89. Andy Sinclair-Harris on Imagineering, Dr. Who: The Experience, and Hong Kong Disneyland

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When we consider all Disney’s resorts around the world, the one that receives the least attention is Hong Kong Disneyland. It opened in 2005 with a limited number of attractions and has struggled to draw crowds. Disney has added three lands to the park — Grizzly Gulch, Mystic Point, and Toy Story Land. They will also be adding a Frozen land and Stark Expo in the next few years. Andy Sinclair-Harris joined Walt Disney Imagineering in Hong Kong during those updates in 2011. He has a close perspective on the park after working there directly.

Andy is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. We begin with his background in theater design and interest in Disney. Andy visited Walt Disney World as a kid and connected with EPCOT Center. Attractions like Horizons and the original Journey Into Imagination left a strong impression on him. Andy pursued theater in school but always had an eye for working at Imagineering. The skills that he developed early on played a key role in his job as a Concept Designer at Disney.

I really enjoyed the chance to talk with Andy about his story and theme park design in general. We discuss attractions in Hong Kong like Fairy Tale Forest and the Halloween version of The Jungle Cruise (Curse of the Emerald Trinity). Andy also describes his work on the design for Dr. Who: The Experience, the first attraction of its kind for the iconic character. Beyond his specific projects, Andy also has a lot to say about themed entertainment design in general. His experience with Disney and beyond has given him considerable insight into the industry.

Show Notes: Andy Sinclair-Harris

Check out Andy Sinclair-Harris’ work on his official website, andysinclairharris.com.

Watch videos of The Jungle Cruise: Curse of the Emerald Trinity and Fairy Tale Forest in Hong Kong Disneyland.

Photos in this post used by permission of Andy Sinclair-Harris.

Transcript

Dan Heaton: Hey there. Today on the podcast I’m talking with Andy Sinclair Harris about his work at Walt Disney Imagineering on Hong Kong Disneyland, including the Halloween edition of The Jungle Cruise, which is really crazy. You’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Thanks for joining me here on Episode 89 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I’ve been really lucky to have a chance to talk to some former Imagineers about their work on a bunch of different Disney parks, but most of the focus has been on Walt Disney World and some on Disneyland. I have rarely spoken to people about overseas parks beyond Paris and a little bit about Tokyo. That’s what I really liked about having a chance to talk to Andy Sinclair Harris. He knows so much about theme park design. He has a background in theater and is a really amazing concept artist, and he spent most of his time at WDI working on Hong Kong Disneyland, which the park opened in the mid 2000s with not that many attractions, and Disney has been working since to really beef up the roster.

They added three lands more recently and now they’re going to add Frozen and the Stark Expo. Andy was involved with a shop in Toy Story Land and then with the addition of Fairytale Forest at Fantasyland and with the Jungle Cruise, Curse of the Emerald Trinity Halloween overlay, which sounds really cool. We also talked about Dr. Who: The Experience, and I’ve really enjoyed some of the recent seasons of Dr. Who, including with Matt Smith and David Tennant, and I haven’t caught up with the current version yet with Jody Whitaker, but I’m excited to do so.

So it’s super cool that Andy worked on the design for a complicated walkthrough attraction that spotlighted Dr. Who and we dig into all that and so much more during this podcast. So I could tell right away from talking to Andy that he has a lot of enthusiasm about Disney and about design for theme parks, and he is still consulting for Disney and also working at a company in the UK for someone who’s still fairly young and has a lot more ahead of him. It’s great to hear that much passion about the parks and what goes into them. So I’m really excited to bring you this podcast. Here is Andy Sinclair Harris.

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Dan Heaton: I want to start by talking a bit about your educational background because I know you went into school for theater and theater design, and I’d love to know how that interested you and how that connects to what you do now.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Well, it’s interesting because I think it was a kind of culmination of two things that were interesting me at the time. I think obviously living here in the UK, I ended up going to Disney World in the early nineties I think it was, and a lot of Imagineers or people who wanted to becoming an Imagineer. It had a really kind of profound effect on me, especially Epcot Center at the time.

Just coming back from that and thinking that was what I wanted to do because I was at that age where I was probably about eight or nine where I knew that there was an artifice to this world that was, I was on Spaceship Earth and I was looking down at how the ride was moving and I knew that they ran animatronics and I just remember thinking, oh wow, there must be people who do this.

There must be people who actually plan these things and decide where they go and everything. At the same time when I was at school, I was really enjoying theater, but from an aspect of not being on stage, but just kind of having an overall sense of the world, creating obviously set design, things like that, they’re just creating these worlds and this vision.

So it kind of got to a point in my life when I was younger where these kind of two bisected really, and I’m sure you’ve probably heard of it as well, but I’m sure a lot of the listeners have heard this. There was a documentary famously imaginary one called “Shoot for the Moon”, I think it was, I dunno if you’ve heard of it or not, but it aired here in the UK around the time that Space Mountain was opening at Disneyland Paris.

It was basically like a marketing tool for the people to get people in Europe to go to Disneyland Paris. But that was where you literally went behind the scenes of Imagineering for one of the first times. As I can recall, I think that you really went there and saw a young Tim Delaney, mustaches everywhere. It was amazing. You see Tom Morris and everything and you go into Imagineering and then that was just the crystallization of, oh my goodness, these are the people do these things.

They’re called imagineers. I would love to do that. So educationally I thought the best thing to do was to kind of maintain that theater sound aspect, the fact that you were studying a playtex and creating that and putting that into the real world. So that to me seemed like the best kind of side that appealed to me to go into Imagineering if I wanted to go into Imagineering.

Dan Heaton: Actually I am familiar with that documentary. I talked to Tim Delaney on this show back in the fall and I had not seen it at the time. He mentioned how big of a hit that was and how people really, when Paris was opening, and I watched it on YouTube after that. And you’re right, I mean especially given, I mean now we have this Imagineering series going on Disney Plus, but still even now, I watched that and thought we don’t really see too much of that. So I’m imagining as a kid that had to really play a role for you.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Absolutely. And again, we are going back a long time before there was social media and before there was any way for me to know really too much about Imagineering. Again, in the UKI’m not in the US and there’s no real way because I mean the early Imagineers or the second generations who got into that kind of knew someone who knew someone and they worked at Disneyland and there was a ways into Imagineering.

But for me, living in the UK and just having this dream to do this job, I had no idea of the people who actually did these things. So to see this documentary, and it was in the UK, it was on the BBC here. Again, this is going back a way when there was only four channels in the UK and had, so the BBC, it’s a big deal. So lots of people saw that documentary, and I know for a fact there were a lots of people who saw that and it was really profound to them.

Like I said, this is coming off the back from me, coming from Epcot and already being interested in the actual design. I suppose it was my kind of fledgling interest in theme park design and how these worlds are created. Then actually seeing that realized, this documentary was literally a few weeks after I got back from Epcot, and then I think we ended up going to Disneyland Paris after seeing that. So the marketing worked in that sense, but as you say, it’s just to have that camera going around Imagineering and seeing Tim Delaney’s sketch.

Then I was so fascinated by seeing his original sketches and having read how perfectly he aligns the original Jules Verne book to the attraction, what is essentially a roller coaster, how he makes that so much more than that. It’s more than sum of his parts, which I was just fascinated by that. Then you see the special effects being tested and the lighting and I was hooked. So it was a great documentary. So anyone who hasn’t seen it, I think it is on YouTube as you say, right? You could go see it.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s easy to find. Basically you just search for it and it came up right away and it’s a pretty decent quality given the quality of TV at the time, but it’s pretty easy to watch for sure.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Absolutely.

Dan Heaton: Alright, well I actually went to Paris once and in 2006, and that whole park is like that. You mentioned the connection to Jules Verne and just, I’m sure you’ve probably been there just given proximity of London to Paris plus your work at Disney, but it’s a gorgeous park that I loved. But I want to go back to Epcot. I know you mentioned going there when you were younger, and I assume that was in the nineties when things like Horizons and journey to imagination, others were still there. And I’d love to know why that connected with you so strongly when you went there as a kid.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: So yeah, you’re right. I mean, I ended up going to Walt Disney World first before Disneyland Paris. And as you say, this was ‘91, ‘92. So I was at the, I still believe it was a good period for Epcot, obviously, because having been open about a decade to me, it was still in its kind of heyday as it were. So I rode on Horizons, I rode on Journey to Imagination, and those two attractions specifically, just something completely just clicked with me, resonated with me.

The fact that Horizons, you just came off of that attraction and it was a sense that the future was going to be okay. And if anything, if you could have a part in playing in that future to make it better again, I just think that early days of Epcot was a kind of call to action for people to kind of become involved, and that’s what resonated with me.

The same with Imagination. I loved how Journey Into Imagination was a completely whimsical attraction that was just kind of breathtaking in its fantastical nature. There isn’t really anything like that now within Disney. It’s such a shame that Journey Into Imagination no longer exists in the form that it did because it’s such an evergreen attraction that didn’t really unfortunately need updating. That’s a topic of another time. But both of those attractions, I said Horizons and Journey Into Imagination stuck with me.

I think for Horizons it was the fact, it was the sheer scale of it. I mean, I remember going through the show sets, and you remember in Horizons when you go around in the Omnimover cars and then you’ll see a kitchen set and then you’ll go to outside and you’ll kind of see a patio outside veranda, and there’ll be someone shoes there, and then you look out into the cityscape.

To me it was just, again, it was kind of clicking into my theater design brain, the fact that it was these spaces that were designed so well. It really resonated with me. These were, and again, back at that time, I’d never been anything like that. These weren’t amusement parks, these weren’t roller coasters, these were something completely different. It was this kind of bisecting kind of point between a theater and a film. It was this kind of middle ground that I’d never experienced. Again, especially in those two attractions, that’s why they stuck with me.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, with Horizons especially, I mean I even remember the transitions between scenes where they would have these really basic hallways where you just light them in a certain way where you’d be like, wow, these hallways are amazing. It was basically just this thin hallway of nothing that they had to do to get you for one seat to the next, but the transitions were so good, and the way that the floor plan, I’ve seen the blueprints, the way they wind you around that building because they had to cut size at one point near the end of the budget. The fact that somehow you’re able to go through and it all kind of fits together is amazing. It’s such an oddly constructed but brilliant attraction the way it’s put together.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: You’re absolutely right. It’s incredible. I love the way you go through the levels, some of the sea scenes that you descend and you kind of start above in the briefing rooms, and then you go down and you’re under the water and you’re looking back at people looking at you. It’s constantly dynamic. You’re never really in one place for too long. You’re constantly moving. There’s always something for your eye to see. To me, it’s one of the most, still remains one of the most unique dark rides. I mean, again, if we talk about something like Haunted Mansion, it’s just a very different experience that’s more kind of atmospheric.

This was really telling, again, it was telling a story of this family, and again, it was the kind of evolution of the Carousel of Progress, I guess. But it was more than that. It was kind a feeling; it was a mood that Horizons was doing, which was amazing, as you said, the way it kind a snakes around that building, it’s fantastic. It was a huge show building, and you just think, would anyone ever build a ride like that today? Probably not.

Dan Heaton: Well, it’s one of those things too where they used a clever ride system and then the way that it was different than an Omnimover because it was facing out. But the way that they pack so much into that building, it’s just one of those things where I think they could have done so much less and gotten away with it. But it’s one of those where you look and you’re like, how did they, and then you come to the middle and there’s the giant Omnisphere. So it’s almost like a Flight of Passage type thing, but done to a much simpler form. Then you go back into, like you said, there’s the Carousel of Progress connection. I don’t want to derail the conversation because I could totally, I’m…

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Sorry.

Dan Heaton: I could totally just be like, let’s talk about Horizons for two years.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Yeah, how great was Horizons?

Dan Heaton: Yeah, oh yeah, it was great. But I think it gets to a good point about what interested you about getting into themed entertainment in general. So I know you graduated from college with a theater design degree, and how did you go about then going from that to then? I know you worked in some roles before Disney, and how did you kind of transition from that into finding roles, doing what you were looking to do with design for themed attractions?

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Yeah, as you say, I did my kind of degree in theater design and in the last year, well, the second and then the third, the last year of that, I was really kind of torturing my professors and my tutors to say, I have an idea of what I’d like to do my final project, and it’s not a theater piece, to which they were kind of shocked to gobsmacked because this is a theater design course and you should be designing something like for Brecht or this Playtex.

I was saying, well, I’d really love to do something for my own project because in the third year of this particular course, you could have a project that you could kind of self create almost. I said, I have an idea. I’d like to do a theme park attraction. I’d like to do something like that. My tutors were great, but they didn’t really understand what I was asking of them, and they didn’t really see the correlation between entertainment design and how it exists within theater, that kind of pure form of entertainment design and artistically and compared to what they would think of as an amusement park almost, I guess their thought would be comparable in America to a Six Flags or something, which is all rollercoasters.

But I was really trying to push them and say, look, this is something I’d like to do when I leave. I’d love to go into this theme entertainment design. So they did let me do pieces of that and to build up a portfolio. But luckily, I think it was a visiting tutor had a connection to Disneyland Paris, and she was a creative director designer for Disneyland Paris’s parades and floats. She actually came over to the UK to do a talk. Of course I was just went over to her and tried to, she kind of introduced me to some context in Imagineering at Disneyland Paris.

Then that was the start of about eight years or almost of back and forth interviews, portfolio sharing, and refinement with Disney. But at the same time I was building a portfolio and working for UK companies over here that have theme parks, Merlin Entertainment, etc., just so that I could have a background and actually get used to, because I’d been to theme parks and done that, but it was showing other people that I could do it.

And a large thing, I still get people asking me today, what is the secret to being at Imagineering? How do you become an Imagineer, etc. But back in the day when I was doing this, I was kind of really completely fudging my portfolio and just creating things like, wow, I’ve just done a design for something that could be used in a futuristic pavilion, or here’s the exterior of a restaurant, or here’s a rough ground plan of a, I was kind of creating these things that would exist purely from a portfolio perspective, but that could show people like Disney or other designers that you get what theme park design is.

It’s not just drawing the pretty pictures, it’s making sure that you understand how scale works, how guests flow through your attraction, how they see it artistically. And if for example, you are doing a story, for example, let’s say it’s in the Wild West, what does that era look like? Are you using the appropriate tools and things like that? So I was really refining all the time to get better at what I wanted to do. So it was a completely self-directed process I guess really.

Dan Heaton: It’s good that you bring up to the restaurant fronts or shop fronts because I feel like a lot of us who are not designers easily look at theme park design and say, I want to design a giant pavilion that could go anywhere that’s this massive thing. But I suspect that a lot of the design that a lot of Imagineers are doing is some of that, but also storefronts and carts that sell food or whatever. So it sounds like you had a pretty good gauge even just for mentioning that on the various things you would do. And like you mentioned, the reality of it, which I know is something that a lot of us don’t think about when we think about theme parks.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: It really is. I think that the reality of that is the biggest thing that as you say, people don’t quite get when you’re talking about the business. And it is a business, and I don’t just mean a business in terms of the economics of how it’s run, but a business in terms of operationally how you manage these things, how this thing your design is going to withstand, just withstand how it’s going to stand up and how it’s going to withhold itself against the elements.

For example, things like if you are having the exterior of an attraction, where are your cast members going to stand? You’re going to have a greeting booth, what’s that greeting booth going to be? All these kinds of things, you have to think about it holistically. There was a good friend of mine when I was imagining, he’s retired now, but Patrick Brennan who was the Vice President of Imagineering when I first started, he came over to Hong Kong and he said that a lot of Imagineers would always cut their teeth.

He said, never be too big to design a food cart or, you know what I mean? He would always say that. And there were a lot of big Imagineers who would have to do that because sometimes you could be working on a big project and you’re waiting for it to go to an approval or maybe your funding gets cut and you’re between projects and someone will come and say to you, look, I need this food cart designed for Animal Kingdom or for this thing for Hollywood Studios. Can you do it?

I never think you can be too big to say, wow, this is a food cart. Nothing’s everything as an Imagineer, every single thing within that theme park for me is giving the same amount of credibility and thought process as the biggest attraction, the biggest thing that you’d put money towards the biggest capital investment for me, again, there was one point when I first started, I did a concept for pool fences.

I was between jobs, there was a big job that was finishing, there was a big job that was about to start. Someone said, have you got time? And it was pool fences and you’d think about that and it’s just, okay, you still have to do research because it might be, if it’s Coronado Springs and you have to go into that kind Mexican world, you still have to do research. You can’t just phone anything in. So as you say, and food carts are absolutely, it’s where a lot of people start with that kind of thing.

When you’re doing the smaller designs to prove yourself to do the bigger things, you still have to have that same system of values. If this is a food cart and it’s existing in, for example, and again in Animal Kingdom, if it’s in Africa, for example, okay, well, Africa is a very much as a kind of reality to Africa and Animal Kingdom that you have to kind of portray.

So also you want to be culturally sensitive to that. This isn’t about saying this is a poor Africa, but you have to reflect that in the design you’re doing. There has to be a reality to it. So again, it’s about research, it’s about going into that. There’s no kind of quick book like, oh, I’ll just open up my book of cart designs, page 15, I’ll do one of those. So for me, it’s the whole theme park experience. Genuinely as an Imagineer, you look at everything from the graphic on a trash can to how a huge building looks silhouetted against the sky of something. Those two things should have the same amount of time and energy given to them in a way.

Dan Heaton: I think the best parks like the original Disneyland or Animal Kingdom or whatnot, have that where essentially you don’t get taken out of the environment the worst that could be if you are in this really themed environment and there’s a giant Coke bottle there and you’re like, why is that there?

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Exactly.

Dan Heaton: Which I’m not thinking of any particular example more. I’m not calling it that. I just think that that’s just an example of something you’ve got to find a way to make it fit. But I’d love to talk to you about one of your early projects before Disney, which is I’m a big fan of Dr. Who, though I haven’t caught up unfortunately with Jody Whitaker with the latest version, but up through Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi and David Tennant and everything. So know you worked on the Doctor Who Experience in London, which I believe originally was with Matt Smith as the Doctor, this kind of walkthrough themed attraction with the Weeping Angels and everything. So I’d love to know how you got involved with that and how that came together.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Absolutely. Well, it’s funny because I was a huge Doctor Who fan as a kid as well. I mean, obviously I grew up on it here. It was on BBC and it was kind of after seven o’clock. I was just at that kind of cusp being you’re just a little bit older than the child, but you can appreciate it. And Dr. Who back in those days was kind of a little bit scary, I think for people of a certain age. You will remember it being, it’s a little bit darker than it is now.

The Doctor Who now is still good, but it’s just not quite as dark. So I kind of grew up on that. And it just happened. I was working, I’d taken a job with another UK design firm, and this was before I moved to Hong Kong, actually just done some interviews with Disney, but it was between, and I’d stayed there for about a year or so, and as I started, they explained to me that they were going after this big BBC contract.

They couldn’t explain to me what it was, blah, blah, blah. I’d been there for a couple of weeks and they said, right, we’ve actually won this pitch to get this Doctor Who attraction. So I was like, oh my goodness, I love Doctor Who. They asked me if I knew anything about it. I said, yeah, actually do. It’s in my wheelhouse of things that I could draw upon. It was interesting because there had never been any Doctor Who attraction in the UK or globally at that point.

This was the first ever time that you’d actually been able to experience Doctor Who from a kind of themed entertainment standpoint. So it was really exciting to me to be one of the lead designers on this and to create a world. It was also extremely challenging because Doctor Who, obviously it’s an IP, but at the same time it’s different from away for Disney because there’s an expectation that people are going to bring, if they come to a Doctor Who experience, they’re going to want to tick those boxes.

So for example, as you mentioned, you’re going to want to see the Weeping Angels. You’re going to want to see, especially the Dalek, there’s going to have to be Dalek encounter. So that kind of starts to craft the story you’re going to tell, because you’d kind of almost know you’re going to have to hit those story beats within it. So it was great fun, but it was actually really challenging as well to craft a story that would allow you to go on this time travel adventure.

And at that time, Matt Smith had just begun as the Doctor. He was brand new, and we were being shown the episodes before they were released. It was a few months out from being released. So we were kind of working at the beginning. We were almost working in tandem with the production side of it.; we were getting rushes from them and they were on final VFX, things like that.

We were seeing it, and we were trying to kind of craft this story about what there was going to be. And I remember at one point we weren’t actually privy to what the TARDIS was going to look like, the interior of the TARDIS. So we had to really wait for that to become available to us. We were quite foreign into the design, and it was like, okay, here’s what the TARDIS is going to look like. They were so concerned about it being leaked. We finally got the image and then we had to recreate that for the show. We actually ended up building, we wanted to build two of them. I think we ended up doing that. The fact you would start in the TARDIS, we needed you to come back to it to feel like you’d left the TARDIS, but came back.

So we had to build two identical sets. But the thing that was obviously it was a space constraint because as it was in London, as you can imagine, London is hugely expensive in terms of rent and what you can do. So having something like a moving, like an Omnimover ride was completely out of the question. And also it kind of lent itself to more of a walkthrough experience where you could kind of go and experience these things. Again, walking through the graveyard of the Weeping Angels and having a dark encounter on a ship, all of this stuff, it lent itself to it, but it was, again, a once in a lifetime project for me. It was really exciting to be a part of that, really.

Dan Heaton: So was it a challenge because you said you had space limitations, and obviously you have to set up the TARDIS where you’re walking in, and it has to go from very small to very big somehow with the room. Was that tricky or, I mean, obviously I could figure out how you could do it, you just have a room and then another room and make it kind of a doorway. But did you have challenges, especially with doing two of them, getting that to fit?

Andy Sinclair-Harris: I can completely tell that you do a themed entertainment design podcast because you’ve actually hit upon the biggest challenge we had. The fact that for anyone who doesn’t know about Dr. Who obviously that the Doctor has this thing, his and her, excuse me, it is the doctor’s gender fluid. This tardis, which is actually an old fashioned kind of 1930s, forties, I guess kind of police call box. It’s like a blue police box with a light on the top. And again, it’s like a telephone box. So that’s very small.

In reality, you could probably fit one person in there comfortably, two completely fine, it would be too much. And then three would be out to the question. Then when you do step inside of it, and the whole thing about Doctor Who is you step inside and then it’s much, much bigger on the inside, it’s a huge space.

So for us, from a logistical standpoint of doing this as a themed attraction, you can have tens of guests going into this space. So we had to cheat the scale of the TARDIS. We had to make the TARDIS a little bit bigger. I think we put that into the story a little bit and cheated that a bit. Then both doors opened as double doors, which were kind of code compliant doors that we had to have.

Then you’d enter into, we built smaller, there was a small room that, it was a corridor that we worked with the TARDIS designer for the show. He kind of gave his blessing to that. You kind of walked in and then the interior was about the scale. It was on the show actually a little bit bigger. The set again for the show is only to fit the Doctor in a kind of camera crew, and it’s a little bit smaller in real life, whereas our one needs to be much bigger.

So we kind of, again, cheated the scale, increased the set a little bit. So as you say, that’s kind of one of the realities when you do themed entertainment design, that people kind of want to see something that’s on the screen, or they seen the movie theater and everything, and they want to experience that. But it’s our job to realize that from a three-dimensional standpoint, that you’re going to look around it, you’re going to touch things.

What does it smell like in there? And again, it also comes back to code compliant things. Like we want to make sure that every single guest, the shortest guests, the tallest guests, guests who are in wheelchairs need to be able to access this completely. So that in itself is probably one of the biggest challenges of our job, that it just, it’s with you all the time. When you’re a designer, you going to have to have that in the back of your mind when you’re designing something,

Dan Heaton: Right? It’s a case where, again, getting back to the way you would draw a concept is you can make the coolest, most amazing TARDIS that’s as good or bad than anything on the show. Then it’s like, well, how are people going to walk through that? You’re like, I don’t know.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Exactly. That’s one of the things I try and pride myself in my career is the fact that I’ve tried to have this balance of being really lofty and blue sky. You push for the stars, you what’s the best experience we can do? However, I try and ground a reality in there that makes it, you’re not just drawing these things where I remember there’s a really funny Joe Rohde painting of Expedition Everest, where the Yeti’s holding a giant, yet he’s holding this ride car and these guests are running out of it.

And it’s funny because it’s just a mood. He’s just basically trying to elaborate the fact that this is going to be, the Yeti’s going to destroy the track kind of thing. But when that gets boiled down to the reality of this concept, okay, how are we really going to do this? Everyone’s going to be in a rollercoaster car and etc. And like you said, with the TARDIS, it’s about bringing the reality to a great concept. It’s having those two things work in tandem and still doing, delivering a really great experience.

Dan Heaton: Definitely. Well, let’s get to Imagineering. So I know you started there in 2011. How did you go about interviewing and actually getting hired to work at Walt Disney Imagineering?

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Well, so basically, as I said, it was around eight years or so of interviews and back and forths and portfolio submissions and refinements, things like that. I’d actually done some freelance by that point for Disneyland Paris. And there was a lady there who’s still at Disneyland Paris called Kathleen Nunes, and she’s such a wonderful dear friend of mine. From what I’ve heard from people in Imagineering, the one thing that has been constant is you have a champion, someone who is looking out for you and just becomes that kind of mentor.

I’ve been really lucky to have probably a couple. I mean, I would say Kathleen was great, and also Don Carson, who’s obviously a former Imagineer, but again, every one of your podcasts audience probably would’ve heard of Don his amazing work. So they were both people I knew of, and I could check in with them in terms of my work and how it was going.

As I said, Kathleen had put me in touch with people at Paris, had done some kind of freelance with them. I was refining my style and everything. Then she just said, if you want to have a job, we might be having something coming up soon in Paris. Would you do that? I said, yeah, probably would move to Paris. I’d love to be an Imagineer.

Then again, that comes into the realities of if you want to be an Imagineer, you’ve got to really move around the world. Then she called me actually one day, and that was when I was, I’d finished the Doctor Who thing, it was kind of towards the end of that part of my job in London. She called me out of the blue and she said, are you sitting down? And I thought, okay, no, I’m not.

I’m stood outside, but everything. She said, well, there is a job in Imagineering that you can interview for. And I said, that’s great. Okay. I’m thinking to myself, okay, move into Paris. She said, it’s actually a role in Hong Kong. So I kind of had forgotten that Disney had a park in Hong Kong, and it was relatively new. I think it’d only been open a few years.

It’d probably been open about four or five years, I think at the time it was relatively new, so I’d completely forgotten. I was like, oh, wow. Then I had two phone interviews with the Imagineers in Hong Kong, and I just seemed to be the right fit for them. I was literally, I think it was about six or eight weeks later, I was packing up my life in the UK and then on a plane and landing in a very, very hot and humid Hong Kong thinking, oh my goodness, what have I done?

Dan Heaton: Yeah. So I know Hong Kong is the one that, I mean, I hate to say it, but that sometimes people forget about, especially at that time before Mystic Manor and everything else being Grizzly Gulch and everything being added to it, how challenging was that? I mean, one thing you’re starting in Imagineering, something you wanted to do for years, and then two, you’re going to work on somewhere that maybe you hadn’t considered that you would end up working there. Was that a challenge to then move to entirely new culture and start at this big role?

Andy Sinclair-Harris: It really was for me, because for me, I’d always imagined that I would probably start at Paris. I mean, definitely going to Florida or California would’ve been the dream, but I knew that was going to be harder in terms of working visas, all of that kind of thing. But for me, I always thought it was going to be Paris first. So I wasn’t prepared for it to be Hong Kong. And as I said, this was a kind of new park as well.

But very quickly, once I’d moved to Hong Kong, it was a very small team. And it was good for my career in that sense because of, it was such a small team going in as kind of the lead kind of concept designer for the base park coming in for the permanent team there. I had an influence in everything. I was doing hotel room designs, I was doing attraction facades, restaurants, carts and wagons and things.

It was everything. So it was kind of a baptism of fire. So not only were you having to navigate this culture, and again, Hong Kong, for anyone who’s been there, it’s an amazing city. Again, it was a really fantastic four years of my life in Hong Kong with my wife and our son was born there. So it was fantastic. But you have to live in parallel with this city that’s amazing and dynamic and quite intense and all of that. Then you also having to, I felt like when I was at Hong Kong, we were really kind of trying to bring the park up to its full potential.

I mean, now they’re investing a lot more in it. I mean, when I look at what’s happening with Hong Kong now, it’s so funny because obviously when we were there, we were constantly pitching attractions and new rides and we were pushing all the time, and it just needed that big investment that it got now that it has with the new frozen land that’s coming.

And obviously when I was there, it had been greenlit for the Mystic Manor and Grizzly Gulch. Toy Story Land had been green lit, but Toy Story Land was the last piece of the puzzle because I’m sure a lot of your listeners would know, but I dunno if you do. But basically there was supposed to be a land there called Glacier Bay, I think it was called, which was more of this kind of snowy environment. And I think, I’m not quite sure of the history of this, but I think it was similar, a project that was being planned for Ocean Park, which is kind of a competitor, I think.

So that was one of the things that kind of forced it to its evolution to stop. Then another thing, I think that there were management at the time, or there were people who felt like it needed an existing IP, the story that people, I think there was almost stepping back, having Grizzly Gulch, which was a new kind of land and a new experience, and Mystic Point, which was a new experience having something that would kind of ground it.

So Toy Story seemed like a kind a, I don’t want to say a safe bet, that’s the wrong thing, but it would kind of seem like a good starting point between those three lands. So I came in at Toy Story Land and was right at that development of that, and obviously it didn’t have a retail space, so I was really heavily involved in Andy’s Toy Box, which was hilarious. I was Andy and everyone on the project team thought it was named after me. It was like, no, it’s Andy from the films.

So yeah, it was a really fun and challenging time to be at Hong Kong because I said we were trying to push the park to be live up to its potential, and I never thought they’d actually rebuild the castle. It was something that was being talked about, should we kind of add to the castle? Should we change it? And it’s fantastic to see now that it is a brand new castle, a much taller castle being built on top of the existing castle.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s really interesting the evolution of that park because like you mentioned with Frozen than they’re doing the Stark Expo that they’re putting in there. And then on the castle, which to me is really unprecedented. I mean, we’ve seen things like in Disneyland where they add little colors or they changed a bit to it, but nothing on this scale. I mean, this is astounding to me, but just, I mean, coming from the States, we look at things though in Hong Kong and we see that they had two, like you said, two lands with Mystic Point and Grizzly Gulch without connections directly to a movie. And we’re like, oh my gosh, we’re so jealous. That’s amazing.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Exactly.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. It’s like, wow, that’s great. But I wanted to ask you though about doing even Andy’s Toy Box because it doesn’t surprise me that they wanted to have Toy Story in there, and I’m not making it nefarious. Just that makes sense, especially given the Toy Story Lands have, there’s one in Paris, there’s now one in Hollywood Studios. I mean, they’re very common in a lot of different parks, but when you’re trying to, with that Andy’s Toy Box or with something like that, as a designer, you’re using existing characters. You’re trying to create something that’s unique but still connects to the source material. How challenging is that, or what’s the trick that you’ve learned about being able to do that even in a space, just like a retail space?

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Yeah, was an interesting project because as I said, it came really late into the design of Toy Story Land. So essentially, as you said, they’d picked the attractions. They wanted to have the Green Army Men Parachute Drop and Slinky Dog was going to be there, but they had sort of, I’m trying to be careful how I say this, but they slightly micromanaged that and hadn’t thought big enough for that land. I think there was originally supposed to be a retail space there, but when I was there, it was kind of decided it needed that kind of extra footfall.

And knowing the popularity of these Toy Story characters, and to your point as well, it was a good idea to put Toy Story in because the Toy Story characters buzz would be hugely popular in Asia and in Hong Kong. So when I came into that, this toy box needed to really kind of speak a language that would be apparent because this is probably a separate conversation, but designing for guests in Asia compared to designing when I was designing in America and in Florida, they’re completely different.

I mean to say it’s a different audience, it’s an understatement. And again, people like Tom Morris and other people will know about this. The fact that what someone will actually visually understand and have an emotional connection with in the States compared to Paris and Hong Kong, it’s completely different. And I think this was coming right at Hong Kong, once Hong Kong had opened, it was just that start of that learning curve for Disney pre Shanghai of learning, oh my goodness, Disney exists here in this parts of the world, but it’s not what we think it is.

Guests identify with things differently. For example, one of the biggest challenges we had there, I’m segueing from the toy box. I’ll come back to it, but it was Space Mountain. One of the things we would always have was that guests would complain at Hong Kong Disneyland, they didn’t understand what Space Mountain was. Some people thought it was a convention space that this was this huge void, what’s in here. That design thinking led to some of the rides and attractions for Grizzly Gulch for example.

That became a terrain coaster. It was because we kind of wanted guests to see what these attractions were. They had more of a sense of what they were, because historically, a lot of Imagineering is done within a box because you can control the light level and the sound and the music, etc. So that was a learning curve. Again, going back to to your question was this had to work iconically for people to understand what it was. So we kind of did this, again, with Toy Story. You’ve kind of got this bucketed parts you can use, really say the cardboard box. Andy’s done these kind of drawings on the side.

So it was my job to be Andy for that. I had almost a blank sheet of paper really to create these drawings and how Andy would assess that and how he’d make the cardboard and do all of that. Then the good part of that was I got to work really closely with everyone at Pixar because obviously they at Pixar care very deeply about their characters. Even though it’s Disney, Pixar exists in its own, and you still have to do due diligence with them to say, Hey, we’re going to have Woody’s face here.

Woody’s going to be doing this. You have people at Pixar, Roger Gordon, people like that, who are actually going to oversee that from an artistic perspective and things. I remember one of the challenges we had was that we had these inside the space with these gondolas, these kind of merchandise gondolas and things.

Again, going back to what we started talking about is that everything has a story. Everything has, I know people say this about Imagineering all the time, but it is true that once you’re inside this cardboard box, you have to think, well, Andy wouldn’t just build necessarily merchandising stands. How would he create these things? We kind of figured a way to have domino pieces and jumping jacks and things doing that. I kind of really pushed to have some kind of toy in there because it was a kind of nice change of pace to have something kind of graphically represented. So the fun thing about that was that I got to create this kind of toy story money. Then by doing that, you had, it started a larger discussion about, okay, well this money must’ve come from a game, and it was Woody’s game.

I kind of came up with this backstory where, I mean, it was literally just for me to do it and for Pixar to be involved with how it’d begun. No one in the store is ever going to look at that and think about that. But that’s the kind of level of detail that I went to within that design. Getting the train tracks, the paint level on that and everything. It is a lot that went into that store, even though it doesn’t probably look like it’s the average guest. It is a challenge in that regards to fit all of that design into that small space.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, it reminds me again too of things that so much going into every element of the parks, which even if we don’t go in and think about exactly what went into it, you can sense when something is done really well. Also too, you brought up, and I’ve heard this in terms of Main Street and other areas when you’re in the parks in Asia where you have to adjust, or they’ve even said with, we can’t do Twilight Zone Tower of Terror in Japan because no one will know what that means.

Or different adjustments you have to make, which are easy to forget here. Where also too, the parks with Disneyland being 64 years old and Disney World, being there so long to fans is a little just, we’re used to it. So I’m sure that just adds extra layers. That brings me to what I find to be such a fascinating thing you worked on, which is this Halloween version of The Jungle Cruise.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Yeah.

Dan Heaton: I watched the video and it wasn’t the best video, but it gave kind of a good gauge of it. I just love the idea because again, I think I heard you talk about this in another podcast where you have to consider how people in Hong Kong even look at Halloween and everything. So how did that design come together, and especially considering some of those challenges you might have?

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Yeah, you bring up a really fun project that was probably one of the most fun projects I’ve ever worked on in Imagineering, that Jungle River Cruise, because the project came about because Hong Kong Disney was actually, I believe was the first park to have the Ghost Galaxy overlay for Space Mountain, which then kind of transitioned to Disneyland came a few years later. But essentially that kind of started at Hong Kong, and we’d had a lot of success with having these attraction overlays, especially for Halloween.

I mean, Halloween in Hong Kong is extremely popular. It’s become a really kind of American adopted holiday over there in Hong Kong and Asia. But they, and I hate to, I sound like I’m really generalizing the entire Asian population here, but at the time, and there is a certain population in Hong Kong who really enjoy the more scary aspects of Halloween. They really, to them it’s a little bit more thrilling, a little bit more gory. It’s a little bit pushed all right to the edge of that horror. I think when Hong Kong Disneyland originally opened, some of the Halloween product was kind of more typical to a Castle Park.

Then through guest feedback and everything, and then obviously from Ocean Park, which is another theme park in Hong Kong, they were doing a lot more thrilling, and they were kind of getting that kind of guest mix a little bit more than Hong Kong was. So then we rethought the product and it became a bit more thrilling. There was a time where it was at Tomorrowland and it was kind really alien and really kind of pushing the envelope of what Disney could do for Halloween. I mean, just from an Imagineering perspective, I kind of remember thinking this is something we would never do in Florida or California. It just wouldn’t fly. You just kind of know it in your bones.

So this is where, for me, it was interesting being a British based designer or having, coming from a British perspective, because I was at that kind of unique crossroads to be learning about the Asian culture and what that audience liked and really immersing myself in, but also knowing about the completely immersed in Disney and the history of Disney and knowing about what those parks made up and then bringing those together.

So after the success of Ghost Galaxy, we had another kind of blue sky session, and we were really challenged to say, look, we would love to do an overlay of a land or an attraction for Halloween coming up. We just kind of kicked around ideas. I don’t think it was me that pitched that said Jungle River Cruise. I think someone else did. And there was a few other attractions going around again.

For me that just sounded like such an amazing proposition to be able to take that. It’s a very long ride. It’s kind of iconic and it’s out in the open. I thought, okay, and I think it’s on my website, but I was sat there and we were having this blue sky session, obviously because it’s a blue sky session, everyone’s got postcard sizes and we’re sketching, we’re talking. It’s fantastic to be involved in an imagining blue sky.

Even when you’re there, you still have to pinch yourself. It’s such a wonderful thing. I did this really quick sketch of a Jungle Cuise boat, and there’s a skipper holding a flashlight down and the lights just cutting through the dark and illuminating this hand coming out of the water. And it just kind of drew really quickly. I kind of didn’t know what I was doing. It was almost a bit like, okay, we know it’s going to be nighttime, and how would that look? The management really kind of jumped on that and was like, wow, okay. It’s kind of evocative and let’s just push it.

So I was kind of put in charge of developing that attraction with entertainment. So it was great because I was given completely kind of carte blanche, just blank canvas to say, okay, let’s do a Halloween attraction overlay. Then it became really daunting to me because you have an existing attraction that’s been there from park opening. And again, it’s based in water and you have a ride vehicle that’s existing. You have these existing show scenes, and we were somewhat limited to what we could and couldn’t do. For example, we can’t remove some of the big show sets, but we had to address them in a way.

Again, that really informed, kind of similar to Dr. Hill, I suppose. The story had to be crafted around these iconic elements of going through the Serengeti and the elephant pools and things. We knew we were going to kind of darken some of the show lighting to not have them, but then we needed to add a new story in. So the story became about this kind of very nefarious explorer, almost like the dark side of Indiana Jones, the shadowy side of him.

He was this kind of explorer out to collect these three stones, these emerald, the emerald trinity as it became. And he was kind of out to take them from, they existed in the jungle, he’s out to take them and they provide I mortality. Then the jungle kind of almost fights back. One thing that I really pushed for was to, we ended up removing the hippos from the hippo scene, the attack scene.

We had these kind of what I called almost like vine creatures. It kind of got my concept back in there that they were literally lurched out of the waters. We took the hippo shells, kept the mechanism of them lurching out of the water with these hands and these vine creatures coming out. We kind of had this low lying fog on there, and it was lit by a, and it was really kind of thrilling to do it in tests and adjustment phase. It was fantastic. I remember thinking, oh my good. But then there was part of me that thinking, what have I done to the Jungle River cruise? Is anyone going to forgive me for doing this?

Dan Heaton: Well, it’s funny, somehow it had mostly escaped my notice until pretty recently. But I think about, we went on the Jungle Cruise in Florida at night a few years ago, and this was the normal Jungle Cruise. I was like, this is a little freaky just going there at night already, because it’s not literally lit up and you’re going through some of those narrow waterways. Then I watched the video and there’s this whole thing where you have, you’re seeing it in shadow, but the vines come up and grab this guy and it’s like, oh my gosh.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: That’s right. It was amazing. We ended up, for that scene, as you say, for the Gorilla camp scene, we closed the scene down. We couldn’t actually move the animatronics down. That was one of the things that, again, costs and time and everything, we couldn’t remove the gorilla and animatronics. So we sealed the show set down and used projection mapping on the front of that, but then created part of the story that again, the jungle was actually reclaiming the stones and him himself, he was kind of sucked down into the earth.

So again, this was me getting to do the show writing thing, but it was, as you say, completely. We ended up walking before, when we first started the development of the attraction, the Halloween overlay, we ended up walking the space. So we would walk the backside of the attraction. This was about 11 o’clock at night.

All the guests have gone, it’s pitch black. We had torches and we walking the kind of land side of the Jungle Cruise, and it was really eerie. It already had that sense of being mysterious and dark and you didn’t know what was through the shadows and everything. Again, just the reality of this, that in Hong Kong you have spiders and mosquitoes and there was an actual reality of the terrifying side of it.

And then what we did, we then boarded the boat and we kind of circled around the attraction a few times in the dark. I just said to everyone, can we just turn all the show lights off? Let’s just, we’d brought these big torches, these really powerful torches we could find. We were just testing out how evocative it was completely, as you say, I said, we had a Jungle Cruise driver and I said, oh, can you stop the boat here?

The boat engine would die and it’d be silent, and we’d be cutting through the night with this torch. It was, as you say, I thought some of the work is already done here so eerie and evocative, and as soon as you’re kind of looking and the torture would captured these animals, and you couldn’t quite tell what was in the shadows. It was amazing. And it’s a shame, as you say, you’re seeing it on YouTube because no one ever really got a good enough a video of that and the video to say the video doesn’t do it justice is an understatement. It was such an evocative ride to do on the boat and be scared and not knowing what was coming up. It was amazing.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s one of those things where even four years later from 2015, the videos would be so much better because I think about it, the shot that the video I saw, it was in the back of the boat, I’m like, there’s cool stuff happening that I can’t really see.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: And no one ever captures what’s going on because the camera’s never panned down to the particular show scenes that happen. So you can never quite, excuse me, can never quite get a good enough view of the attraction on those videos.

Dan Heaton: Well, it’s really cool. There’s one other attraction I wanted to ask you about in Hong Kong, the Fairytale Forest, which to me seems almost like it’s like a walkthrough and it’s interactive, but it reminds me a little bit of if you walk through the Storybook Land at Disneyland or in Paris and kind of did it as a different way. I know it only opened in 2015, I believe, but I’m curious what it was like to put that together.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Basically, again, this is coming back to Hong Kong Disneyland where there was a real economic force at work there, and we were really looking to put some new product into the park. We really wanted to put something back in. Honestly, there was some kind of financial restrictions with that. So we wanted to fill out the little parcel of Fantasland there, and it’s right against the train tracks of the Fantasyland train station there. We also wanted to make it more of an old fashioned as completely as you said, we were talking about what would happen if you took the Casey Junior Railroad or the riverboats and took the Storybook canal boats if you took the water out and made this a walking tour.

We specifically wanted it to be about the horticulture and these little kind of dioramas, it was very much like you could see them from the boat or from the Storybook canal, but you can see these dioramas, but what if you kind of get closer to them and see them and the craftsmanship of those things.

So that was the task we were given. As I said, we were working with financial constraints as well with that. But I do think it ended up being a really nice kind of sweet project. It was intended to be that kind of sweet, gentle walking tour because again, I think Hong Kong needed that kind of, it was almost going back to the ticket books.

You have your E Ticket, it was kind of that kind of B or C ticket. It’s not to detract from that at all, but it’s just to, as Tony Baxter, I think as Tom Morris say, to kind of level the expectations for guests of what they’re going to be seeing. Oh, this is a really quaint walking attraction. Again, it’s showing guests, it’s out in the open. Guests can see it. And from a topiary perspective in Hong Kong, they’re fantastic at growing things.

Because of the climate, you can really get some amazing topiaries. They have some really fantastic artisans over there who are on a par with the artists in Florida who create the topiaries. So we knew from that point the actual forest would grow up really, really quickly. And it’s really fun. You can kind of crank handles and things and things happen.

Kids, younger guests really enjoy it. And again, I think that was important for us as well, to have something that younger guests would enjoy as well. I really enjoyed doing the marquees. You enter the Fairytale Forest and it has touches of hand carved characters, and then it was really quaint and charming and I was really trying to channel that original Disneyland aspect to that rather than, yeah, it was kind of going back to more of an old school kind of imaginary, I guess kind of the old school style of Disneyland Fantasyland essentially.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think it does a nice job of, and I haven’t been there, but unlike for the Jungle Cruise, it’s very easy to find really good videos where people walk through and they crank everything and you can kind of see what happens, but it has that, I wouldn’t even say quaint, but it has that kind of pleasant or relaxing vibe to it, which I think you really need in a theme park because while roller coasters are amazing, and while thrill rides are amazing and even grand dark rides, sometimes you just need to mosey around a bit and just enjoy kind of little things.

I think that does, it’s very pleasant even watching a video and I suspect even one person, very attractive area. Like you said, I think by now I probably was watching a video for more recent, as the foliage grows, it just looks more impressive.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: It does, and you’re completely right. I think it’s kind of forgotten in theme parks where sometimes that everyone’s always pushing for this big ticket attraction, and what’s the big thing? What’s the big draw? But I completely agree with you, the fact that you have to have a menu of things. For example, you don’t just go to a restaurant and have steak, steak, steak all the time. You need a starter, you need a side. The more diverse the palette is, the more enjoyable for guests.

You can’t put a high enough price on things that are just a walking tour and things that are, as you said, pleasant and just enjoyable and a diversion. They allow you to reset your sense before you necessarily go into another dynamic blast into the galaxy with Tony Stark or etc. You need to have that breadth and that change and that, I guess it’s comparable to a sorbet.

You just have that between meals as that kind of, oh, this is really charming. Yeah, I think that’s the word I’m trying to say, charming. The Fairytale Forest, we were just literally going for a charming quality to that that would really sit within fantasy land and again, allow for younger guests to enjoy something because kids really enjoy this kind of cause and effects type of attractions that sometimes they don’t get to experience. Everyone’s clamoring for the Space Mountains and things like that. We really wanted to have that be something that younger guests could experience and enjoy.

Dan Heaton: For sure. Because we have a local Six Flags amusement park here where I live, and every ride I feel like I’m just getting pummeled. And that’s fun. That’s fun for a few hours, but once you’re done with a few hours, you’re like, okay, I’m going home. It can’t do it.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Heaton: Can’t get pummeled by every ride no matter what.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Too much steak. Yeah, exactly. That’s right.

Dan Heaton: Alright, well I know after Hong Kong, you spent a little bit of time working in Florida after that. I’m curious kind of how that transition went and kind of what you were doing there.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Yeah, so basically whilst in Hong Kong, excuse me, I had friends in Florida and I’d kept in touch with them and a couple of things happened that were interesting. There’s a program within Imagineering where it allows you to transition to different sites and explore that other kind of site that you might not have done. So for example, we would have people from Paris come over to Hong Kong, Florida, come over to Japan, etc., kind of move around the sites.

So a friend of came over to Hong Kong, a lady called Beth. She came over to Hong Kong and she spent two months with us and we just became firm friends. Obviously she was really daunted coming to Hong Kong. It was a huge challenge, but she’d come from Florida and my wife and I took her under our wing and we became really great friends. Then the opportunity came for me to pick a size.

My leaders said, would you like to go somewhere? I was like, well, I would love to spend my two, three months in Florida. So I did. Ended up to go there and spent time with them, got to meet all of the amazing people in Florida and made lifelong friends there. I was really passionate about going there, to be honest with you. They were really passionate about getting me over there.

And it was probably nearly two years of work to get me to move over to Florida from one way or another and to finish my work in Hong Kong and I was transitioning at the time, so I was having to finish projects in Hong Kong and then begin projects in Florida, etc. So yeah, I ended up moving to Florida and I was there for about a year and a half or something like that I think.

I kind of got to a point where I wanted to move back to the UK actually, it was my choice to leave Disney. There was a lot of things happening back in the UK that I wanted to be a part of. So I was absolutely devastated to leave Imagineering and especially the Florida team, which was great. But in that year, it was a fantastic year for me because I got to work on such a diverse range of projects and most of them were really conceptual. I was having a conversation with somebody the other day saying that it is the curse of a curse and a blessing of a concept design, which is kind what I am.

I’m more of the first initial blue sky of projects because the work you get to do is fantastic because it’s challenging and you get to literally have that blank piece of paper and create something. But at the same time, there is a reality of those things that sometimes a good portion of those projects don’t actually ever see the light of day. I mean, I worked on, for example, a redo of Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster for a long time that was going to change that attraction to something else, and that didn’t happen.

Again, it’s the reality of the industry. You spend months of your life pouring your heart and your soul and things into these things, and then a presentation will happen or a meeting will happen and then you finish on Friday and then there’s a meeting on a Monday and then you get a phone call on Tuesday and say, that’s no longer happening. We’ve got something else we should work on. So it’s a pool fence, something like that. So as I say, it was a really great time in Florida and like I said, I would love to able to share with some of the things I did, but I probably still can’t talk about some of the things in case they happen or whatever.

But conceptually, that’s one of the fun things that you get to do. So many concepts, I mean, I worked on the initial versions of the Disney Cruise Line island that’s going to be, it was actually a different island than the one that’s going to be.

I was working on that and some of the attractions and the water features that were going to go there. So I got to work on that, which was cool, and again, conceptual and I think that’s, again, it’s going to be a different project. I think now that Joe Rohde is involved in that new Island, it’s going to be a completely different project than the one I was working on.

So again, it’s one of the joys of Imagineering that you have these, and it’s as fun to sometimes work on the things that don’t see the light of day because of the people you got to work with and the work you got to do. Sometimes it is heartbreaking that it doesn’t actually happen, but at the same time, the work is the reward and you enjoy doing it. Really

Dan Heaton: Having been to Aulani that Joe Rohde worked on designing the fact that he’s working on that island, I mean, who knows what he’s going to do? It’s going to be something I’m sure

Andy Sinclair-Harris: It’s going to be amazing because I mean, the version that I was working was more kind of, there definitely a story there and there was more an architectural story, but I think that Joe is going to bring more of a human story to it, if I can say that. I think there’s more of an adventurous human side of it, and it’s more rooted in a culture, whereas I think the version that we were working on was, again, it’s just a different, I don’t think it was more positive or negative in that it was just a different story. It was more rooted in kind of stories and architecture in that sense. So again, really excited to see what he’s going to do there.

Dan Heaton: Great. Well, I’m starting to wind down, but if you have time, I just have a few more questions for you if that works out. I’d love to hear a bit more about Imagineering and whether if there were certain Imagineers you work with that really had a strong impact on you in Hong Kong or in Florida, or even just in general, just kind of what it was like to be there and how that kind of impacted you and what you’re doing now.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Well, again, when you want to be an Imagineer and the actual, the state you are in when you want to be an Imagineer compared to when you have been an Imagineer and you’re actually doing it, it’s kind of breathtaking and amazing. I mean, I should never forget when I’d officially moved to Florida and going into one of the Imagineering brainstorming sessions in Florida in the Epcot building.

And for me, it was literally a dream come true because it was a realization of, Epcot was the first ever Disney entertainment project I ever saw and experienced, and as we’ve talked about, it had such an indelible print on my life. So going to the Imagineering office in Epcot and actually walking through those gates with the Blue card, it’s incredible. It literally is a realization of a dream and then sitting in a room with these people who are these Imagineers, these incredible men and women, it’s really daunting.

I remember talking to a friend of mine in Imagineering and saying, this first couple of weeks I was really nervous. And then someone said, look, if you’re in the room, someone has seen something about you that feels like you can be in the room. That was both reassuring and incredibly daunting as well, because you feel like, okay, I have a right to be here, but then also bring your A game all the time.

But specifically people, again, it’s a really fantastic environment because everyone is so creative about everything. Everyone is so passionate about what they’re doing. I really don’t have any kind of horror stories about Imagineering. I mean, because it was such a wonderful time of my life to work there, and specifically people who I’ve worked with, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, Don Carson, who’s kind of a really dear friend and mentor of mine.

People can kind of look up his work on his website, and actually, again, I’m sure people will know about him anyway, but he’s a fantastic Imagineer and a storyteller, and to me is almost a second generation of a Marc Davis. He has that incredible kind of quick penmanship and can sum up a character and pose and story. So he was someone I would just who I know today and talk with and still is inspiring to me. And Jason Grandt, especially at Imagineering in Florida.

He’s creative director now, but he’s just an amazing person and an amazing personality, really.; he’s so much fun and really kind of someone you can gain lots of experience and energy from. He’s kind of fun to be around and really fun to work with. So any project that Jason was involved with, I was really kind of keen to be working with him on that.

Dan Heaton: Well, excellent. Yeah, I mean, I am sure you could go on for a while. Those are, I could, yeah. Great examples of people that you work with, and I know now you’re still doing some consulting, but you’re also working at RMA Themed Attractions, and I’m curious, I don’t know how much detail you can go to, but what type of work you’re currently doing in your role now?

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Well, yeah, I mean, the nice thing is I still get to work as a consultant with Disney, which is great. So when I left Florida, the team out there were really keen to stay in touch with me, and I keep in touch with them and work with them. As I say, I get to do elements of concepts of things, and I also still keep in touch with the team in Hong Kong.

So I’ve just finished a package, a concept design package or something, which I probably can’t talk about, but for Hong Kong and a mid-range kind of thing. Nothing huge I’m afraid, but that’s really great for me. That’s still kind of feel like I’m going to imagine and get to keep in touch with that. But in terms of working at RMA here in England, they’re a great company because they get to do things that aren’t just theme parks.

We’re currently working on something that’s more of almost like a museum visitor retraction, like the next generation of what a museum is, and that’s been really fantastic to me to kind of segue to something that’s more real world we’re designing at the moment, we’re consulting on a large Roman Vista Attraction Museum, and that’s been a challenge for me because obviously it’s dealing with more of the real world, bringing a lot more of that kind of entertainment into there as well.

But still kind of trying to bring specifically my imaginary side of things of, again, what is the next generation? It feels like museums and things like that are going through this evolution of not just being graphic panels on a wall, visitors are looking for something different. So it’s been really fun for me to, I’ve specifically been brought in because of my theme park experience to create something that’s different and that’s unique. Literally the people who have asked me to work and have said, we’re looking for a world-class visitor attraction, and that’s been really exciting. So something different for me outside of Disney’s been really fun as well.

Dan Heaton: Well, yeah, I’ve noticed it even just here in other cities, I’ve been to that museums, aquarium, zoos, they’re all taking elements from theme design and doing a lot more than just what you would’ve expected 10 or 15 years ago. So I’m sure there’s plenty of work like that to do, which is really cool to see.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Absolutely. I mean, for example, they ask us and say, I’ve been in meetings with people when we’ve consulted for things about museums and these other attractions, and they’ll say something like a Disney, or they’ll use that phrase, because of my unique placement, the fact that I’ve worked with Disney, and I can say to them, when you bring the name Disney up, what I’m saying to them is the fact that you’re bringing up a thought process, you’re bringing up.

It’s not about a huge investment, obviously about, it’s about a thought process of using a story of staying true to that story and embodying that in the best way that you can, and making that really, again, this word gets so used, but immersive and true to the story that you’re trying to tell. So it’s kind of showing them that the principles of Disney are just generally really good storytelling principles generally, that Disney use them so well that it’s something that can, as you say, be brought into zoos and aquariums and museums, because it’s the same standards that we’ve been using. It’s a storytelling process essentially.

Dan Heaton: Definitely. Well, Andy, this has been great to talk with you and learn more about your background. So if someone wants to connect with you either on social media, I know you’re on Twitter and everywhere. Where’s a good place to go to learn more about your work or just what you’re doing?

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Well, as you say, I’m on Twitter. I’ve kind of come off of it a bit more recently, but I do still check, so I think it’s 185 per acre is my handle. I’m sure I haven’t looked for a while, but so again, if you want to reach out to me on Twitter, that’d be great. I always love connecting with people. I do have a website, which again, I haven’t updated for some time, but andysinclairharris.com. You can check out some of the work that I’ve done that we’ve talked about. You can see some things, and again, if anyone wants to reach out and talk to me, I’m always happy to talk about the work I’ve done.

Dan Heaton: Excellent. Well, Andy, thanks so much for doing it. It was a blast to talk with you.

Andy Sinclair-Harris: Thank you so much for having me, Dan. This has been really fun. Thank you so much.