by Judith Rubin
NewWave Entertainment
Astro Canyon Coaster; Cosmic Pinball; Devil's Mine Ride; Glacier Run; Hi-Chip Tour; Journey Through the Center of the Earth; Kid Coaster; RGB Adventure; Secrets of the Lost Temple; Volcano Mine Ride.
Where to see them: Iwerks Turbo Ride Theaters in locations worldwide, including: Empire State Building, New York; Reino Aventura, Mexico City; Seacon Square, Bangkok; Tokyo Dome, Tokyo; Star City Metro, Manila; and Hoyt's Cinemotion, Melbourne. Showscan simulator theaters in locations worldwide including: Cinemania in Universal CityWalk, Universal City, California; CN Tower, Toronto; Cartuja Park, Seville; Lotte World, Seoul, Gardaland, Verona; Mitsubishi Ocean Dome, Kyushu, Japan; and Nordsjoellands Sommerpark, Copenhagen.
Funhouse
Express© Midland Productions
Animation in theme parks most frequently appears in the form of the four-minute, motion-simulator film or ridefilm. Simulator films generally are produced in special formats, and they are the visual component of a brief virtual adventure through some fantastic terrain or other. The motion component is provided by the theater seats, which are programmed to move in concert with the film. Generally the experience simulates a ride in a vehicle, frequently down a track or through a tunnel.
Ridefilms are a bit formulaic in their storytelling. Producer Charlotte Huggins and designer Ray Spencer of NewWave Entertainment, a Belgium-based company that is probably the foremost producer of animated ridefilms, humorously sort the ridefilm genre into six plot categories: 1) Rollercoaster/Track, 2) Flying, 3) Underwater, 4) Racetrack/One Plane, 5) Object/Person point-of-view and 6) Dark Ride. Within those plots, the following devices are most common: A) Sister Ship, B) Molecular Shrink, C) Time Machine, D) Crisis Landing, E) Something's Wrong With Our Ship, F) Save the Planet, G) Oops! Wrong direction, H) Time Clock, I) Encounter an Evil Creature, J) Camera point-and-shoot and K) On-camera "host." Under this system, Back to the Future--the Ride, which plays at the Universal Studios' parks in Hollywood and Orlando, is a #2ACDEFGHIK.
"You have four minutes to tell your story," says Ray Spencer from New Wave's Sherman Oaks, California office. "It unfolds in a linear way. We see them as minidramas of two to four acts each. A backstory is essential."
Rival notes face off in Jazzland in Adventures in Audiana
© The Works
"It's easy to have CG animation look like CG animation," says
Spencer from New Wave's Sherman Oaks, California office. "But that
holds the customer at a distance. We work to create enough interest and
enthusiasm by using material to which people can relate; something that
connects them to their real-world experience. Animation is not an end in
itself."
Spencer praises computer animation for its versatility. With virtual sets
and environments, he says, you can do what would be too costly to do with
miniatures. "We can create anything in our workstations," he says.
"There's no limit on subject or on setting. But you have to understand
how the eye sees things. The software can't do it right without human intervention."
The lifespan of a successful simulator film is fairly long, Spencer notes,
because there are always new audiences and repeat ridership. New Wave's
first production, the 1993 Devil's Mine Ride, is still showing around
the world. In it, a crusty, diabolical old miner decides to send us on an
alternative tour to the one we're supposed to be expecting, and in our simulated
vehicle we go crashing and swooping through tunnels and along tracks in
a disused and dangerous sector of the ancient mine. The challenge, says
Spencer, was to create an organic look of rotting timbers, twisted rails,
flickering torches and falling rocks. "It was an ambitious project
at the time," he laughs. "None of us was sure we could pull it
off."
Not all New Wave's ridefilms have the organic look. Silicon Adventure,
a trip through a chip, is appropriately slick and geometric. Still, Spencer
emphasizes the need to have elements that make the journey real, credible.
Inside the chip are stamped-on numbers, a company logo, dust, "things
that we all recognize in a particular scale," says Spencer. The different
areas of the Silicon Adventure chip were depicted metaphorically.
The RAM area is filled with cyclones and sparks to represent energy. The
ROM area is very linear and organized-looking. In a visual pun of the animation
process, the graphics area resembles a fabrication shop. The sound area
is crammed with sound effects and crazy occurrences. Recent productions
include Red Rock Run and Secrets of the Lost Temple. Budgets
run from $700 K to $5 million, averaging at about $2 million, says Charlotte
Huggins.
Rhythm & Hues
Seafari
Where to see it: Porto Europa in Wakayama, Japan
Ellen's Energy Crisis
Where to see it: Epcot Center, Orlando
Star Trek: The Experience
Where to see it: Las Vegas Hilton
Los Angeles-based Rhythm & Hues is a leader in computer animation, having
done many sequences for commercials and feature films as well as amusement
parks. Their work can be seen in the film Babe and the Pepsi polar
bears spots. And according to Executive Producer Ellen Coss, the company's
production Seafari is considered by many in the business to be one
of the best CGI pieces in any genre. It opened at Porto Europa in 1994.
"Even now," says Coss, "it pushes the envelope in terms of
lighting and animation." The company relies almost entirely on its
own proprietary software for animation productions.
Seafari by Rhythm & Hues Inc.
© Recreation Services
All images of this 3 1/2-minute simulator film were computer modeled and
lit in great detail, right down to the dust particles, bubbles and texture
maps. The animation team included Larry Weinberg, Loren Lanning and Steve
Ziolkowski. Weinberg went on to write his own commercially available animation
software, called Poser.
The story: Our sister ship is lost and we are launched into the ocean on
a search mission. Sammy the Dolphin turns up to guide our minisubmarine
and protect us from dangers. And of course, we need his protection. We soon
encounter a toothy sea monster and have to run for our lives. We dart inside
an old tanker ship, pursued by the monster; we escape but the monster bites
the tail end of our submarine, hitting the fuel tank. The captain hits the
ejector button; the explosion blows us out of the water and we splash down
back at the mother ship with our mission completed.
The preshow features a two-ton water tank with Sammy swimming around inside.
He's an animated rear projection and seems to be a real, solid creature,
except that he talks to us, has a cartoonishly expressive face and wears
a backpack.
Rhythm & Hues also produced the 50-second, animated opening sequence
for Ellen's Energy Crisis, which opened in summer 1996 at the Exxon
Pavilion in Epcot Center. The show is hosted by TV personalities Bill Nye
and Ellen Degeneres. The animation is a CGI conception of the big bang and
the formation of earth.
Star Trek: The Experience is a new simulator ride slated to open
at the Las Vegas Hilton in March 1997. The entire hotel is being retrofitted
with a Star Trek theme. R&H is producing the 70mm simulator film and
its preshow, using animation plus some live action. It's a Federation vs.
Klingon battle in space that includes a sequence in which the ship touches
down on the Las Vegas Strip. The company is also in production on an elaborate,
animated film for an Imax 3D simulator ride. It opens sometime next year
at Caesar's Emporium in Las Vegas. From their hydraulic, moving seats, audience
members will don headsets that include electronic, liquid-crystal shuttered
glasses and special sound systems and be enveloped by 3D images on a 70mm
dome screen.
Midland Productions
Funhouse Express
Where to see it: Sega City@Playdium,Toronto; Sega Joypolis, Niigata,
Japan; Neo Geo World, Tsukuba, Japan; The Magical World of Fantasy Island,
Lincolnshire, England; Gaumont Theaterplex, Valenciennes, France.
Since Berkeley-based Midland Productions entered the simulation field in
1989, they have made nine simulation films. Some feature live action, some
miniatures, some CGI, or combinations thereof. The company is now focusing
principally on CGI production. Funhouse Express, produced by Midland
in 1995 for Imax Ridefilm, features stop-motion animation all the way through.
The protagonist of Funhouse, Jimmy, is a downtrodden, disgruntled
clown who operates an old broken-down funhouse for a tyrannical boss. But
he has secretly built his own fantastical ride in the bowels of the funhouse,
and this secret ride is the one on which he takes us. It's been built out
of old bits and pieces of carnival equipment. Our adventure includes riding
along the tongue of an enormous head, going down a dark tunnel to encounter
a huge pair of snapping dentures at the end, bouncing off the nose of another
huge clown head that is the ride's centerpiece, and cruising through a dimly-lit
clown's graveyard. The film is extremely detailed and has the air of a Hieronymous
Bosch painting. Midland's Yas Takata directed; animator was Anthony Scott.
The four-minute film was made in VistaVision.
The
Mars Ride
© SimEx Digital Studios
SimEx
In a collaboration with New York-based Ogden Entertainment, SimEx of Toronto
is producing a motion-simulator feature that will open in zoos around the
world in spring 1997. Allen Yamashita, creative director for the project,
points out that the work will break new ground in content, style and venue.
It's a story about a little boy who dreams of covering the earth with buildings
of his design. He is visited in his dreams by an animal spirit. The spirit
reminds him that development plans need to include room for other living
creatures, and takes him on a journey to acquaint him with other creatures,
turning the boy into various animals and communicating a message of greater
respect for other living things and for peaceful coexistence and sharing
of the environment.
The animation is being done in a style reminiscent of children's book illustration.
It will combine CGI and 2D cel animation to evoke great visual depth. "We're
not trying to replicate reality," says Yamashita. "This will be
more like painting than photography." SimEx will take this film on
the road in the spring along with two other new animated Yamashita films,
Mars and Jove's Hammer. The films will run at participating
zoos, museums and entertainment centers in SimEx's transportable, 40-seat
simulator theater.
The Works
Adventures in Audiana
Where to see it: Futuroscope Park, Poitiers, France; Matsushita/Panasonic
showrooms in Japan.
The original version of this 6 1/2-minute, animated short story (not a simulator
film) debuted in Japan in 1994 at regional expositions in the cities of
Wakayama and Mie, and in Panasonic showrooms to promote their HDTV system.
It was later redubbed in French for display at Futuroscope. According to
Fred Hope, of Audiana producer The Works, based in Long Beach, a
new cut is forthcoming to demo the Panasonic digital video disk system (DVD)
that will shortly make all our CD-ROM drives obsolete.
Tad and Mike (or MC) in Adventures in Audiana
© The Works
"The cost of computer animation can be amortized, if you produce
something versatile," says Hope. "We can take the whole design
database of characters and objects and settings and reuse them. It's easy
to recut, to stretch the concept, to dub it in a different language, even
to retime it for different music." he says, pointing out that the digital
disk version of Audiana will include dubs in four languages and subtitles
in at least four more. The budget of the original was $1 million. "We
could now do the exact same film for half the money and in half the time,"
says Hope.
Audiana screens at Futuroscope on a high-definition video projection
screen with five-track surround sound. Each of the main characters is some
kind of animated musical notation. The lead role is played by an animated
treble clef called MC Treble. He expresses himself in rap music mode. Another
character is a young, single note called Tad.
Tad is one of the Sound Rangers, a team of endearing young hero types. Audiana
is a solar system of musical planet-cities named Orchestria, Rock City and
Jazzland. In his role of caretaker, treble-clef MC zips around Audiana in
his little ship, taking shortcuts through sound tunnels. He's working to
resolve the plague of sound quakes that is causing a rash of sour notes
throughout Audiana, and enlists the Sound Rangers in his mission. Together,
they restore the musical harmony of their world. Keith Melton of Infinity
Filmworks, Los Angeles was creative director; Magic Box Productions of Beverly
Hills did the rendering and the soundtrack was written by The Works' Chip
Smith. Panasonic was executive producer.
Judith Rubin (schmatte@mail.well.com)
is an Oakland-based freelance writer in the themed entertainment industry,
with a particular interest in special-format film and entertainment applications
of technology. In addition to contributing a regular column to At-the-Park
magazine, she writes for Fujitsu Cultural Technologies' WorldsAway product
family of animated, online virtual communities.
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