in a variety of ways. Several Photoshopped pictures posted on my school's bulletin board depicted Kanye interrupting other icons (Patrick Swayze's death is not as good as Michael Jackson's, and the red Power Ranger isn't as cool as the green one), while a quiz I took on Facebook informed me on when Kanye would ruin one of my own special moments.

Needless to say, all the world is a stage, and Kanye's act was so memorable that it proceeded to make encores throughout the other venues the Internet has to offer. With the advent of such platforms as YouTube and Facebook, even ordinary people can rise to celebrity status and have the same effect. A man named Gary Brolsma, for example, became famous thanks to a webcam video of his crazy dancing to a pop song. The entire video couldn't have taken more than five minutes to make, but everyone knew who he was as a result. In this day and age, celebrities have more power that ever to rock society's boat - Kanye West did last week, and the boat's still rocking. But the realm of celebrities isn't just limited to rappers, rock stars, and movie actors. Ordinary people have joined the ranks and are rocking the boat on a regular basis. If you're one of those people, don't rock it in the wrong direction. People will remember you for it, and you will likely never live it down.

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Old K'nex Ad

I recently came across this TV ad that I've never seen before, but it reminded me a lot of my childhood when I was constantly working with K'nex. This was really back in the day.



Man, sometimes I really miss my childhood. Anyway, just for laughs, here's a video of a really cool K'nex ball machine I found. A lot of people build stuff like this for fun, but this is the most genius one I've seen yet!



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The World of Roald Dahl

I recently discovered this featurette on one of the films I'm tracking this fall - Fantastic Mr. Fox, based off the children's book by Roald Dahl. This clip goes behind the scenes of the creative direction for the movie and how the director spent quite a bit of time investigating Mr. Dahl's home and surroundings in order to gain inspiration for the film.



What struck me as remarkable is the fact that Mrs. Dahl is largely in favor of her late husband's works being translated onto the screen considering that the reaction of the author and/or his family is usually the opposite. This is one of the reasons I'm excited to see this movie. When a classic book is adapted through filmmaking not so much for the sake of making money as for the purpose of telling it in a whole new light, you know that the filmmakers' efforts are going to be wonderful and worthwhile.
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"Up" Soars Over the Summer Movie Line-Up

This morning I read the Rotten Tomatoes breakdown of this summer's movie line-up and found Up at the coveted "number one" spot on the Top Ten list for the summer, beating out other acclaimed films such as Star Trek or District 9. Though I know that Pixar creates excellent films, I was nevertheless surprised to see their newest title surpass other top movies for the summer that might be a more sophisticated. Could this be because Pixar created a family film, appropriate for all ages? Perhaps, but we were introduced to other family films as well, such as Ice Age 3 and G-Force that didn't even make the list. Besides, when it comes to judging the fine craft of filmmaking, "acceptable for young children" isn't usually high on the list of qualifications.

No, there must be something else in Pixar's Up that excels all the sex and violence commonly found in modern movies. Pixar has disregarded all these sensual components designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator and engaged in superior storytelling. They've created characters that are not only charming, but also incredibly deep. They've used their talents in animation to create magnificent worlds for these characters and stories to inhabit. Most of all, they've blended all of these together in such a way that make you cry in the first four minutes of the film. In other words, their talents only continue to uncover something more powerful (and, as Rotten Tomatoes has shown, more marketable) than the sex and violence permeating Hollywood today. I don't know how they do it, but they've done it so well that their work has not only found a competent place in the filmmaking industry today but has even soared on a regular basis, sometimes all the way to the top.

Well done, Pixar! We'll see you at the Academy Awards!
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Murphy Appears!

If you've been following recent Disneyland news at all, you've probably heard about 'Murphy', the elusive new dragon for the finale of Fantasmic. Originally scheduled to debut mid-June with the return of Fantasmic, a massive wave of technical problems caught the creature off-guard. Her nickname, in fact, is a reference to Murphy's Law because just about everything that could have gone wrong with her did go wrong. As of now, Murphy has yet to make a grand appearance before audiences of Fantasmic, but Disney has worked out enough kinks to release this press video to the Orange County Register's website. Take a look!



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A Miniature Splash Mountain

On a recent trip to the beach I found myself with little to do at one point, so I resorted to an act of incredible geekiness: I decided to try my hand at building a sand model of Splash Mountain. I'm not much of a sculptor of any medium, let alone sand, but I found I was able to carve out a rough replica of the actual landmark. No doubt my lengthy amount of experience around the actual thing was of considerable help. Anyway, when all was said and done, I felt my model was worth photographing, and thus the results are posted below.



Here's an aerial shot. I was so pleased with the front of the mountain that I decided to head behind the peak and complete the flume in that area as well.

One last close-up.

In case that doesn't float your boat, here are a few more pictures from the day.




Okay, that's all from me for now!
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