158. Imagineer Tim Landry on Creating Effects for Movies and Theme Parks

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Movies and theme parks have always had a clear connection; Disney’s animators worked closely on Disneyland. While the industry has expanded, visual effects advances in movies have carried over to the parks. Along with creating remarkable effects in Hollywood, talented artists have delivered attractions for Disney, Universal, and more. Tim Landry’s career offers a perfect example of this trend. He went to film school at USC, and those skills have served him well in a wide range of mediums.

Landry is my guest on this episode of the Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his career in films and theme parks. Following school, he worked as a visual effects supervisor at Dream Quest Images, which was ultimately purchased by Disney. During that time, he was involved in the excellent CinéMagique show at the Walt Disney Studios in Paris. On this episode, Tim talks about the experience making that cool love letter to movies. In addition, Tim created effects for original Disney California Adventure attractions like the Bakery Tour and Golden Dreams film.

In 2005, Tim returned to Walt Disney Imagineering and played a key role in the visual effects for the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage at Disneyland. He talks about that challenging process and his work on attractions like Mystic Manor, Soaring: Fantastic Flight, and several at EPCOT. Beyond the specific projects, Tim tells his story about the ups and downs of being an artist. He documented this experience in his film Shoveling Pixie Dust: a Memoir, available to watch on YouTube. I really enjoyed the chance to learn more about Tim’s story on this podcast.

Show Notes: Tim Landry

Watch Tim Landry’s film Shoveling Pixie Dust: A Memoir for free on YouTube.

Learn more about the career of Tim Landry and his work on his official website.

Note: Photos in this post used with the permission of Tim Landry.

Transcript

Tim Landry: I’ll look up the old actors and see what their careers were like and everybody had struggles, everybody. We’re all human, and that’s what makes theme parks and movies so magical is that it’s a shared experience. We learn about what it’s like to be human.

Dan Heaton: That is Imagineer Tim Landry, and you’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

(music)

Dan Heaton: From the production of an audacious short film to becoming a Hollywood refugee to the Magic Kingdom with a few bumps along the road, follow Tim’s adventures as he deals with the challenges of making magic. That’s the description of Tim Landry’s movie Shoveling Pixie Dust, a memoir which you can watch on YouTube, but it also could describe our conversation here on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. I hope you’re all doing well out there; it is Dan Heaton. I’m back here for episode 158 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

I am excited to bring you this conversation that I had with Tim Landry. He’s had a really interesting career starting out at USC. He wanted to become a filmmaker, nearly working on a very famous sci-fi film in the late seventies. Created a short film called Cabbages and Kings with silhouettes, which I find really interesting, and ultimately ended up at Walt Disney Imagineering, working on effects for Cinemagique at Disneyland Paris, a film that I love, Finding Nemo Submarines at Disneyland, Mystic Manor in Hong Kong, Phantom Manor, Soarin’ Fantastic Flight at Tokyo Disney Sea, so much more.

Plus the Astro Liner, which was a very early type of simulator that feels kind of similar to what Tim did on Star Tours in 2011. The newer version, of course, The Adventure Continues. That’s just a small sample of the different attractions that Tim worked on for Imagineering. He’s also worked on a lot of films more than I could possibly list right here, and what I also appreciate too is that Tim was honest about some of the challenges, some of the ups and downs that comes across in his movie and also comes across when we talk here where he had some great highs and got a chance to work for Disney, but not everything is super rosy.

Sometimes it’s just a job and that’s okay. But it was really great to talk to Tim and I hope that you enjoy this interview and if you do, I would highly recommend you check out Tim’s film on YouTube Shoveling Pixie Dust because it expands on a lot of what we talk about here in this interview. So let’s get right to it. Here is Tim Landry.

(music)

Dan Heaton: Tim, thank you so much for talking with me on the podcast.

Tim Landry: Hi Dan, good to meet you. Let’s have some magic.

Dan Heaton: For sure. I really enjoyed your movie and I’m really excited to talk about some of the things you worked on. There’s a lot of cool stuff. Before we get into that though, I’d love to know from you just how you got interested in filmmaking and then ultimately decided to go to USC for film school. I mean, what was your background where that kind of grabbed you as something you wanted to do?

Tim Landry: I was a kid growing up in a Leave it to Beaver neighborhood in northwest Florida. I used to watch I Love Lucy in the afternoons and Lucy wanted to be in the show with Ricky. I thought that must be something that would be fun to do, and so I got kind of hooked in the idea of being in show business somehow.

Dan Heaton: You ultimately ended up getting to USC and I know that you had a chance to do visual effects for a film that ended up being rather large with Industrial Light & Magic. I’d love to know a little bit about that experience and ultimately not end up doing it.

Tim Landry: Yeah, I tell this story in my little film. My animation professor got a call from some guys in the valley that were doing the science fiction movie and they needed some help with visual effects and it was an opportunity, so I thought I’d go out there and talk to ’em, and so that little movie ended up being Star Wars, but I got to see the facility ready as it was that they were putting this thing together in with brand new things like motion control and computer control, and it was all pretty fascinating for a kid from Colorado, but ultimately I had some commitments at school.

I needed to finish school and I knew that if I went to work for them, I would ultimately just be a technician. I would never get to do anything really creative, especially being a student and getting the bottom rung of the ladder and I saw at that time that I probably had a better career path by trying to make my own films through film school and that was the path I chose and you can laugh at me if you want.

Dan Heaton: I would not. It makes a lot of sense logically. Well, you ended up working on some short films at that time and I’d love to know a little bit about what that ended up being and just your experience working on those as you were learning how to make films.

Tim Landry: Well, it kind of goes back to my baby sister was born in 1967 that motivated my dad to buy a super eight movie camera. Well, he didn’t get to use that movie camera very much because I grabbed it and started making movies all over the place, and as I got a little older and better at it, I made more complete efforts and submitted them to some local film festivals and whatnot and started winning some prizes and I said, wow, this is a high, I got to keep doing this. I got into this habit. It’s a tough habit to break being the creative high of doing something and seeing the work of your hands and entertaining people. It was always something that always fascinated me.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well one of the short film you worked on Cabbages and Kings, which I’m familiar with the silhouette film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which is Lotte Reninger and it feels like it’s in that style and I know it was really a labor of love for you to put together and work on. How did that come together? What interested you about that style?

Tim Landry: Partially technical desperation, trying to make the best film possible with the greatest production value, apparent production value to still be able to tell a good solid story. We should explain. For those of us who don’t understand who Lottie Reninger was, she actually made the first feature length motion picture, animated motion picture. It was not Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; it was The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

And I forgot what the year was. It was something like 1919; it greatly preceded Snow White and her work was delightful; it was so delicate and it had a good sense of place and technique and she worked in coordination with her husband who did a lot of very strange visual effects to add to her frame by frame manipulation of these cutout silhouette puppets. Very fascinating stuff. So somehow that was an inspiration of how to get a good looking picture.

Even though I wanted to use live actors, I had this idea, well, maybe we can use live actors and shoot them against a white screen. Now remember this was back in the analog film days, there was no such thing as digital compositing. Today you could make my little movie Cabbages and Kings in your living room with almost no problem, but back then we needed a crew and cameras and lights and the whole nine yards. So the idea was to shoot some live actors as silhouettes and as a silhouette in film. It was much easier to composite with a background in our case, painted backgrounds sometimes with animated characters.

Dan Heaton: How challenging did that end up being to do that, watching it in your film? I thought it looks amazing, but it end up being more difficult even than you thought.

Tim Landry: Yes, certainly we ran into things that we didn’t expect to run into. It’s one of those things that was painful enough that you put it back in your subconscious. As I got into this thing and decided I wanted to do a making of this film that was 45 years ago, I started going through the materials that I had. One of the things was an article that we managed to get published in the American Cinematographer and that went through all the technical issues of where we started and where we ended up and all the struggles in between and my goodness, we were nuts.

Dan Heaton: Well, I think it’s amazing what you were doing there and another project around that time that I’m really interested in, especially given kind of your possible connection to Star Wars and everything was this Astro Liner simulator that you worked on, which reminds me a lot of kind of an early version of Star Tours and again, that seems like you were ahead of the curve a bit.

Tim Landry: I’m not going to take any credit for the concept because that came to me with the project and it was this very interesting company in rural area of northern Colorado away from all the cities. These guys make amusement park rides and I think one of their famous ones is the Scrambler. They make a lot of round rides. They came up with this concept of a motion simulator. I don’t think that term even came around at that time. This was 1977.

They made something called the Astro Liner, which many of your listeners may have experienced because they were all over the place, I think especially in Europe, and it consisted of essentially a drum with a nose cone on it to make it look like a missile and you entered through the side and it had bench seats in it, no seat belts or anything, and you sat there and you watched the screen on which was projected an adventure and the first incarnation of it, it was a super eight projector putting the image up there. As you can imagine, it looked pretty terrible, but it was what it was. It was my opportunity to work with some real equipment and real basic tools to learn my craft.

Dan Heaton: Well, I mean when you were growing up around that time, were you that interested in theme parks from amusement parks, that side of it? Did you have much history with Disneyland or anything like that at the time?

Tim Landry: My folks did take us to Disneyland in 1962. It was my first experience. I think I was seven years old. Obviously it made an impact. You flash forward to a time when I was working for Dream Quest. I really wanted to make films, big budget films, and the opportunity came through to work on these theme park projects and I really wanted to decline, but ultimately they ended up being some of my favorite projects that I’ve ever worked on.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, so when you were working for Dream Quest at that time, I mean what were some of the, or what was a memorable theme park project that really you enjoyed doing that you didn’t expect to so much?

Tim Landry: There was this one called Cinemagique, which was, there was a second park going in Paris. They had a Disneyland park and they by contract had to put in a second park, which they decided to make Disney Studios Paris. So they were making a phony motion picture production studio complete with Studio Tour where no films were ever made, but whatever. One of the projects was this big theater that looked like a soundstage that had a 70 millimeter presentation on it that was synchronized with not only live actors who worked against the film and in theater, special effects such as smoke puffs and strobes and all those things.

A lot of that stuff is fairly common these days, but doing it in coordination with the film was pretty sort of groundbreaking at that time. But I digress. The concept is or was for that project that there’s a member of the audience whose phone rings and he is trying to get a signal and he ends up going up on stage trying to get a decent signal and the actors on the film get so irritated with this guy that they zap him and suck him into the movies and he gets an adventure through all the movies and film history from silence through Disney animation to Titanic to Hunt for Red October to Star Wars, to you name it.

We got to recreate each one of those films in some manner. It was, we had to cut back and forth between real clips and our actors doing their thing. So they built a piece of the Death Star corridor, they built the deck of the Titanic and some of the rooms in the lower decks. They built the whole mountain in the yellow brick road for The Wizard of Oz. It was so much fun and I remember I was the visual effects supervisor on the show. I was there on set waiting for them to start working on scenes that would affect me. They were shooting some stuff on the Death Star set, which was right next door to the Titanic set on the same stage.

So they occupied, they were crammed right up against each other and one of the best things I had was I was sitting there bored to death and I was there with my producer sitting there on the Titanic set and I said, Rachel, watch. And I got up, moved one of our chairs and sat back down and I said, I’m rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Ended up playing for 46,000 performances before they finally closed it down a couple of years ago.

Dan Heaton: I’ve seen that show. It’s incredible. We went to Paris one time, Disneyland Paris, and I agree with you, the park is a little strange with the tour and it’s not the best Disney Park but Cinemagique is an amazing show. I’m sad that it’s gone, but I’m glad it played for so long, but I kind of assumed seeing it that a lot of it was tricks in terms of I didn’t realize you actually rebuilt parts, little parts of the Death Star, the Titanic, or whatever.

You just kind of figure you get trained in modern technology to assume that doesn’t happen. Kind of fascinates me that especially you being so interested in films that actually that they were creating those sets, little parts of those sets for the film that makes it even more interesting to me. I want to go watch the video again of it just after that.

Tim Landry: Well, one of the major contributions I’d say I had with that film was I had come off of a film called George of the Jungle in 1996 and I had worked with a cinematographer named Tom Ackerman and they needed a cinematographer for this show and I just thought that he would be perfect for it because what was fun about it was we had all these old movies, everything from Casablanca to these French films to whatever, and we knew we needed to film whatever bits that had to go with them in the same format, using the same as close to the same technology as we could just to make it so that it would match in.

This film was going out to 70 millimeter film, so we didn’t really have all the color matching capabilities that we have today with digital stuff. Ackerman just had a ball doing shooting stuff in 70 shooting stuff in just division shooting stuff, and it all went together to try to make one big movie.

Dan Heaton: It comes together so well just, it’s one of the great theme park, especially film attractions and bringing in the live actors and it’s just awesome.

Tim Landry: Do need to give a shout out to the director of that film, which is a guy named Jerry Rees who’s a dear friend of mine and also producer Tom Fitzgerald, all three of us. It’s our favorite show that we’ve ever worked on. A lot of other people too really enjoyed that show.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, Jerry, he’s worked on so many cool stuff. Also, Bruce Broughton, I talked to him, he did the music and he had told me it was one of the favorite things he ever worked on too, and he did a lot of theme park stuff, so that’s quite a group of people that worked on one show. Well, when you were at Dream Quest, I know ultimately Disney purchased Dream Quest and I’m curious what that experience for you was like for you Disney kind of buying the company and then shifting possibly what you were doing.

Tim Landry: Yeah, I was not let in on all the internal discussions, but what I did know was that they came in and started moving management around, started putting their people on site to watch over us. We made it work, but it was not the best decision that I ever made, although I did hear through the grapevine many years later that ultimately, but ultimately Disney bought the place, ran it as the Secret Lab for six years and then closed it down on a whim and Dick Cook, who was the head of motion picture production of the Disney Studios at the time later confided to one of my bosses at WDI, that closing down Dream Quest was one of the biggest mistakes they ever made.

So we all knew it at the time and finally the big guy accepted that and they really wanted to buy ILM, but we were kind of second choice, so they bought us and now they own ILM.

Dan Heaton: Well, it’s good to hear. I mean not, it probably doesn’t mean that much, but good that they realized that there was a real value to what Dream Quest was doing.

Tim Landry: Well, even when they closed us down, we had a bunch of clients that just desperately wanted to use us and we said, sorry, we’re going away. See you.

Dan Heaton: Well, another project you worked on, I know you worked on some projects for Disney California Adventure, including Golden Dreams, the film, and the Bakery Tour, and I’d love if you have any, what it was like to work on those, especially the early California Adventure, which is very different than the park today.

Tim Landry: It was my introduction to theme park work at all. My most vivid memory there is going to the park to screen some stuff, some tests or whatever in the theater that we were going to be showing it in and just going through and trying to get through all the rebar and all the poured concrete and get around all the dust to actually do the work. It was a challenge. Golden Dreams, we shot part of it in Colorado, a lot of it in location in California. It was a 70 millimeter or 65 millimeter and it was directed by a director named Agnieszka Holland. I got the feeling her heart wasn’t really in it.

She would sit there and read her book most of the time, but ultimately it had sort of an emotional impact. It always brought a tear to my wife’s eye whenever we would get into the montage part of it, but I guess it didn’t go over as well as it might and it was in the building that is now The Little Mermaid, which I also worked on. That was the second time I’d worked on a show that replaced another show that I had worked on in the same building.

Dan Heaton: That’s a common experience that from people I’ve talked with about replacing their own attractions or attractions they were involved with. So I’ve heard a lot of good things about Golden Dreams. I wasn’t able to experience it, but I know a lot of people that still like it and that miss it, so I think it made an impact. What did you do on Little Mermaid when you were working on that?

Tim Landry: Bubbles. That was pretty much it.

Dan Heaton: Well, those bubbles were great. Well, I know that we mentioned that Dream Quest was ultimately closed by Disney, but you eventually ended up getting back and doing work for WDI, a lot of work on Finding Nemo on the submarines in 2005. So for you, after having that first experience, what was it like to go back and work on Finding Nemo when they were changing up the classic old submarine ride?

Tim Landry: Well, like any Disney fan, I was excited that they were actually going to get the thing back up and running because they had closed it down for a long time and I know the maintenance guys wanted to get rid of it. I’m sure the bean counters wanted to get rid of it. It’s an expensive and difficult show to create and to maintain the new upgrade was pretty pricey to begin with because it was a transition from a show that was completely underwater.

All of the animatronics and things were underwater before they decided to close off a lot of those boxes in the show building and just put these humongous plastic big windows so that we’re looking through three feet of water out of our submarine window and looking through it into a dry box that has projection equipment and sets and things to complete the illusion, and it’s a really compelling illusion because you’ve got real bubbles going by in front of your face and you’re seeing Nemo and his friends swim around out there. It’s fun.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean that projection, especially at the time was mind-boggling to me at least. Just the idea that the characters are swimming through it, it’s easy for your brain to not think, oh, this isn’t actually the water. It was that it’s more projections. So was that challenging to make those effects work? I mean the parts that you were working on?

Tim Landry: I was inventing process. A lot of it, even the folks that had designed the show, I don’t think they really knew exactly how they were going to pull it off. They had done some tests, but they were not extensive tests and I had to figure out a way to, you’ve got the situation where you’ve got a projector that’s hitting a screen at an angle, so how do you take out the keystone and well, some of that’s automatic these days with technology and software that you have with projectors and projection systems, but it really didn’t exist that much back then.

So I had to figure out a way to distort the image so that I could trace the edges of where the playing field was and map out no fly zones where the fish couldn’t swim because they’d run into a shadow or something and then figure out a way to retort it so that we could hand it back to the Pixar guys to say, here, make your fish go here. That was the technical part of it and it was fun. It got me up and running in the whole screen mapping business, but once I got done with that, I was lucky enough to do some of the ancillary animations. Again, more bubbles. I got to animate some lava. At any rate, I touched every single frame that went through that thing.

Dan Heaton: Well, I mean you worked on so many films prior to that and I mean how important was it do you think for you to have worked on visual effects and all these Hollywood projects and then to work on something so new like that?

Tim Landry: Well, art is art no matter what the medium is, and you start to learn about balance, you start to learn about pacing, you learn about rhythm, it all goes together. That’s what I loved about working in show business is that you learn on every single project it’s best when you can build from one to the next. If you can take the same crew and everybody learns something and then take that knowledge and move on and make something bigger and better and greater. Unfortunately, you don’t get to do that very often. It’s like a serial family. You got a film crew and you’re like a family, and then you all disband and you don’t see each other again.

Then you come together with a new film family and get to know each other and then disband again. It’s not as great as it could be. One of the things about WDI is that the limited number of people, at least back when I first started, we could become more of a family and we would end up doing odd jobs that weren’t necessarily in our job description because there was nobody else to do it, and that was another opportunity to learn.

Dan Heaton: Right, because it makes the job more interesting too, because you’re learning new things, you’re not doing the same thing over and over, and even just looking at a lot of the projects you did with new effects or with modernized effects, that seems to be the case. I mean, you worked on haunted mansion and pirates and adding new effects and everything. I mean, how is that to go and to those and other kind of older attractions and work on some new effects to spruce those up?

Tim Landry: At the time, I felt like I was being asked to put a few more brushstrokes on the Mona Lisa as any Disney fan who’s been through Pirates of the Caribbean would feel, and going behind the scenes in that attraction was exciting, but also a little bit appalling because the whole thing is made out of wood using techniques from the 1950s. Radiator Springs Racers, for instance. That entire facility is all stainless steel and concrete and glass, and then you go back over to Pirates of the Caribbean and it looks like it could be a fire trap, but it’s a museum piece and nobody really wants to touch it and you can’t blame them.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean also too, there’s so many people that have so much affection for it that it’s like any change is there’s going to be, I mean, a lot of unhappy fans across the board, so I’m sure that’s tricky there too. But like you said, there are such great attractions, but I feel like if you do good updates, they can even be, I don’t know if I’d say better, but different in a good way.

Tim Landry: Well, I always kind of figured that we tried to make people experience it the way they remember it. Just moving things from 16 millimeter film projections into a digital projection makes such a huge difference in the quality that you can easily justify it both artistically, financially, the whole nine yards. So it’s in a lot of those upgrades.

Dan Heaton: It’s like our brains kind of sometimes forget. I think that’s the case sometimes with, I love old Epcot attractions. I think my brain probably fills in the technology more than I realize as far as how things looked and stuff. If I went back to how they were in the eighties, they might not be exactly as I remember if they weren’t updated in some way. And you worked on a bunch of Epcot attractions, I don’t know how much, but you worked on Spaceship Earth and then Frozen and Grand Fiesta Tour. I mean, just overall, did anything really stand out from doing all of those that was kind of a good experience or something you enjoyed?

Tim Landry: The thing I liked best about Epcot is the parking. You can drive around any one of the attractions and just park right there. You don’t have to park a million miles away and get a tram or something. That’s the best part of Epcot. One of the last ones I worked on there was the rat attraction. I don’t even know if that’s open. Is that open?

Dan Heaton: It opened, but just in October. I haven’t even experienced it yet, so it’s only been open for a few months.

Tim Landry: And I had marginally touched the version in Paris, and it was months before I even got to see that one, and I was not all that impressed. The image was dim and out of sync and one eye was wrong in some places. It was not a thrilling attraction for me, but when we walked away from the one in Epcot, it was using the very same bits of animation that were installed in Paris. It now looks the way it should look in Florida, and I was very proud of it when we finished it.

Dan Heaton: That’s great to hear. I haven’t been, because I went to Paris before the one opened, so I haven’t been on either version, but I figured they were very similar, but I’m glad to hear the technology is even up to where it looks better because when screens are driving the attraction so much, you need them to be top notch for sure.

Tim Landry: They’re pretty much identical in terms of their layout and in terms of their art direction and whatnot, but the imagery, the stuff, the of the show is a lot cleaner now.

Dan Heaton: Cool. Well, we talked earlier about the Astro Liner too, and I know you ultimately worked on the newer version of Star Tours, which opened in 2011, and I thought that was interesting kind of the connection to something much different, but how was it to work on the updates to Star Tours?

Tim Landry: It was a thrill, get to touch it because it’s such a cool show to begin with. I was mostly peripheral on that, but I did get to supervise the creation of new animatic that basically laid out all of the new modules and then those got handed over to ILM, and then they took our Maya files and just built it up and put the polish on it. So that was a thrill as long as we’re moving back to the future, so to speak.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I’m jumping around a little bit, but that’s

Tim Landry: Okay. I have another Astro Liner story.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, go ahead.

Tim Landry: About four years ago, well, actually I have to go back. A nephew of mine referred me to a YouTube of the movie of the original Astro Liner that somebody had put up on YouTube and claimed that they did it. That kind of irritated me, so I made a post on this YouTube saying, no, this was not done by this person. I did that. I have all the models, I have all the artwork; I can prove it. Okay, flash forward several years, the phone rings.

I’m sitting in my place in Burbank and it’s this guy in I think Hungary with a heavy accent, and I’m going, okay, what kind of a scam is this? And it said, is this Tim Landry? Yeah, you worked on Astro Liner. Yeah, how can I help you? Well, it turns out this guy worked for another guy who’s some sort of collector of amusement park stuff and video games and whatever, and he had managed to purchase an old Astro Liner and was restoring it and had no way of getting the movie to go in it.

They apparently went online and found this YouTube post and somehow traced that to me and got my phone number, how, I don’t know. They wanted me to get the film for them so that they could restore this attraction the way it was. And the first thing I did was I said, I don’t really own the copyright to that. You need to contact the manufacturer. Well, they tried that and kind of got nowhere. I’m not sure what’s going on with that company anyway, so I said, well, okay, I’ll get it to you, but you never knew me. We never had this conversation. So I got them an up and running Astro Liner after what, 40 years.

Dan Heaton: It’s still pretty cool that people are that interested in, I mean, it doesn’t surprise me knowing just while I’m doing a podcast talking about older things, but just knowing how people are, but that they recreated it. That’s the next step beyond what a lot of people are doing and shows the impact of what you were working on.

Tim Landry: Yeah, I’m glad that they remembered it finally. I’m glad they remembered it at all. There were several iterations of the Astro Liner too. Some good, some bad, most of ’em, pretty cheesy.

Dan Heaton: Jumping back ahead a little bit, I want to make sure you worked on some speaking of technology, some very cool attractions that have opened fairly recently, including Mystic Manor, which I have not experienced, have not been to Hong Kong, but I know mean the visuals on that are really something and it’s just a cool attraction from everything I’ve seen. So I’d love to hear a little bit about what it was like to work on that, at least from your experience.

Tim Landry: Well, it’s interesting. It’s been interesting in my career that there’ve been several shows where I get involved as an assignment. The boss says, go work on this one, and I get in ankle deep and it doesn’t seem very together. This thing is going nowhere. It’s going to be a disaster. I don’t know what’s going to happen with this. And that was kind of my initial reaction to Mystic Manor.

But the nice thing and the best thing about that and others that were more successful is that I’d get in there on the team and give them my input and they would actually listen to me. What they listened to me, are you kidding me? For instance, they had the whole exploding wall, which is the big effect at the end, and they had a technique mapped out to do that that absolutely would never work ever in the real physical universe.

So I pretty much had to puzzle over it myself and suggest a way to do it, and they ended up using my way, thank goodness. But that was another one that was you remember cinema Well, this one also was directed by actually augmented by Jerry Rees, my very imaginative friend who directed The Great Little Toaster among other things. Mystic Manor was a lot of fun. It was my first approach to doing 20 projectors in a scene. We basically mapped them all manually except for one screen where we had to put four projectors blended on this kind of weird curved screen, and we tried to map that manually and we had to bring in the big guns and get that done with an automated system. But it was fun. I’m very proud of that work and it’s still running.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it holds up well and I hope to see it. And I know from your film that you ultimately on that and Phantom Manor, which is another cool Haunted Mansion variation, but you make a cameo in those attractions, they can find you. Where can they find you on those attractions or if you’re willing to give that away?

Tim Landry: Well, first of all, I have to say that this is not a big ego thing, even though it’s great stroke for one’s ego. Typically in theme parks, nobody gets credit. Unlike movies where a lot of people get credit, as you see with the hundreds of people scrolling names at the end of it, any given film, you don’t get that on theme park, so you get your credit in wherever you can get it, but many of the ones where you can see my face or name somewhere in the theme park were not initiated by me.

People just liked me and said, here, I’m going to do this for you. So I was very proud of that in Mystic Manor when Joe Lanzisero said he needed one more piece of art, he needed somebody to do some Photoshop work. So I was elected and this piece of art was a depiction of the opening day of this mansion that supposedly opened in 1916, and it shows Professor Mystic and his monkey in a crowd around him.

I put that together and made it black and white and distressed it so that it looks like it was filmed or shot in 1916. And this piece of art is the very first thing that you see when you walk in the door to go into the queue. So people just kind of whiz past it, but if they take the time to notice, it just says a grand opening 1916 Mystic Man. It’s got interesting things in it showing the manner as it was back then.

But the crowd that I put at this ribbon cutting depicted in the thing, I got a bunch of stock photos of people that were actually in that era, but in addition, I managed to put myself and my wife in there just for fun, but I also found a photo of Walt and Roy Disney and I put them in the crowd as well. So that’s a little Easter egg if you want to go to Hong Kong.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I’m going to have to look for that when I get there. Also, I want to ask you about one more attraction you worked on too, Soarin’ Fantastic Flight. I know you were involved. The pre-show is very different even though part of the soaring main part is similar. And I’m just curious, I know you mentioned you put it in your film, you mentioned that it was a cool project that you really enjoyed, so I’d love to hear you talk about that a bit.

Tim Landry: Well, it was another one where they actually listened to me, and it’s interesting because I was on that one 10 years before it actually opened. There was another creative crew that had laid out a different, and that was only significant in that I learned several things about what making allusions of moving photos that supposedly should be static or printed or hanging on the wall and instead putting a projector or a monitor up there to stand in for that.

That’s a tricky business, and I learned a lot about that from the Jiminy Cricket version of that opening. Then flash forward, we got the new crew and they called me in again and they said they wanted this shadow of Falcon to come to life and fly around and highlight these photos and or paintings rather, that were hanging on the wall. Okay, fine. But as I got into that, they didn’t have the story completely worked out of how this should be choreographed yet.

So I was able to help them with that, and I had some ideas. I said, well, look, we’ve got all, it’s 11 projectors total in that scene, and you’ve only got stuff really happening on about three or four of them for any length of time. We’ve got a canvas. Let’s make a show here. Hey kids, my uncle’s got a barn and I’ve got some costumes. Let’s put on a show. So I did a mock up of some other activities that illustrated what the verbiage was and told the story a bit better, and that went over well and the people that were in charge enjoyed it. So it sort of evolved. It got better and better from that point on, and that’s exciting is when you start to see magic take place from something that really wasn’t working to begin with.

Dan Heaton: There’s a lot of examples like that from your career. Well just, we’ve talked about a lot of attractions you worked on and I’d love to know for you maybe one we haven’t talked about or even just mentioned, what is a rewarding project or it could be film or a theme park that you just really enjoyed doing that maybe we haven’t talked about?

Tim Landry: Well, one of my favorite Disney films was Alice in Wonderland, and I got the opportunity to be involved in the upgrades for several of the C ticket attractions in Fantasyland, in Disneyland, California. Alice in Wonderland was my favorite. I don’t know why. I mean, we had our struggles, but the show looks an awful lot better than it did when we started. Alice was sort of the redheaded stepchild of the sea ticket attractions, and she got spruced up enough that she’s really good to look at now.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, working on those dark rides, I mean a lot of them got a lot of upgrades in the eighties for the updated fantasy land, but still that’s a long time. I mean, you mentioned going into pirates and having it seem that way. Was there kind of similar going into those and kind of seeing what you had to work with?

Tim Landry: Luckily I didn’t have to experience what it was really like when the crew first turned the lights on and went in and started cleaning out those things, apparently they were disgusted because of activities that some of our guests do.

Dan Heaton: Oh.

Tim Landry: Yeah, think about it.

Dan Heaton: I could imagine 30 years plus or more. I mean, I’m talking back to the eighties, but my goodness. Well, on that note, I have a few kind of overall questions for you too. Over the time, I mean you mentioned Jerry Rees. Are there kind of other designers or people that you worked with that either were mentors or you just really had a great experience working with in your career?

Tim Landry: That’s a problem because I’ll leave somebody out and then I’ll feel bad. The guy that hired me there was Ken Horry who ran the media department or the visual effects department. They kept changing names. I don’t even know what we were anymore. Tom Fitzgerald is a very inspirational guy. Larry Nikolai, I worked with him on a lot of the dark rides. Joe Lanzisero worked with him on not only Mystic Manor, but on the Disney Dream, the cruise ship. He was inspirational. Just a lot of really brilliant people. Ethan Reed isn’t a bad guy to know either. You had him on.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I’ve actually, I had Ethan and Joe together. You’re naming great people. Larry Nikolai too I talked with. So all those people are great, have done so many great things.

Tim Landry: They have and they’re inspirational.

Dan Heaton: So for you, just based on your experience, a lot of people right now are they want to get into the industry, whether it’s films, theme parks, something related. Is there advice that you would give someone aspiring to, whether it’s imaginary or something else to get started or things that they should know or focus on?

Tim Landry: I can only address that as far as WDI, the WDI that was in place before Covid. That place doesn’t exist anymore. Many, many, many good Imagineers are no longer with the company and the management has changed. So the way you get in has got to be different. But having said that, I have to say that the way you’re likely to get in is to be good at something. Anything from drawing, painting, computer programming, sculpting, you name it, there’s bound to be a place for you because there’s a lot of product that needs to be made.

Dan Heaton: I think that’s good advice. I mean to specialize in a way and like you said, yeah, I mean the industry on the whole is so different and we’re probably just learning now how different it’s going to be going forward just given everything. So it’s a good reminder. But I want to make sure and mention too though, speaking of just your experience is your film, I mean, like I mentioned, I really enjoyed it. People should check it out, but what got you interested in documenting your life in a film and taking the time to go back through what you worked on and kind of your career?

Tim Landry: Well, that was a project that kind of got out of control. It started with, I’m sitting at home during lockdown. I decided to just occupy myself. I was restoring old family photos, and then I come across these photos from this whole student film of mine. Then I realized I actually had the materials. I could restore the film itself, and I took this bad 16 millimeter transfer and spruced it up and made it look great or at least greater.

Then I got all that together and I started to think, well, gee, wouldn’t it? I’ve got the behind the scenes photos. I’ve got the film. Why not make a making of Cabbages and Kings, my old student film that I made so many years ago? Then I got that going. I realized I had all this material. There was a story to be told, and what’s more, I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of anybody else who’s ever made a memoir as a film instead of a book.

My career was a pretty visual career and there’s enough documentation of it to make I thought, I hope to visual film. At any rate, I wanted my family to have something to remember me by when I’m gone, and so I decided to just do that. I realized that I could do it here in my office in this very seat and at very low cost.

It seems to resonate with people more than I expected, that it seems to be greater than the sum of its parts because I think a lot of people see themselves in the story of this crazy kid from Colorado who wants to be in showbiz. Ricky. So much success so far. I just finished it last month, but I’m entering it in film festivals and a couple of them have picked it up. The Santa Fe Film Festival is going to be showing it, and another one in the UK is picking it up as well so far.

Dan Heaton: Well, that’s awesome. I think too, you mentioned it that you going through kind of your ups and downs, I think a lot of people connect with that, that amazing attractions, great films, but also the challenges in between which we don’t hear about as much, I think is great that you spotlight some of that.

Tim Landry: Yeah, as I told my story, I’m starting to be a little bit more observant. Even as I watch movies at night on Netflix or whatever, usually old movies, so maybe not Netflix. I’ll look up the old actors and see what their careers were like, and everybody had struggles, everybody, we’re all human, and that’s what makes theme parks and movies so magical is that it’s a shared experience. We learn about what it’s like to be human.

Dan Heaton: No, I think that’s a great place to end. You mentioned that it’s going to be showing at some film festivals, which is awesome. I’m curious if people want to check it out or learn more about what you’re doing. Is there one place to go or anywhere to follow that they should do that?

Tim Landry: I have a YouTube channel, although it’s kind of informal. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend people go looking for that channel, but I would say just do a Google search for Shoveling Pixie Dust, a memoir, and it should take you to it.

Dan Heaton: Well, awesome. Tim, this has been great. I really enjoyed talking with you and hope the film does excellent because it’s a great story.

Tim Landry: Well, thank you. I had fun making it. I had fun living it.

Dan Heaton: I want to give a big shout out to Ethan Reed for helping to make this podcast happen. Ethan was actually just recently on the show once again on a roundtable along with Joe Lanzisero and Episode 155. Thanks so much for listening to this podcast. I really appreciate it, and I will talk to you again next time.