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One of my favorite parts of visiting Walt Disney World as a kid was experiencing attractions that were unlike anything else out there. You couldn’t see a Circle-Vision film in St. Louis; there was nothing even close! Films transported us to another place across the world that was only in our imaginations. One of the key figures behind those films was Jeff Blyth, who directed Wonders of China, The Timekeeper, and more. His filmmaking skills helped make those attractions more than travelogues.
Jeff is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his career. He recently wrote the book Polishing the Dragons: Making EPCOT’s Wonders of China. The personal story takes us behind the scenes and explores the challenges to make the Circle-Vision film in a different China in the early ’80s. Jeff and I talk about what interested him in writing the book and his experiences shooting Wonders of China. The opening-day attraction for EPCOT Center played for 21 years and was replaced by Reflections of China, which Jeff also directed.
Another favorite is The Timekeeper, which used the Circle-Vision format to create what’s essentially a theme park ride. Jeff talks about some of the most challenging shots in that film, including a scene that involved a prototype of Nine Eye appearing in a mirror. Also, Jeff discusses his work on other films like American Journeys and Portraits of Canada plus shooting helicopter footage for the opening scene of The Shining. I really enjoyed the chance to learn more about Jeff’s career and his amazing films.
Show Notes: Jeff Blyth
Watch Jeff Blyth’s presentation at the RetroMagic event from October 2019 at Walt Disney World.
Check out the audio commentary from Jeff Blyth about Reflections of China on Youtube along with the Circle-Vision film.
Read my review of Jeff Blyth’s new book Polishing the Dragons: Making EPCOT’s Wonders of China and purchase a copy through Amazon.
This post contains affiliate links. Making any purchase through those links supports this site. See full disclosure.
Transcript
Jeff Blyth: What made the Mozart scene so incredibly complex? Certainly the most complex shot I have ever done in any format was that we needed to be able to see Nine Eye, and they weren’t done designing her while I was filming that. And so we had to take a prototype of Nine Eye, and they had a model of that, and that’s what we used. It wasn’t the exact final design, but it was close enough for what we were doing that we were able to get the shot. But that was that sort of two track of making the film and building all of the things that were going to end up in that theater and the mechanics of how it was all going to work together. These were just multiple layers of complexity that were above and beyond getting the shot.
Dan Heaton: That is director Jeff Blyth talking about the making of The Timekeeper attraction. He’s also here to talk about Wonders of China, Portraits of Canada, American Journeys, so many great CircleVision films, plus his new book, Polishing the Dragons: Making Epcot’s Wonders of China. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 124 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I hope you’re all doing well. And one thing about being more at home is I have spent more time looking back at attractions either that are still at Disney that I enjoy or past attractions, and there’s been some really cool things online. And one of them is an audio commentary of Reflections of China done by Jeff Blyth. This was put out by WDWNT and they did a really good job where it’s set up, it’s a 360 video, but you can also on my TV where that is impossible, all the screens are up there.
Then you can hear Jeff talking about what it was like to direct that update to Wonders of China. So that’s just one of many examples, but it leads well into what this episode is, which is of course an interview with Jeff Blyth. I became familiar with Jeff through his appearance on the Retro Disney World Podcast where he talked all about The Timekeeper and then he appeared at their Retro Magic event. I unfortunately wasn’t able to go, but they put all those clips out there on YouTube and Jeff’s presentation is definitely worth watching out there on the Retro WDW channel. A lot of what he talks about in that video, including with images and explanations from Jeff, really connects to what we go through on this podcast episode.
I mentioned in the intro that Jeff has a new book Polishing the Dragons, and I want to make a huge pitch for that book. If you are interested in the behind the scenes of how a film that plays at a Disney park gets made, you’re going to love this book. Jeff goes so much into his experiences making Wonders of China, which of course was the first film at the China Pavilion at Epcot Center and played for over 20 years.
Jeff also did Reflections of China, which was replacement. And like I mentioned, The Timekeeper, so many other Circle Vision films, and has had just a really cool career. We even talk about The Shining where he was involved with helicopter footage and then also To Fly, which was one of the first IMAX movies and still plays at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
I remember seeing that when I was a kid. I think I was like seven years old and was just blown away. I’d never seen a film like that on that size before. So Jeff’s had quite a career and really knows filmmaking, and I found a lot of that very interesting, but he’s able to explain it in a way that’s not too technical, where basically you and I can understand what he’s talking about. So it was a really fun conversation and I don’t want to waste any more time. I want to get right to Jeff. So here we go. Here is Jeff Blyth.
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Dan Heaton: My guest today is a filmmaker whose extensive career has included CircleVision films like Wonders of China, American Journeys, Portraits of Canada, and The Timekeeper. He’s also recently written a book, Polishing the Dragons: Making Epcot’s Wonders of China with great stories about the making of that CircleVision film for Disney. It is Jeff Blyth. Jeff, thank you so much for talking with me here on the podcast.
Jeff Blyth: Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. I really welcome the opportunity to talk about making films for Disney. It’s been something I’ve done for over 40 years and it’s always been very special to me.
Dan Heaton: And some of the great attractions that Disney’s done that kind of make them stand out have been some of the films, especially in Epcot and beyond. So it’s great to learn some stories about that because like I mentioned the book, there’s so much in there that I did not know about how challenging it was. But before we even talk about the book, I’d love to learn a little bit more about your background. So when you were younger, how did you really get interested in becoming a filmmaker when you were growing up?
Jeff Blyth: Oh, I guess I’d have to blame my dad. He was taking home movies all the time, and he did it in 16 millimeter, and we had a lot of family memories that were just always saved on 16-millimeter film. At a certain point, I think it was in probably junior high school, I became really interested and I got an eight millimeter camera, started making films all the time, and I’ve made independent films for myself just ever since. I mean, even today, I still make little animated films just for me.
They’re no clients, no pay, but it’s always been part of just sort of pushing the envelope of what I know as a filmmaker of saying, I’ve got to try this. I haven’t done this before. So the thing I remember from that time period, and even through high school, the one thing that really excited me more than anything was receiving that little yellow box from Kodak of your film developed. I couldn’t wait to thread it into a projector and to see how it turned out.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean you can see that excitement. I mean, when you’re doing something like Circle Vision and some really challenging technological feats with filmmaking, I suspect that interest would have to play a role. So when you were growing up, were you really interested in the technological side of the latest advances? Because going in the ‘70s and ‘80s, some of the things you were doing were definitely beyond just your typical filmmaking.
Jeff Blyth: Well, I once figured out that there’s no job on a movie that I haven’t done at one time or another except for music. I’m not a composer, can’t play the piano. But everything else I’ve done, and it was kind of this broad-based approach to filmmaking, and this was all before I ever came out to California. I had an interest in all of it, and that means both from the storytelling side, but also the technical challenges of how do you do that? How do you make a shot like that?
How do you do that kind of editing or whatever. So I was interested in the entire thing and what was part of the transition of moving from the Midwest to California was I had a few film awards under my belt, and I had had some experiences, but I knew that coming out to California, the nature of Hollywood was you’re going to have to give all that up.
You can’t be the broad interest filmmaker. You have to specialize. And in those days, when I moved out, if you wanted to be a cameraman, you might get a job at say Paramount Studios as a third assistant cameraman, and you would spend your days in a dark room just loading and unloading magazines. That’s all you got to do. If you stayed there long enough, you’d move up to second assistant camera and then eventually first assistant cameraman, and you’d be out there on the set, whatever. I came to California assuming I was going to have to do that. I can’t be the writer, producer, director, the guy who’s editing his own films, the guy who’s doing his own special effects, forget that that’s not going to work.
Yet the first job that I got when I came out to California allowed me to do that, and it was like, here are some other talents I can use. It was great. So by the time I got to Circle Vision where you’re dealing with such a really small crew, you have to have that completely broad-based sense of filmmaking. It’s not just about the technology of putting the film on camera, but how is this going to work? How is this going to affect what you do in the mix? A year and a half later, all of those kinds of elements all came to play in making those kinds of films.
Dan Heaton: You mentioned your first job or getting started, and I know you worked with MacGillivray Freeman, who I’m a big fan of the large format IMAX films even now, and that is the company in that space. So the fact that you were able to get there in the mid-seventies and work on To Fly, which I remember seeing as a kid, which still plays at the National Air and Space Museum, I’d love to know how that worked out and what it was like to work on that such a monumental production it ended up being.
Jeff Blyth: Right. Well, when I first came out to California, I had a couple of contacts that people I had worked with back in Michigan, and both of them said, you should go talk to MacGillivray Freeman. They’re hiring somebody for a bicentennial film. So I went and had an interview and got the job as location manager, and that was it. That was what I was going to be doing. Location manager. It was one of those films where it was, this was their first IMAX movie, and there’d only been a handful of them made up until that time.
This was 1974 going into 1975, and the film was for the bicentennial, and we were charged with making this film for the Air and Space Museum. And so over the course of the making of that film, I ended up doing any number of different parts of well beyond the description of location manager and ended up as the associate producer of the film. But it included finding locations, doing local casting, finding the costumes and props for what we were filming, doing the special effects. I’m even in a couple of scenes in the film where it was just, we need somebody to ride on top of the stagecoach, or we need somebody for when the balloon goes past the church and knocks the bucket of paint over.
It was like, okay, even just like that one shot, which you might remember from the film, I was involved in casting the guy that was on the church steeple, I was involved in finding this period bucket that he’s painting from trying to figure out what kind of material we could put in that bucket. I came up with this kind of powdered milk solution, and then I’m in the shot as well. So it was like how many more different things could I do in that one silly shot? And yet that kind of defined my role going forward with MacGillivray Freeman.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean to think about it, a lot of the things you’re doing, I mean, not as much the acting, but some of the other choices were the kinds of things that a director eventually might be at least overseeing or might need to know those things. So it’s kind of interesting that you, I wouldn’t say stumbled into it, but ended up doing so much more just given that production that probably helped you going forward.
Jeff Blyth: Oh, absolutely. A director really needs to know everybody’s job on set. You cannot afford to be in a situation of somebody in some department asking for something that you don’t understand. You need to be able to communicate with everybody, and how better to learn that than to have done it yourself.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, and one of the things I wanted to ask you about too from a similar timeframe is I know you were involved with the shooting of the opening sequence for The Shining with the camera kind of gliding over the lake and the trees and everything. So how did you get involved and what was that experience like?
Jeff Blyth: Well, we got a phone call from Stanley Kubrick, and he knew about the reputation for doing helicopter photography that MacGillivray Freeman had. Unfortunately at the end of To Fly, literally while the print was being installed in the theater in Washington DC, Jim Freeman who did all the aerial work was killed in a helicopter crash while we were scouting locations for a Kodak TV commercial. And the company basically shut down for six months or so and just we didn’t even want to think about work.
The first job that came along after that was one that involved a client that we’d worked with before Thunderbird, and they needed a helicopter shot, and it was like, great, who’s going to do that? And it fell to me, and I did that and ended up doing quite a bit of helicopter work for MacGillivray Freeman. So when the time came to do The Shining was, I was going to do that as well. We spent about a month up in Montana when we got the call from Kubrick. He had a crew that was already there, and they were already shooting a lot of ground-based shots that were going to be used for what we call background plates.
So that if you see the shot of Jack Nicholson with Shelley Duvall and Danny in the backseat of the Volkswagen, and they’re driving on their way up to the hotel, the backgrounds out the window, that was all added in later. It was this crew that was there shooting that material, and they were shooting as everybody does on a Kubrick film, tons of stuff, just every possible kind of pass by and whatever ground-based photography of the yellow Volkswagen. And as an interesting note that most people don’t know about it, it was one of these things that we were asked to shoot the helicopter footage that was going to be for the first trip only.
That’s Jack Nicholson alone going up in the Volkswagen for his meeting. So that was our brief, that’s all we were supposed to be shooting. There’s a second trip that the Volkswagen makes, and now it’s the Nicholson character going up with his family, and they’re towing a small trailer that is filled with all of their stuff, all of their luggage, because they’re going to be there for over the winter. You may not remember seeing that trailer because it’s not anywhere in the movie. And yet that British crew that had been there been shooting before we got there, they shot a ton of stuff of the Volkswagen with the trailer, with people doubling for Nicholson and Shelly Duvall as they’re traveling up to the hotel.
Well, what happened in the meantime was Kubrick really, really liked all the helicopter stuff and decided, well, let’s forget the trailer and let’s just use some more of the single shot or the imagery of the Volkswagen alone with no trailer, and that’ll be the family going up to the hotel. So if you watch the movie when they arrive, they’ve got bags and bags and bags, and it’s like, excuse me, they’re in a little Volkswagen. There’s no way they could have had all those bags except for the trailer. And so Kubrick just basically said, forget continuity, it’s going to be an error. We’re just going to skip over that all the business with the trailer and just use more of the helicopter shots.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s interesting because yeah, if I didn’t know that your brain just kind of fills in the gaps where unless you’re really watching for it, you wouldn’t even think probably, why do they have all that stuff? And where was it? You’re just like, oh, wow, that’s a really gorgeous helicopter shot, and oh, that’s setting the mood, and that would be it. But so Kubrick I know is known for being really controlling and wanting to do every shot the way that he has it designed. But for this one, was he involved at all or did you just have freedom for this footage to kind of follow his guidelines but not have him kind of telling you exactly what to do?
Jeff Blyth: We had no guidance whatsoever. We were told, pick up the little yellow Volkswagen with the Colorado plates, and we need some helicopter shots. There was zero guidance that said, I need a shot that does this, and it should be this long. I mean, all the typical things you would expect of Kubrick. And he was known for doing 50, 60, a hundred takes, and it was just total freedom. It was just shoot and send the footage undeveloped back to London. So we never got to see our own dailies.
We would just keep shooting and shooting and shooting and sending footage back, and he would occasionally get on the phone and call Greg MacGillivray and say, yeah, more of that. That was it. We didn’t really have any specifics. The way we approached the process was we had made arrangements with the national parks and they’d said, well, you can shoot, but keep in mind, you can’t land anywhere in the park unless it’s a flat out emergency.
And we also don’t want you interfering with traffic. Well, typically when you’re doing helicopter shots and there’s real traffic out there, you bring in the highway patrol or somebody and you’re working with walkie talkies and you’re going, okay, shot ’em down and we’re ready to roll or whatever. We had none of that. It was just a handful of us.
So all of those shots we had to grab, that means that when there’s that one shot just before Kubrick’s credit in the opening where the helicopter is kind of closing in on the Volkswagen, it’s climbing and going around a curve and the helicopter shoots off the other side, take a look at that sometime. There’s no barriers, there’s no guardrails. And yet if a car had been coming the other direction at that precise moment, we probably would’ve driven them right off the road. We were just trying to do the best we could.
I typically, I was in the helicopter with a pilot, Dwayne Williams, and we would go up to a fairly high altitude so that we could see ahead and know, alright, there’s nobody coming. Let’s go. Let’s try to set up the shot. Then we’d dive back down, get to a position, and we had a number of shots that we had rehearsed that we just had sort of discovered. Then we would just, oh, let’s do number seven because the weather is good or the light is good, or whatever.
And most of the shots that we did, as I said, we shot for a month, but most of the shots that made it into the film happened in a very brief period of time, just a couple of days when the fall colors finally changed and we had some still air, take a look at that opening shot of the lake. There’s not much of a ripple on that lake, and that made for really beautiful photography, not the least of which is because the helicopter was flying through such smooth and steady air.
Dan Heaton: Totally, yeah. And the results, they stand for themselves. I mean, it still holds up so well and is really well known, but I’d love to know next, I’d love to know how you got connected with Disney ultimately where you ended up working on Wonders of China, but when you started basically working with them.
Jeff Blyth: We got a phone call from Disney. I say we, it’s MacGillivray Freeman films. And in fact, I took the call and I said, we want to talk to Greg about doing a film in China for Epcot. I said, well, what are the dates? And I thought this is going to be problematic because we’ve got another big IMAX show that we’re doing in Hawaii that was going to conflict, but I dutifully passed the information on to Greg, and he said, well, let’s just talk with him. Let’s have a meeting.
Basically, Greg taught me never say no to any film offer. You never know what’s going to happen. So we took a meeting and at the meeting they wanted Greg to do this film, and Greg had told me that he was going to have to, he was committed to this film called Behold Hawaii for the Bishop Museum.
He said, well, you can do it. You’ll do the film. And I had already had a very great interest in China and had written a feature film script about China. So I had done a lot of research, but that was all sort of coincidental. It was more of a scheduling issue that Greg said, well, you can do it, but we had to convince Disney of that. And we had a few meetings that were a little tense because it was sort of like, hang on a second. They wanted Greg, he’s the guy that has the reputation.
But at the same time, I had the reputation for doing helicopter shots. So it was one of these things where they basically said, well, as long as Greg’s going to be there, okay, we’re fine. And of course, you have to understand Disney had this clock that was ticking the opening date of Epcot, and that was as hard a date as you could possibly have. So they were hearing that clock ticking in their sleep. It was like, you must get this underway immediately. And we were one of the last films to get started. Other films had, the French film had already been shooting for quite a bit.
The Canada film had already been working, and there were 34 different pieces of film that were being made for Epcot, and we were just one of them. But once that production started in earnest, and we were overseas meeting with the Chinese, and I had this negotiating session where I spent a week with the Chinese and I had a representative of both the Disney studios and another from Imagineering, but it was essentially on me to try to convince the Chinese that all of these locations that I wanted would be approved. We got to the point where it was like, yeah, it looks like we’re going to be able to make this movie, even though they never actually said yes to anything.
But they said no to a lot of things. And once got there, the two guys from Disney both said, you know what? We know you’re going to be making the film, so that’s fine. We’re good. And somewhere in the middle of the making of the film, I ended my relationship with MacGillivray Freeman films, and it was kind of like the old changing horses in the middle of the stream thing. And it was like I needed to be on my own, but Greg needed to have me make the film. So we continued to make the film, but under a different arrangement, if you will. And that film, once it was made, it led to all the other work that I did for Disney.
Dan Heaton: What really surprised me reading the book, I mean, it makes sense as I learned your story as we go through it, but I hadn’t considered when watching Wonders of China was just how many challenges you would have shooting there, just given the fact that China was so different at that time period. So what were some of the biggest obstacles that you had beyond getting the approval for the locations, like you mentioned while you started shooting?
Jeff Blyth: Well, probably one of the biggest issues was that if you were making a film in America, you could try to describe to them what Epcot was going to be like, and they might have as a frame of reference. Well, is it anything like a state fair? Well, yeah, it’s kind of like there was a frame of reference that you could connect to. And in China in those days, there was no idea at all about a theme park.
It’s like the concept of a theme park was so foreign that it was very, very difficult to explain why we were doing this, who was going to see this, what were the circumstances? So we had to use a lot of promotional material from Epcot to try to convince them what it was that we were doing. But then beyond that, it was just CircleVision itself was so alien.
This idea of a camera that sees in 360 degrees, I think frankly, it was terrifying to them at first in that first negotiation week, they would say, no. It’s like, well, no, you can’t go to that province because there’s a military base there. I was like, well, we’re not going to be anywhere near where the military, but you’ve got this camera can see around things and through things and over mountains.
It was like, no, it can’t. So just trying to explain what the camera could do or not do was probably the single biggest obstacle you add onto that all of the cultural and technological things that China was really quite backward at the time and communication was terrible. The only way we could communicate with the studio was by telex. So I mean, these were all layers and layers of challenges, but those two right up front of what the heck is Epcot and what the heck is CircleVision, were probably the biggest obstacles all the way through.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, because right off the bat you mentioned everything you do is going to run into those same challenges, possibly, especially in the early going, but you mentioned just the camera and that I talked to Rick Harper about Impressions de France and how challenging that was to film with theirs. They weren’t even doing the full 360 degrees, but they’re working on things like the Eiffel Tower and landmarks and such. But I know you had to do a lot of interesting things like walk up lots of steps and film in very different places in China. So how did that work with the camera and what did you kind of do to I guess, get around some of those challenges?
Jeff Blyth: Well, I was, for the most part, making it up as I went along. Rick’s film was very carefully mapped out in advance. He knew all his locations and how they were going to integrate together and how long to make each shot because it was all going to be tied to musical pieces that he’d had these selections made well in advance.
So he had a very prescribed sort of film to be made, whereas in my case, I had a list of locations that had made it through the approvals process, and that was it. There was no unifying idea for the film. There was no concept of, well, this has got to go before that or after this part. Nothing. There was no shape to the film. And so this all came about during the survey that as I went to these approved locations and started looking for shots, it was, okay, we’ve been to the top of this sacred mountain.
I don’t know how, but we’re getting this into the movie. This has to be done. That became kind of a nexus point where you just say, we are going to throw whatever resources we need to at this to make sure that gets into the film. And when you go up the mountain and it’s thousands of steps, you realize, oh my God, there’s no way we can get the camera here. The camera is this massive device, and while it breaks down into all these boxes of you can put three of the cameras in one box and all the magazines for three cameras in another box, well, you still end up with 20 to 30 boxes.
And one of them is about four feet, a four foot cube that contains the central pedestal of the CircleVision camera. So it’s like, yeah, any of these other boxes, you just get somebody to carry ’em up the mountain or wherever your location’s going to be, but that box that’s got the pedestal in it, how do you get that? That becomes the determining factor of, you can’t get there from here, or we’ll find a way. And so all the way through the surveys, it was looking for ways to get the camera to the place I needed it to get a shot. Then at the same time, I was trying to figure out how am I going to assemble these?
How am I going to organize these? How will I put it all together? Then that’s where the character of Li Po comes in. And it was funny, I had been off on location doing all these surveys, and I come back to Imagineering to give my report on what I’ve got so far. I had done a month of survey locations in the spring, and then there was going to be another month of surveys in August, and we start shooting in September and October.
And then there was, from that point on, I was still scouting locations, but I’d try to fit them in, run off and go see something. But after that first survey, I came back to Imagineering and I was talking with Randy Bright, who was the creative executive for all of the films that were going into Epcot, and we both had the same idea at the same time. It was like an Abbott and Costello routine.
We run into each other in the hall, and I’m going, I’ve got this idea. He’s going, I’ve got this idea. And I said, well, let me tell you mine first. He goes, yeah, but I want to tell you mine. It’s about a storyteller. I’m going, no, it’s going to be a poet. See? And so we both had the exact same idea, but was I came back to him and I had the specifics because I had done all the research and figured out who would be the best candidate, but from Randy’s standpoint, it was really what’s a good way to tell the story.
From my standpoint, what I was looking for was how to tell the story and not have it seem like it was a communist manifesto that what he was saying was approved by the communist government and that it was just, oh, yeah, that’s what they want you to believe. And so my solution to that was not just a storyteller, but the distancing of history of make this a real person who existed some time ago, and it would be the equivalent of, say, telling a story of England during the time of Thatcher and using Shakespeare as your guide. You’d go, okay,
Shakespeare is not really associated with Thatcher politics. And so there’s a kind of safety there by having somebody who’s not associated with the current political situation. So that was how that particular character came about. Then it was just a matter of how best to integrate him into the film and writing a script that would say, okay, when we get to this place, we’re going to run into Li Po again, I wanted him to be a presence. I knew he was going to narrate the film, but I also wanted him to show up at intervals so that you would at least feel like, well, we kind of got to know one Chinese person. There’s only a billion of them, but there’s one guy that we kind of connect with.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, you mentioned earlier just how to kind of connect all together. And I think that stands out because if I think about America the Beautiful, or some of the early CircleVision films that are very, there’s kind of this narrator, but it’s more just, here’s a bunch of monuments and here’s kind of the history where this is more, you have this kind of down to earth guy who can sit there and kind of guide us through this place that most of us have never been to. So I think that’s what makes it more unique. By doing that, it kind of keeps it from being just, I mean, not just because there are great travel log circle vision films, but it makes it different, which I think is really important.
Jeff Blyth: Well, and there’s another aspect of it that people don’t tend to pick up on, but was important for me. China at the time that we were making this film, had suffered through 10 years of the cultural revolution. It had only been over for a few years when we first started negotiating with the Chinese.
The results of that were horrific in terms of a lot of the cultural relics and historic sites that were thoroughly damaged by the Red Guards going wild and trying to destroy what they called the four olds. And those olds were the things that I was interested in photographing. So what Li Po represented for me was a connection to what China that in a way, had they had turned their backs on. It was a little kind of a reminder to Chinese of their highly cultured past when a poet was revered.
Dan Heaton: That’s really interesting. And I think that also connects to the music. I feel like that’s another really strong part of the movie that stands out that people remember is the music from a composer Du Ming Xin. And I’m just curious how that came together and what you were thinking about when it was being edited into the film.
Jeff Blyth: Well, all the way through the process, all my travels through China, I was exposed to very, very wide range of Chinese music. Almost every evening we’d be going out to a ballet or a Peking Opera or an acrobat show, or going to watch a Chinese film or something. So we were seeing quite a bit of what was going on musically. I was keeping track of that. In fact, I would buy records when I, I’d find them in stores that were sort of representative of a particular area, because you’ve got a lot of ethnic music that is very specific to parts of China. And I thought, well, we’re representing those places in the films, and when we get there, it shouldn’t be strings playing over it. It should be something that’s particular to that area. So I had gathered up lots of resource materials.
We didn’t know where the music was going to come from. I had thought we’d probably have somebody in the states write the music, compose a music, but I wanted whoever that was to have all these resource materials of, oh, this is the instrumentation that you have for the Muslim influenced Xinjiang area, and this is what their music sounds like, that kind of thing. Or Tibet or Mongolia or wherever.
So I brought all those materials together, and when the time came to start editing the film, I used a lot of those musical cues as temp track. I could say, well, this music is appropriate for Sheng province. Let’s put some of that in here for now. And so I was kind of educating the studio and imagineering for what to expect for each of those areas that it’s like, oh, okay, it’s going to be that kind of music.
So as we were looking for a composer, we talked to some composers in the US and eventually settled on Mr. Du who had done a number of films in China. I met with him, very quiet, unassuming guy. He got a real sense of what we were trying to do. What I was trying to explain was that in the course of listening to all this music from all over China, some of it wasn’t really going to fly very well to American ears, to Western ears. So I kept saying, I need this flavor. I need this feel, but it needs to be appropriate for western audiences.
Mr. Du got that he understood that. And so he had the skillset to be able to write pieces that were soaring over Guin that were very distinctly Chinese, but had kind of a western structure to them. Does that make sense? And so what we ended up having to do was we did two recordings sessions, one in China where Mr. Du had a bunch of his students from a music conservatory play all the instruments that were ethnic that we just would’ve had a very hard time trying to find in Los Angeles, let alone people who could play them. So we recorded those parts of the musical score in China, and then back at the studio, we recorded all of the Western style support that goes with those cues.
Dan Heaton: And I think that’s important because even though you’re presenting China, you’re still, this is going to play in a theme park with a lot of guests that are coming from the West. So you have to find ways to make it something new but also palatable for a variety of audiences, which I think it does really well.
Jeff Blyth: I knew that because it was such an important element, cultural element to the Chinese. I knew we were going to include some Peking Opera. The question was how much, how bad it is. Definitely an acquired taste. I sat through any number of hours and hours and hours of Peking Opera live and knew that there were moments when it was, oh, that’s actually pretty good. And there were lots and lots of times when it was just, oh my gosh, what a horrible noise. So I had to pick and choose. So I was very careful about what we used, how we used it, and how we made it work into the film. But I knew it was going to be a short piece.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. It’s a quick moment. That’s great. And then we move on to the next thing. But I’m sure there was a lot of planning to even to pick the right moment and have it work within the film.
Jeff Blyth: It was trying to design the ultimate buffet experience, and you move along and you get a little taste of this and a little taste of this, and hopefully you walk away satisfied.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. And I’m curious too, we’ve talked a lot about filming and the actual film, but for you, you talk in the book about some harrowing experiences, some really cool moments. When you look back at this film, what really stands out to you about the experience of making it not just about the movie itself?
Jeff Blyth: I promised myself, I wasn’t going to use the expression as I said in my book, but I’m going to have to use that now. One of the things that was kind of an overriding experience for me was the pressure that I felt to make this film for Western audiences. This was China. This was one of the biggest countries on earth who knew at the time how important it was going to become to the world. But I just felt this tremendous responsibility of interpreting China for Western audiences to see at Epcot.
I had no idea how long the film would last, but all the way through, I kept saying, why me? Why not somebody who knows a lot more about China? Why not somebody who was fluent in the language, has read the books, has studied the history, all of that. And that was a huge pressure on me all the way through this. And the most satisfying part of it for me was that knowing the Chinese could, they had a contractual stipulation that they got to approve the final narration script.
I worried so much about that because I was trying to please two masters. I needed to please Disney and what was going to be the audience at Epcot. But at the same time, I had to please the Chinese with what I said, that they weren’t going to be offended, and I couldn’t poke them in the eye if we were making this film in their country. So all the way through that was trying to find a way to negotiate, a way to say things and kind of half say certain things and how do I allude to this without really saying that?
It was a little bit of an obstacle course to, I had to slalom my way through there. In the end, we sent the script before we recorded narration, we sent it to the Chinese for approval, and the clock started running out on us. It was like, we need to get this film into the park. It’s going to open. And we hadn’t heard from the Chinese. And so I told the studio, I said, here, worst case scenario, we record the narration, we get it up, we get the film running. It’s in the theater, and the Chinese come back to us and they’re a month late or whatever, and they say, you can’t say this. You’ve got to fix that.
So that was the plan was, okay, it’s the first version of the soundtrack, and we’ll get the narration up and we’ll make our deadline. So we did, and we made our deadline and years went by, and eventually I ran into a guy who played Li Po. He came to the US and I took him to Epcot to see the film for the first time. And I asked him, I said, what happened? You guys were going to get back to me and tell me what you wanted to have changed. He said, oh, if we’d wanted to change anything, we would’ve told you. So it was a kind of backhanded compliment that they had approved it. They basically felt comfortable with what I had said about China.
Dan Heaton: Wow. That sounds nerve wracking, but I’m glad that it worked out and you didn’t have to make some sort of last-minute scramble or something to fix it. But that’s great that they liked it and also that you were able to kind of, like you said, walk that line with something that made sense and didn’t just go one way or the other. So I think it was great. So I’d love to know about too, you mentioned the book, so what interested, you now Wonders have China played for a little over 20 years, and then of course Reflections of China, which I know you worked on, but I’m curious about writing the book and your process for being interested in going into this detail about this film.
Jeff Blyth: Well, I had gone to a conference in Florida. I was invited to come and speak. It was called Retro Magic, and this was in 2019. And they said, we’d love you to come and be one of our speakers and talk about making CircleVision films. And so it was like, yeah, sure. They were going to pay me to come and cover my expenses. That was great.
I kept thinking, but who’s going to sit there and listen to this? Who’s coming to this thing? And I didn’t know the mechanics of how the thing was set up. And they said, oh, we’ve got 300 people that are going to be here, and they’re big Disney fans. Well, if you were to look at the list of speakers, there are people who designed ride vehicles, Ron Schneider who played Dream Finder at the Imaginarium. And it was like, well, how do I fit into this?
Well, as it turns out, I was the only one that was talking about actually making a film, the sort of centerpiece of an exhibit. Everybody else was about contributing to that whole process. As they were done speaking, they’d all go off to the back of the room and sign copies of their books. When I finished mine, I was the last speaker. People came up and said, well, where’s your book? And I was like, yeah, where’s my book? But I just honestly did not know until, this was a year ago, I honestly did not know that there was an interest in these kinds of things of behind the scenes of anything from the theme park.
So that was a real eye opener for me, and it was like, well, yeah, I’ve got a ton of behind the scenes stories. So I contacted two publishers that specialize in sort of Disney theme park books, and I ended up going with Bamboo Forest Publishing because they were willing to take a chance on me and my book and put in 400, actually more than 400 photos in color. They hadn’t done that before. They were willing to try that. So I had written a sample chapter and they said, oh yeah, let’s go. Let’s make a book.
Dan Heaton: It’s so interesting that the turnaround was pretty quickly. I mean, you wrote it pretty, I’ve talked to people that wrote books that took seven years or a long time, and the fact that Retro Magic was just a little over a year ago and about a year from when your book came out, that’s really impressive. But yeah, to your point about people’s interests, I mean, I think a big part of it two is, I mean, one, people really like Epcot and love this film, but two, Disney does not really release.
They release basic descriptions and behind the scenes, but not on this level at all. So I think there’s a real hunger from fans for this type of detail and personal story that we just don’t hear very much, except for now, recently people retiring and like you mentioned at Retro Magic, but it’s still such a new thing. So I think it’s great this is out there because it’s really rare even now, to have an entire attraction, how it came together, dissected in such a amount of detail. It’s great.
Jeff Blyth: Well, one of the things that, to answer sort of two parts of the question here, one is how did it come about in such short order and with such detail? And it turns out that I’ve been a writer of journals and I write in my journal every night without fail, whether there’s anything interesting or not, I write it down. So all of these films that I’ve done for Disney have been memorialized in book form already. Granted it’s handwritten, but year by year by year I have shelves of these journals.
That way I was able to go through this and I had a literal daily record of exactly what happened on which day when we shot things, the problems that came up, all of that. And so that was invaluable in being able to reconstruct for the book, how the film came together from the earliest meetings right on through the premier at Epcot.
Dan Heaton: That’s really impressive that you had that. That was kind of a follow-up I had was really, I’m impressed by how much information you had, because it’s clearly not just coming from memories. You definitely had chronicled a lot of this. So I wondered if you had always planned a book, given how much information you had.
Jeff Blyth: I had not planned it because frankly, I did not know until last year that there would be any interest in this sort of thing. And yeah, I’ve got all the details and I’ve got a ton of memorabilia that I’ve collected along the way. For the longest time, I had Li Po’s robes, I had his costume in a box in my garage. I have Mr. Du’s musical score and who knew it would ever be of any use. And yet, when we went to do Reflections of China, the composer for that film said, I don’t suppose you’ve got the score from the original. It was like, yeah, sure, right here, here’s the sheet music. So stuff like that that I had just saved, and it was taking up a lot of space, but it turns out it’s of great value to somebody.
Dan Heaton: Well, speaking of Reflections of China, I mean, it’s interesting in that it’s considered or was presented by Disney as a new film when I know a good portion of it was either parts of it were from Wonders of China or unused footage, and then you had a new actor for Li Po. I’m curious, with modern China being what it was in the early two thousands, how different that was for you, and how you kind of were able to put together a new sort of new film?
Jeff Blyth: Well, as it turned out, we started by working at cross purposes, and that’s real typical. What my brief was when I first got hired to come back and do this was we need to update certain scenes. And it wasn’t like we’re going to make a new film. It was we need to update certain scenes. And part of the issue had to do with some of the extras. They were wearing Mao jackets, which was, they were ubiquitous at the time that we made the film the first time. And they obviously dated the film considerably.
But the other thing that was huge was the Chinese absolutely had to replace everything having to do with Shanghai. Shanghai is their crown jewel. And that fantastic waterfront that you see was literally an empty field. There was nothing across the river from Old Shanghai when we made the first film nothing. And so here was one of the most fabulous cities in the world that it sprung up, and so they needed that. So it was do Shanghai and replaced these scenes where, and we had a screening, and we went through it and we said, they’re not too bad.
The Mao jackets aren’t too bad in this shot. We can keep that one, but oh yeah, this one. Yeah, look how obvious that is. So that scene, and so we flagged certain scenes and said, well, those have to be replaced. So the marching orders in going off to China was find replacements for these scenes and come up with new shots for Shanghai. And it wasn’t until we came back to Imagineering and I had all my pictures put together. Now as I take these 360-degree still images that were all pasted together, and we had these big presentation boards, the date back to when Walt used to do his animated films, these were the kinds of storyboards that he would create.
So we had imagery for all the old shots, and then we put over them the new shots that we’re going to replace them. And it was a one for one process, this shot that was done here, here’s the new shot, this is where it goes. And in the course of making that presentation, Imagineering was going, oh yeah, that’s great. Oh, those are wonderful. Yeah, these are terrific. These are new updates. Wonderful. It was at that meeting that I learned that they were going to present it as a new film, and I realized immediately that was never going to fly because the first shot that we were replacing was about six or seven shots into the movie, which meant we would be using the first six or seven shots of Wonders of China as it was.
It’s like, how are you going to sell that as a new film if it doesn’t even start with new? So I came up with some ideas and restructuring the whole film to pull a lot of the new stuff towards the front, but it required a new Li Po and a new shot on the Great Wall to open the film, and that’s how the final structure came about.
Dan Heaton: Well, that’s interesting because yeah, I mean, the film really what stands out are like you said, the new shots, whether it’s Shanghai or Macau or Hong Kong and such, but I’ve been looking back and forth, and you do have a lot of it up front, which I think probably makes it seem newer in a way, because a lot of the new footage starts right at the beginning, right?
Jeff Blyth: Exactly.
Dan Heaton: Well, I want to make sure to ask you about some of your other work if you’ve done so much with CircleVision beyond even the two China films. So I want to start with American Journeys, and I mentioned America the Beautiful earlier, and I find it so interesting to compare American Journeys to that because American Journeys being in the eighties is so much more vibrant. There’s so much more movement and everything. And I know you started second unit, but ended up doing a lot more. So I love to hear about what it was like to kind of make a new American CircleVision film.
Jeff Blyth: Sure. One of the things about American Journeys and how it came to be in the final form that people have seen in the parks was Rick Harper had come up with an original concept that he had hammered out with Randy Bright, the executive from Imagineering. And Rick’s film was very complex and very ambitious, like most of Rick’s work.
In the course of that, he realized that there was just way too much material for them to be able to shoot with a single unit with one camera and Rick and his team. And so he basically invited me to come in and it’s like, here’s the list. Let’s tear it in half, and you go do these and I’ll go do those. So we had two separate units, and I was doing my shots not for any version of the film that was anything other than this is what Rick’s vision was.
Rick had a script and we had the idea of what the show was going to be, and we got partway into that. I was shooting with a second camera and a whole second team, and we got word that Randy Bright said, I’ve got this idea. Essentially what he did was he reconceived the movie and he had done it to such a degree, such a, I mean, it was so disruptive.
And I mean, people have to understand that once you set off, go make the movie, it’s very, very hard to turn the aircraft carrier around. It just doesn’t turn on a dime. It was headed in a particular direction. So it was so upsetting to Rick that he left the show and he just said, this isn’t the film I wanted to make. This isn’t what I had planned to do. And he left. So by default, it fell to me to finish up the film, but I did not want to do what Randy Bright had in mind.
I wanted to do what Rick had in mind. I wanted to honor what Rick had already worked on, and I felt terrible for him that this was what happened. So I ended up writing a new script that was kind of borrowing from Randy and more paying tribute back to Rick. It was a hybrid, and it’s just like when I was writing the China film, you’ve got two masters and you have to please them both. And sometimes it means how you present something, how you shape something. I’ve always known this about trying to write for clients, and you have to find a way for say, in this case, Randy, to be able to look at this new version and not come away saying, oh my God, you threw out all of my ideas.
He needed to be able to look at that and go, oh, I see you used my idea for this, or, oh, and there’s that notion that I had over here. So he was seeing those kinds of things that were recognizable to him from his version of it. But I put them into a shape that was much more like what Rick’s original film was supposed to be. So that’s what I was trying to do, was to negotiate again, another slalom course to find my way to something that was going to be pleasing to both. So that’s kind of how the final version of it came about.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think that’s probably pretty common. Like you said, when you’re creating something for a big entity like Disney that you end up walking that tightrope a lot. But this one even sounds more challenging than your typical film, just given how many changes happened right in the middle.
Jeff Blyth: Yeah, as I say, it was a very ambitious film, and there were any number of scenes that we scouted or even shot that didn’t make it into the final film, but we were all, I think, very, very pleased with the final result. It did all of those things we wanted, and it was much, much more ambitious than anything that was in America the Beautiful. But one of the things that you also have to keep in mind is that at the time America the Beautiful was made, this was an America that didn’t travel very much. It was a big deal to say, oh wow, we went to New York, or hey, we went to the Grand Canyon.
So even your own country, you wouldn’t have traveled all that much. And now of course we’re all so used to going everywhere pre-Covid that the requirements for making an interesting shot are very different than they were when America the Beautiful was made. It was like just going someplace in America. The beautiful was sufficient, and so you didn’t have to have any fancy camera moves or anything special happening. It was just where have you taken us? That’s what CircleVision does more than anything else is it takes you someplace.
Dan Heaton: That’s a great point. I think America the Beautiful goes to St. Louis where I live and it just shows the Gateway Arch and the Courthouse there and that already a lot of people might not have gone to and it was very new at the time, so it’s a big deal. But yeah, it wouldn’t be enough today to show something like that and it kind of connects to, I wanted to ask you about Portraits of Canada, which is a movie that you directed for the Vancouver Expo that also briefly played at Epcot.
Because kind of like you talked about, this film goes to the next step I think, and kind of setting up stories of individuals, which I think is kind of the next step once as we get further into the eighties and move on with how people travel, you have to make adjustments even to CircleVision. So, I’m curious for your thoughts on how that evolved, the formula when you made that film for Canada.
Jeff Blyth: One of the things about making a film for Canada, and I was born in Canada and lived there until I was 10, they have a very different attitude towards their country than Americans do towards ours. You could take a film like American Journeys and put in shots of the Lincoln Memorial at Sunset and the Statue of Liberty with fireworks going off behind it, and you play some patriotic music and people tear up and they feel really good regardless of their politics.
In Canada, you’ll notice in we never went anywhere near Ottawa, they have a very different attitude towards their government, and so it would be the opposite to try to show the Houses of Parliament. It wouldn’t unify people, it would just anger them. So what we were trying to do was to find a way to tell the story of Canada and very quickly it became obvious that there were so many different stories that that’s where portraits came from.
So we came up with 12 stories and it was my idea to make them literal stories that we actually zero in on somebody in that particular story in that particular region. We follow someone who’s a young woman in the court of ballet, of the National Ballet of Canada on stage performing in Toronto. We zero in on somebody who’s a fisherman in Newfoundland, a father and son in Smithers, British Columbia that are native Canadians.
So at each place we were trying to focus on a particular person, and again, it was a way of humanizing it, which is not exactly what CircleVision was built for. CircleVision wasn’t designed to do that sort of thing. It was just to take you someplace and it’s like, well, I’m going to take you some places, but while we’re there, we’re going to meet some people and we’re going to find some interesting stories and see what people are doing and we’ll see how it all ties together that all of these together represent Canada.
Dan Heaton: And I think that definitely comes through in the movie. I have a question about one shot that you had to do in that film, which is you filmed during the rehearsals for the ballet and you’re in this room with these giant full length mirrors, and I was watching it trying to figure out how that’s, where are you in that and how’s the camera working? And I’m curious, how tricky was that to shoot something like that and not end up basically in the shot or to have a good angle from it?
Jeff Blyth: Yeah, it was a challenge because there were mirrors on all four walls, so there was no getting around it that in 360 you’re going to be looking at mirrors, and it was very judicious placement of some curtains that were just very narrowly drawn together to just block the camera. And for most of those practice shots, I was standing on top of the camera and if I stuck my arm out or moved at all during the shot, I would’ve been visible in the mirrors. But it was just being really careful. There wasn’t no digital trickery or anything like that going on. It was just we had to find a way to do it.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think that’s really common with a lot of these films. Well, I want to ask you before as kind of the last big film, which is the Timekeeper or Time After Time, which to me is the most ambitious Circle-Vision film that I’ve seen. We talked about narratives, but going through and turning it really into almost like a theme park ride within a film. So I’d love to hear a little bit about how that was kind of put together and what it was like to work on that.
Jeff Blyth: Sure. Well, in the case from time to time, we went through a very long survey and a simultaneous script writing that was trying to find the best way to utilize this basic notion that was always going to be there, that Timekeeper and Nine Eye had this time machine that was experimental and Timekeeper was going to send Nine Eye back into time. And we knew that just because we were going to be opening in Paris that we were going to use Jules Verne.
So the concept was pretty much that he goes back in time, he runs into Jules Verne, he brings Jules Verne back to our time in the theater in the form of a hologram. Jules Verne wants to see the modern world that he’s written about and he goes off and does some adventures and then he goes off and we end up seeing him in the future. That was the basic working premise. But within that, we were swapping scenes in and out in the script stage trying to figure out, well, what can we do? How do we do this?
Is that going to be able to work? Can we do Mozart? Can we do Leonardo da Vinci? We had a number of things that we surveyed that we talked about doing. That just never happened because it was a very complicated show. But once we had settled on these are the shots, these are the pieces, the nature of the exhibit, meaning we’ve got an AA figure in the theater who talks to the audience who is operating the levers, he’s showing us on the screens what Nine Eye is supposedly experiencing. All of that was so time critical that it came down to when you do your Leonardo Da Vinci shot, this has to happen in 27 seconds.
So it was like this added thing that we never had in any of the other films that we were working on where we had extremely tight time limits that said, not only do you have to pull this off and it’s going to be very tough and you haven’t done it before, but you have to do it to precise timing. So it just added a whole other layer that of course people don’t think about those because it’s not the sort of thing that comes up in regular filmmaking when you’re making a regular film. Very rarely does somebody say, and this shot can only be 14 seconds long, and yet in our case, it was all very, very carefully prescribed because so much of the action on screen has to synchronize with what’s going on in the theater.
So all of that programming that was ongoing at the same time that we were out making the film and what made the Mozart scene so incredibly complex, certainly the most complex shot I have ever done in any format was that we needed to be able to see Nine Eye, and they weren’t done designing her while I was filming that.
We had to take a prototype of Nine Eye and they had a model of that, and that’s what we used. It wasn’t the exact final design, but it was close enough for what we were doing that we were able to get the shot. But that was that sort of two track of making the film and building all of the things that were going to end up in that theater and the mechanics of how it was all going to work together. These were just multiple layers of complexity that were above and beyond getting the shot.
Dan Heaton: Wow. I think about the Mozart scene, but even other scenes where you have so many live actors working and trying to, one, have all the live actors do what they’re supposed to do and maybe say a line and then two, do that on such a, like you mentioned, 14 seconds or 27 seconds. It’s kind of mind boggling. And to do it with the Circle-Vision camera, which is a more complicated camera, it even gives me more appreciation because I love that show and I think that it all comes together so well, it’s, it’s hard for my brain to figure out how it all worked. I guess that’s the trick.
Jeff Blyth: Well, I mean, here’s just one little tiny technical element that you don’t think about, but that these were the obstacles that I had to overcome, and we all did. I mean, we had a fabulous production team that was able to pull this all together, but when you watch a movie, how often do you think about focus? You just accept the fact that the main characters are in focus, right? It’s like, well, of course they’re in focus because it’s a movie and people are in focus. They don’t make, you don’t put a movie in the theater if the actors aren’t in focus.
And yet the original Circle-Vision lenses from Wonders of China, you couldn’t focus them. They had no facility for being focused. So just that alone, you’ve now got this complexity of that opening shot of, it’s not the opening shot of the film, but the one at the Paris Exposition where we introduced Jules Verne, the camera is on a crane and it’s up flying up over a billboard and down the other side, but it’s getting a vista when it’s up at the top and the focus is hundreds of yards away, and yet we drop down to the point where we’re right next to Jules Verne and HG Wells. They’re in focus.
So that alone, just that little detail in a scene that has hundreds of costumed extras and everything else going on, you’ve got to have the facility to be able to remotely focus from that distance to the closeup just to have them in focus for that scene. Here’s another one.
That scene with the two men talking that basically is the premise of the movie. The script for it was four and a half pages. Well, in the movies, we’d basically think of about a page per minute, so four and a half minutes. I mean, we did it a little tighter than that, but still it’s several minutes. Well, the normal load of film in a Circle-Vision camera was about three and a half minutes. So just immediately before you start, it’s like, well, okay, we have to rebuild the camera because we can’t do this with a normal load of film.
So they built thousand-foot loads of film for the camera, but when you mount them on those cameras, the thousand-foot loads, which are much bigger magazines they get in the shot, you would actually see them. They’re so big that they stick up, that they would be visible by the mirrors and the lenses. They had to build an offset so that they would be tilted backwards. So it was like just getting the studio machine shop to build nine of these little offsets that you could run the film through.
And with no light leaks and all, I mean, it just gets on and on and on, just more and more complicated. Those are just two little elements of one shot.
Dan Heaton: And I suspect that’s the case with a lot of the shots. It’s really impressive that that was able to come together. Just the ingenuity I think we’ve talked about with Wonders of China, how much on the fly kind of work you had to do to make it work is just stunning. It really shows what goes into each one of those films, and that really comes out in your book too.
Jeff Blyth: Well, thank you. Yeah, it’s like that first film Wonders China. It’s like, yeah, I suppose you could take somebody like me and who’s never made a Circle-Vision film before and never been to China before, and you can fumble your way through it and find your way and oh, make a decent film out of it. You couldn’t have done that from Time to Time or Timekeeper. It’s just like by the time you get to that level of complexity, there are a couple of us on the planet that could have made that film.
Dan Heaton: And the fact that you’d already done so many Circle-Vision films, it totally made sense that you would work on that. Well, just one last kind of Circle-Vision question here before we finish. Circle-Vision has been around a while and has obviously changed, and we use different ways, but there’s still, I mean, Disney just released a new Canada film recently. They’ve announced they’re going to do another China film eventually in the near future or possibly further along. Why do you think this format continues to have such a great staying power? I mean, there’s been technology changes, but it keeps kind of still playing a role in the parks 50, 60 years from when it started.
Jeff Blyth: As I said earlier, the real strength of Circle-Vision is this idea of I’m going to take you someplace and not just on a screen with a proscenium where you’re sitting in a seat and here it is presented in a rectangle, and here’s this image. It’s the full environment. We’re going to drop you down in the middle of something, and that’s the strength of the medium of this particular medium. So regardless of how that image is acquired, whether it’s a new 360 digital system or the original 11 16-millimeter cameras, or the nine 35-millimeter cameras, it almost doesn’t matter.
It’s this idea of presenting a place to you and in one 24th of a second, you go from being in one complete environment to a completely different environment. That’s the strength. So I think that that’s an important thing that people respond really well to in theme park environments and attractions. So I’m sure that’s got a lot to do with the lasting, the staying power of this particular format.
Dan Heaton: Well, great. And I totally agree, and I think that’s going to be the case going forward, like you said, regardless of the technology. Well, I think that’s a perfect place to end, Jeff. I really like the book. To me, it gave so much more background and you mentioned the photos and I haven’t mentioned that yet. The photos in the book add so much to the words that you have and I think really make the book so memorable. So I’m glad that you were able to write it and you were inspired to do so, and thanks so much for talking with me here on the podcast.
Jeff Blyth: Well, thank you. I appreciate your interest in my work.
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