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Horizons remains my all-time favorite attraction despite closing more than 24 years ago. It combined everything that I loved about EPCOT Center during the ’80s and ’90s. Trevor Bryant joined WED Enterprises in 1979 and quickly started on Horizons. He worked closely on this pavilion throughout its creation including at the installation in Florida. Trevor is my guest on this episode of the Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his extensive career at Disney and beyond.
During this podcast, Trevor talks in-depth about his experiences on Horizons for EPCOT Center. He describes what it was like to work with Claude Coats, George McGinnis, and other legendary Imagineers. We chat about the famous smell of oranges, the “choose your own ending”, and other fun memories. After completing Horizons, Trevor helped develop binaural audio technology for the Disney/MGM Studios and concepts for Alien Encounter. We also talk about his role as a co-founder of the R&D department and the inventive ride system for the Indiana Jones Adventure.
Trevor left Disney in 1994 for Sony and worked on many cool themed entertainment projects like the Metreon in San Francisco. He returned to Disney as a Show Producer and Creative Director for the new version of Test Track in 2012. Trevor describes the challenges with adding interactivity throughout the massive attraction within a short time frame. We close the interview by talking about the interactive Tron Realm at Shanghai Disneyland. I had a great time talking with Trevor and learning about Horizons and other remarkable attractions from Trevor’s career.
Show Notes: Trevor Bryant
Watch Trevor Bryant in his appearance at the RetroMagic event in October 2023.
Learn more about Trevor Bryant and his career at his official website.
Check out my video “Disney’s Horizons: Why It Worked” about my favorite attraction.
Support the Tomorrow Society Podcast and buy me a Dole Whip!
Transcript
Trevor Bryant: I think we figured out at one point the number of cars that you could actually design in that attraction was well beyond the billions. It was unbelievable how many different cars you could design, what variations there would be, and the idea that you would connect with that design and then take it with you into the ride and have that using that wristband technology, have that what you had designed, take it with you and then have that report back to you how well your car performed in the test track ride experience. Just unbelievable that we were able to accomplish that.
Dan Heaton: That’s Imagineer Trevor Bryant, and you’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 227 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. My guest today is Trevor Bryant, who worked on some of my favorite attractions at Walt Disney World and beyond, including Horizons at Epcot Center, which he worked on soon after he had joined the model shop and he was closely involved in that, including the installation at Tujunga and then in Florida.
Also worked on binaural audio, which started out in the post show of the Monster Sound Show and then was at Alien Encounter. Worked on a lot of cool R&D projects including the Indiana Jones Adventure and the second version of Test Track, which you heard in the intro him talking about the many challenges with interactivity and putting that in the show. We also talk a bit about Tron Realm at Shanghai. Lots to cover with Trevor, so let’s get right to it. Here is Trevor Bryant.
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Dan Heaton: Trevor, thank you so much for talking with me.
Trevor Bryant: Hi Dan. Well, thanks for asking me to be here.
Dan Heaton: Oh, definitely. Horizons, I have to say is one of my all-time favorite attractions, but you’ve worked on a lot more even than that, that are ones that I really enjoy. But I’d love to learn a little bit more about your background. What got you interested in even working in the entertainment world and especially ultimately in themed entertainment?
Trevor Bryant: Well, I was actually hoping you’d ask that question because I had formulated a little answer in my head. I think my career started when I was about seven years old. My parents got me a projector, which I got two films with. One was eight millimeter films, one was Laurel and Hardy, and the other one was Creature From the Black Lagoon, and it was a little hand crank projector and I used to sit in a closet and watch the movies.
One day I got the idea of using their back balcony and kind of closing it off with some blankets and turning it into a little theater, and I charged the kids in the neighborhood, I think $0.10 to come see a Creature from the Black Lagoon. So I think that’s when it all started. After that I was an artist for quite a while and then doing a lot of work with rock ‘n’ roll bands and that kind of thing.
And then I got a job working for an architectural model builder building firm in years, and then I went to see the first Star Wars film, so this was in 1978, ‘79, somewhere around there. I was blown away by the special effects like so many other people and picked up and a lot of magazines. Cinema Magic I remember was one popular magazine at that time and started reading about it and decided, well, I should work in that industry and take what I’ve learned in architectural model building and see if I can apply it to a special effects and film.
I started applying writing letters to the studios, of course, got no answer, and to make a long story short, I wound up literally with buying a plane ticket to LA from New Jersey; I had 25 bucks in my pocket, and I knew no one here, and I decided I was just going to get into the business. So I was probably the first homeless person in California. I think that was 1979. I came out and found a job that day working for another architectural firm. They fronted me some money to stay at a motel and that got me moved to California. Then I started really aggressively pursuing the studios. I got an offer from Paramount about three or four months later, which I was going to take.
It was doing architectural models for a TV commercial they were doing, I remember it was filming San Francisco and at the same time I got a letter from Disney who I had applied to months and months before asking me to come in for an interview. And I did that. It was a fortuitous interview; I came to Imagineering, which was at that time WED Enterprises in Glendale, and I had never been to a theme park. I had no idea. I had not been to Disneyland yet; I hadn’t been in California for just a few months. For me, it was just an opportunity to get a job, and when I got there for the interview, they started talking about this Epcot project, had no idea what it was, and just sounded like fun. So I jumped in.
Dan Heaton: Wow, that’s interesting that you got that not having known that much about even going because you were thinking right when you’ve applied to Disney, more like a studio type job, something in that realm.
Trevor Bryant: Exactly right. I thought I couldn’t understand why they were having me interviewing Glendale. I thought the studio was in Burbank. What happened was I interviewed with May Turner Moody, who was the HR person at that time, and she said to me, she looked at my portfolio and she said, you need to meet Maggie Elliott over in the model shop. So I walked with her over to the model shop, didn’t have any idea what I was walking into, and was completely overwhelmed by what I saw going on there. It was just a beehive of art and activity and people building models and crazy, crazy things. And I thought, I want to be here more than anything else in the world. So I turned the job down to Paramount. I think Disney offered me 25 cents more an hour, so I jumped at that.
Dan Heaton: That was the reason. So I know your first project you got involved with was Horizons, which to me is just, it’s interesting just because that attraction of those early Epcot ones has just hung around in a lot of people’s minds for so long. People love that attraction. So I’m curious how you got started working on that project and what that was like?
Trevor Bryant: So I was originally hired to do the architectural models on the eighth inch scale, big overall model of Epcot, and the very first model that I was given to work on was the Horizons building and that that may have been telling of the future as well; I had no idea. To me it was just an architectural project and gave me something to do. That was the first one I started working on, and then I did a lot of other architectural model building for WDI or WED.
At that time I was in the model shop one day and a fellow named Claude Coats walked in. Claude Coats was one of the original animators from the studio come over to WDI or to WED, and Claude kind of walked over to my desk and was looking at what I was doing and he said, I need someone to sculpt a submarine for me.
And I said, well, that’s something I’ve never done. I’m not sure I really know how, but I’m willing to give it a try. So he brought me back to his office and he showed me some napkin sketches of this little sub, and I went back and got some green foam at the time, which we used a lot, and started carving out this little model of a submarine and brought it back to him and he liked it. He liked what I had done and we talked about more we could do with it.
Claude then introduced me to show design and took me out of the architectural side and said that he would like me to work with him on the show models for Horizons. What a break. I mean, I had not been with the company, I’ve been with the company for less than a year, and to be invited into the show design process was really something for any model builder back in that model shop at that time.
Dan Heaton: So what do you think it was that Claude connected with you that made him kind of pick you for this role? Because Claude, like you said, legendary Imagineer and animator. This was kind of near the end of his career but had worked on so much at Disneyland. Why do you think he connected with that and wanted to work with you?
Trevor Bryant: To be honest, I think that first time that he came in the model shop and just looked at me and asked me to do that, I don’t think he, maybe Maggie had sent him over to talk to me that she thought I might be qualified to do it. But what happened after that was that Claude and I really did hit it off. I liked him a lot. He was a real artist. He was inventive and creative and kind of really far out thinking, and it was really fun for me to start working with him; he was the original show designer for something called Future Probe.
It wasn’t called Horizons back then, and he had been working with General Electric and he kind of introduced me to this whole idea of what he was trying to do with what he could do, kind of looking at this far off future. He had in his mind kind of laid out a ride track and how it would work within that building, but he was not really adept at the engineering side of things. So there were a lot of failure points in where the costs were going with Future Probe at that time.
And that point, George McGinnis started becoming more involved and looking at the ride track. Unfortunately, it evolved into almost a design war between the two of them. George really decided to pursue the Horizons ride track and configuration of how the show would lay out on his own, and Claude went off on his own.
And a funny story I got in the middle of it by being asked to represent Claude’s design in a scale model, which I had done, and then Marty invited George in to show his model that he had done, and I remember Marty came to me and said, well, you have to make sure no one else attends this meeting. It has to be very top secret. And I was a new guy and I was kind of intimidated. I felt like a security guy, but I remember that was the first day I met X Atencio who showed up at the meeting and I think I told him he wasn’t invited and he looked at me and he said something like, don’t worry about it. I can be here.
And after that X became somebody that I visited frequently, I never really got to work with him much, but we became quite friendly after that. So wonderful. All of those guys from Claude, X, Ward Kimball, they were really the masters of the work that we were doing and for me as a young model builder coming into there, they were the mentors for anybody wanting to work up in that business or in that company and they were so knowledgeable. Every one of ’em I got to work with Colin Campbell. There’s just a whole bunch of ’em that worked really great. Harper Goff, creat people, really great people.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it was so interesting with Epcot because you had all these kind of older, legendary people working with younger people like yourself and this weird, this timing where everybody combined. Well, I’d love to know a little more about some, I believe you were involved with certain scenes and working on models of those. So were there certain ones that you focused on more in Horizons that you were working on?
Trevor Bryant: After George came in with his version of the track and it was settled that George would really pick up the show design responsibilities, I kind of switched away from Claude and working directly with George. George was really focused on the ride vehicle and its relationship to the sets and the scenery, how it was always going to be facing the sets and then those perspectives and those points of view. So I became job captain for the one inch scale model. At that time at Imagineering, the one inch scale model became the Bible for any kind of set work that was going to be done or any kind of show set drawings, engineering, everything was based off of the model.
So I really focused on the entire ride with the one-inch scale model specific scenes. I remember the desert scene was a big one because of the force perspective in that scene, something I knew nothing about at the time. I had not come out of a theater background, so I was learning about forced perspective and how that worked and George loved it. He really enjoyed creating that illusion, so trying to figure out what those points of view were and how to create that illusion was really fun to do and I think the space section too became a real adventure to do for me. That was quite a beautiful scene to build and think about.
Dan Heaton: Well excellent. Well, I know you went and worked, I believe you were on site involved with the installation of it. I’m curious to know a little about what was that like when you actually were involved with installing it?
Trevor Bryant: So I was a model builder. I came in, got hired to do the architectural models and then wound up doing the show design and the show models by doing the show models and job captaining that I really became kind of the guru for what needed to be built. I also had and somewhat of a building experience and my younger days I’d worked as a carpenter and done a lot of general construction experience. So I had some basic knowledge of construction.
They asked me to start going to hung to oversee the construction of all of the sets. So they were first built at Tujunga and I then took on this role at the time it was called Field Art Director, which was the assignment was to go there, make sure the construction was proceeding according to plan, review all the drawings with all of the people that were actually building sets and scenery, and work out all those details.
To be honest, I think when I first started doing that job, there was a bit of resistance. Remember Horizons was second phase, so there had already been this big crew set up and a lot of people had a lot of experience through the first phase of Epcot and here comes this young guy comes in and is trying to tell them what to do.
I gained a lot of respect though at Tujunga. I think there were a lot of moments where working, especially with the carpenters and the show set people where they realized that I wasn’t a guy who just sat at a desk doing drawings or building models that I actually knew about construction. So I did gain a lot of respect and then the transition from there was to go to Florida and actually do the field direction in Florida. There’s one moment, I don’t know if I’ve talked about before.
When we were building the space scene, we had constructed all of the set pieces for the outer space scene. They couldn’t be configured together. The Tujunga warehouse wasn’t big enough to set them all up, so as they would be exactly staged in Florida. So they were kind of in separate pieces all over the place. And then we had them all lit separately like they would be in the show. And I remember walking in when it was all fully staged and ready for buy off and thinking I was in a modern art gallery.
When you take all those pieces and you break them apart and they’re not in the context of the story, they suddenly look really bizarre and really quite beautiful. I remember feeling a real sense of accomplishment that that was something that I had done that was working with all those people. Of course, not just me, but I had been involved with that was really artistic and beautiful and really compelling. So for me it was a great reward at that moment. Then the transition was to go to Florida and actually do the set installation, which was a learning experience.
Dan Heaton: What were the challenges there that you mentioned?
Trevor Bryant: Well, there was one that was really remarkable when we were doing the desert scene that entailed a lot of rock work and I had no experience doing rock work. John Olson was kind of the rock work guru. Skip Lange also had done a lot of rock work.
They were the rock work guys and the day came for the actual, the rebar had been put in all of the structural steel for the rock work, but the rock work itself needed to go in and that was a process of shooting gunite, which is kind of a concrete that comes out of a hose at the end of a cement truck. I got a call saying that they were going to do that at like 5:00 AM the next morning. And I said, okay, well I’m sure John or Skip will be there. Well, they were in Japan, so they weren’t available.
And I kind of panicked at that point. I got there and I remember there were three cement trucks lined up and all of these contractors with big hoses standing at the show set area and they were all looking at me, what do we do now? And I called Maggie Elliott at the time and I said, Maggie, I’ve not ever done this before and I’m not sure what exactly to do.
I said, can we get somebody out here? She said, there’s no one available. You need to figure it out. I did it and it kind of blew me away that I did it. I worked, fortunately they had done a lot of it before, so they were quick to instruct me on what I needed to tell them to do. But we got through it and it actually came out just looking great and it was a great learning experience for me to know how to do that, but not something I expected to do.
When I went to Florida, I was expecting a lot of construction, traditional construction of sets and scenery with carpentry and maybe some steel also, there was another great moment that was when we were putting in the glass for urban habitat and also for, we did it as well for the birthday party scene at the end of the space colony there. That required laying glass on a steel frame and the glass had to, it used pepper’s ghost.
Well, the problem was that with pepper’s ghost and haunted mansion, you have the glass position for ride vehicle that’s traveling across at a horizontal plane and there’s no change in the scenes that, particularly in space colony scene, the birthday party scene, the track was actually on an angle, so it was very difficult to position that glass in that frame. So the reflection would work as you were going down that angle for all the guests in the cars.
That was a challenge. Then when we were doing the urban habitat scene, we had a lot of problems with adjusting the glass to get the reflection right. There was arguments among the different trades people there as to whose responsibility that was. Some said, well, it’s the steel workers because it’s going into a steel frame. Other people said, no, it’s the carpentry union because they’re using glass and they’re putting it into the frame. So there was a lot of back and forth and couldn’t get anybody to agree.
So finally, Gary Powell and I went in at two o’clock in the morning and we started setting the glass in position because we knew we could avoid the trades. We were kind of violating union rules, which we knew, but we thought we could get away with because it was 2:00 AM while they caught us. We did get in a bit of trouble for that, but it was put in perfect.
Dan Heaton: Well, it ended up looking great. I did want to ask you about one other scene. And I heard you tell a story about the orange smell, which I know people love still think about that, the smell the oranges from Horizons, but that was a little challenging. I heard you mentioned that at Retro Magic, I’d love for you to talk a little about the possible challenges of that smell basically.
Trevor Bryant: Well, we knew that there was, we had a scent cannon and we knew that with the scent cannon manufacturer, they could spray an orange scent into that scene. So as you arrived into the desert scene, you would smell these oranges and that would be a wonderful sensation to add to everything else that was going on there. It worked just great. The problem was it worked great everywhere in the building. The scent started going through the air conditioning systems and it wound up being everywhere.
The way I remember that it was fixed, and I hope I’m right in this, but I think there was some control of the AC units that they were able to set it up so that didn’t flow into all the other areas, but they also found the paint that was an odor absorbative paint, and in the transition tunnel before you went into the orange scene, they were able to paint that scene with that odor abortive paint, and that helped control the problem. So that was one solution, but it was a pretty strong smell and if you didn’t, we weren’t able to control it. It was going to be everywhere in that building.
Dan Heaton: That’s so interesting. Well, I have one last question about Horizons. I’m just curious, having worked on it, this is Horizons has been closed for 25 years, yet people still bring that up more than plenty of attractions that closed five or 10 years ago or more recently. Why do you think it still resonates so strongly with people like this one attraction that was there for 16 years but has been gone for longer?
Trevor Bryant: I think in a big way it’s because it was the only one at Epcot that really dealt with the future other than later that the Seas Pavilion, which really didn’t so much speak to the future, but Horizons was about the future. It was about predicting what the future might be. And I think that was pretty compelling for people. I think especially younger kids that came in with their families, they saw a hopeful, beautiful future that they could aspire to and want to be in the future. So I think that’s a big reason for it.
I’m not sure, I know for General Electric, it was really about getting brand out there and make sure that brand was there, and I think a lot of that came from Carousel of Progress, which was also about foretelling the future in a lot of ways, kind of showing that progression. So there were kind of the two driving points as we went into it, but I think it really did become this beautifully told story of what the future might be and that was pretty compelling to an audience to want to see that and want that future for.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I went there as a kid. I think first time I wrote it I was like eight or something, which in the perfect age, I think for something like that. Well, I want to ask about some of the other things you worked on. I know you worked on, what I always found fascinating was the binaural audio, which went into, I believe was the post show. I remember going to the Monster Sound Show at Disney/MGM Studios, which at that point was a brand new technology. I’d love to know a little bit about that. I know then that comes up again with you in the future with Alien Encounter.
Trevor Bryant: I’m really glad you asked that question. That started with Joe Garlington, who was heading up an effort for Tron. The idea was that it was going to be an attraction corps, I believe, where it was all interactive and guess would come in and have all of these different interactive experiences that were Tron-based. He had some really wild ideas. One of them I remember was an alien psychologist that would do analysis of you in there, and there were some other crazy ideas like that, but it was really fun.
I know that they invested a lot of money and did a big mock-up at WDI for it, and it never went anywhere. It wasn’t funded, but it really was innovative and it was probably the very first interactive experience that WDI tried to do other than at the end of Horizons. We did have that interactive experience, which if you want to go back and talk about that, I’d love to talk about that.
Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, I don’t mind jumping back. Yeah, let’s talk about that, the choose your ending.
Trevor Bryant: As far as the binaural goes, what happened was Joe Harrington was working on the project and he started showing up with this binaural sound system, which was, I think it was Sen Hauser that had created a mannequin head with two microphones in where the ears are. And the idea was that when you held the mannequin head, the recording that went through the ear canals of the mannequin recorded it exactly as if you would hear it when you played it back in stereo and wore headphones. You would hear exactly as if you were a person listening in that environment. And he did a funny thing with a haircut where you could hear the scissors going around your head. So I started working on something called Monster Sound Show, which at that time wasn’t called that.
I think that was the ultimate name. It was called Audio Adventure. Audio Adventure. And it was working with Rennie Rau and there were a couple and Joe Harrington and we came up with an idea for a radio show, and the idea was that people would go into a radio theater and they would sit down and there would be the glass wall at the traditional radio theater.
So the actors were behind the glass wall and the audience members would put on headphones and they would be able to hear what the actors were recording. And it was a crime drama. And at some point the lights went out in the theater and when the lights went out, because there was a gunshot on stage and all the lights went out. Now supposedly the kind of activity, the crime activity now descended into the theater and you could hear people scurrying around, you could hear somebody talking behind your head, and it was all part of this radio show.
I absolutely loved it. I thought it was one of the most inventive things to be thought of for Epcot, or actually it was for Studio Tour. And I was heartbroken, absolutely heartbroken when it was decided that it wasn’t a good fit and that was when they went to Monster Sound Show and that version of Audio Adventure with the binaural sound became a little booth in the post show. I really thought it was a great idea and it would’ve been really fun, so I didn’t let go of it. When we started up the research and development group, one of the projects that I asked to be funded was binaural sound. We came up working with Tom Fitzgerald.
We came up with an idea of creating an Alien Encounter where an alien would escape from a tube in the middle of a room that audiences were sitting around and using bin normal sound that was actually mounted in the seats so they wouldn’t have to wear headphones because that was a complaint about the radio show was they didn’t want people to be using headphones.
They would get this binaural experience. That was the invention of that for R&D. We did a big mockup of that theater. We did first the model. I worked on that, and then I worked on the actual mockup of the binaural effect, and then it got turned over to the show team to do Alien Encounter for Florida, which I guess scared a lot of people and that’s why ultimately they didn’t continue with the show, which I thought was unfortunate.
Dan Heaton: I talked to a few people that worked on Alien Encounter and I went, I have had gone and experienced it scary, but again, I was old enough where I thought it was cool, but I don’t know if I was seven or eight what I would’ve thought, but it was really fun.
Trevor Bryant: Right, right. I was sorry to see that one go. I have a bad track record, I guess.
Dan Heaton: Well, tell me about the final scene of Horizons jumping back since you mentioned it.
Trevor Bryant: So one of the things that George McGinnis and General Electric really focused on was that idea that you get to choose your own tomorrow at the end of the ride. I don’t know. I can’t think of any ride anywhere at that time where you had an interactive experience on the ride itself, and especially where you get to choose the ending of the ride.
It was really novel and unique and a brilliant idea, and the development of it was really pushing the edge of technology, the idea that these TV screens, these video screens would fully encapsulate the ride vehicle and you would be able to see this tilt back on the ride vehicle and see these videos of these future experiences. That was something that had not been done before. General Electric invested a ton of money in these video projectors, which they weren’t off the shelf, they weren’t being used anywhere.
And it was a big risk too, because there was a lot of requirement to sync the projectors so that they would work correctly together. And it was a challenge, technological challenge, but there was real incentive to go ahead and make it work. Then the idea was that there were four guests in the vehicle and there were three pads that lit up on the front of the vehicle. So you got to choose one of three tomorrows, the undersea, the desert, or outer space, and when you had kind of a consensus in the vehicle, actually I think there were four pads because it would override if two and two chosen.
So you would pick your tomorrow. Ideally everybody would choose space or the desert or undersea, and then that would be the experience at the end of the ride for you and you can go back and ride again and choose the different tomorrow. That I thought was just absolutely brilliant for its time. George deserves a lot of recognition for that. It was great.
Dan Heaton: Oh, I love that. I always wanted space for some reason, but as a kid going again, like you said, nothing like that. I mean, there were things you go and press a button, but not on a ride like that. That was just mind blowing. Well, you mentioned that you were involved with founding the r and d department. I know that that was in the late eighties. How did that come together, where that department got founded, which then led to things like vinyl audio or like the ride vehicle, Indiana Jones, so many cool things, but how did you get involved starting that division?
Trevor Bryant: So when I was working with General Electric on Horizons, I met a fellow named Dave Fink. Dave Fink was GE’s technical representative to the ride. He had had a lot of experience with the research and development group with GE, and he came in to kind of monitor especially development of those projectors at the end of the ride and several other technical achievements that GE really brought the technology to.
After we finished Horizons and had come back, it was a few years later that Dave got courted by Disney to come in and help them with the engineering group. The engineering groups had gone through some different leadership. I think Jack Davis was there at that time and there were some issues about development of technologies for the future. So Dave came in really to head up the engineering group at WDI, but he didn’t care for it much.
It wasn’t forward advanced thinking enough for him. So he started thinking about creating a research and development group. Now, there was a R&D group in place that was, Dick Fox was leading that, and I think he had one employee and that was Ben Schweiger. Ben did all the environmental issue development for Disney through Dick Fox and there might’ve been a few others. I think maybe Dave Harbaugh worked for them for Dick.
But Dave came in and said, I’ve got a different idea for what research and development should be. I really want to look at technologies and how they might apply to Disney’s businesses, not only at Imagineering but at the studio as well and how they might apply in the future five to 10 years in the future. So he started looking for leadership to do that. He brought on board a fellow named Dave Spencer.
Dave Spencer had been with the audio video group and had done all of the A/V requirements for Euro Disneyland. Brilliant guy. And he found Dave. Yhen he came to me one day and at this point I was working back in model shop again, kind of doing some show design models and things like that. And he said to me, he knew me from the Horizons project, so he knew my technical interests and how I was involved with a lot of that.
So he said, you don’t really want to be doing this. You really want to be doing research and development. I said, Dave, I’m not an engineer. I don’t have any experience in that regard. Said, I know. He said, I need someone that’s going to help me creatively and start to think about what projects we should be doing from the creative side of the company.
I thought at this point I was actually thinking of leaving Disney because the creative opportunities that I was getting there weren’t that great. I was kind of getting positioned; I had done a lot of work on Pleasure Island and in the development concept development, but I didn’t get to carry that into the field, which I was disappointed by. So I wasn’t sure I really wanted to stay at Disney and now this opportunity comes up to work with research and development. So I said, okay, I’ll give it a shot. You’ll give me a shot. So Dave Fink, Dave Spencer, and I became the leadership of the new R&D group and I started reading and getting very involved in management of research and development.
I started looking at Lockheed. I started looking at a lot of other companies that had been in the R&D business and what they did did wrong, and I kind of enjoyed it. It was something I found really interesting. So working with them, I became not only a creative liaison for the rest of the company, but also looking at how it might be structured, how the division might be structured within the company and how it might support different divisions. What a great opportunity.
It took me out of all of my model building experience, all of my show set experience, but it didn’t leave any of that behind. It kind of took it with me, but brought me into this management of people that were a hell of a lot smarter than I was. For me to tell Ben Schweiger what to do was just insane. And a lot of those other folks, Mike Peterson, but we started hiring people at that point and started thinking about, and I really was involved in looking at what those different projects might be and how they might be funded and who we needed to hire to do those different projects. Just what a great team.
We focused, we kind of, I’m sorry, I’m stumbling here a little bit, but we were given some money as I recall, I think it was $50,000 and we were given a space to hung North Hollywood, which is where they were fabricating.
I remember they were doing a lot of costuming at that point over there. We were given a space, we weren’t given desks, we weren’t given anything else and said, go figure something out. But the first project we did was the Indiana Jones ride vehicle, one of the first, and it was also the binaural sound for Alien Encounter was another first. But that project was driven by John Snoddy who was not in the R&D group. And John had come to Dave and I.
Dave had showed us a model of a Jeep type vehicle on a carriage that was a six degrees of motion simulator, and he thought that it would accentuate the ride movement to be able to tilt this vehicle in different ways as it was on a ride track. We had done some development of the idea of a barcode system to be able to run a ride vehicle on so it wouldn’t actually have to be on a track.
We said, okay, we’re going to buy the six degrees of freedom motion base and we’re going to get some wheels and we’re going to build a box to sit on top of that. And my assignment at the time was to kind of theme it, make it look good, and we bought those parts and we basically spent the $50,000 buying those parts, and at this point, we were actually reporting to Mickey Steinberg and Frank Wells. And Frank Wells was really our mentor in all of this. He was the guy that was really going to get us the funding that we were going to need.
So we brought him over Tujunga to show him this great thing that we were doing and several other projects, and Frank came over and he approved the vinyl sound. He approved several other things and he looked at the ride vehicle and he said, no. And he said, it’s going to cost too much. He said, I’ve seen what happens with engineering and ride systems and stuff; he said, just forget about it. We’re not going to fund it. So we were really set back. We really believed in it and thought it was a great thing. So we started borrowing money behind Frank’s back and we went to different divisions of the company and we worked with Mickey to try and get some money here and there, and we finished assembling it.
It was the very first Indiana Jones ride vehicle at that time. We didn’t know it was going to be an Indiana Jones ride vehicle. We just assembled it as a Jeep on this motion base, and we got it together and finished assembling it, and we invited Frank and Michael Eisner and George Lucas because at this point it had taken off with show design and Tony Baxter had seen it and John Snoddy was still involved, and the idea of Indiana Jones came up and that was what we started thinking how it would work.
So we set up a review for them to come over and write it. This is a bittersweet moment for me because I had so much invested in this. I had been involved in the actual fabrication of it. I had mean it had my hands in it. It was a great moment. We were going to show it and this was going to be terrific. And at the same time, my wife and I were having a baby. So the day that it came to show the ride vehicle that George Lucas and Frank and Michael Eisner arrived, I was in the hospital delivering my daughter with my wife who was primarily responsible for that event.
I’ll tell you a funny story. There was a great moment. My wife had a very long labor. It was exhausting. And I got a call from Dave and he said, how’s it going? And I said, we just had a baby girl. This is incredible. He said, good, can you get in here? They’re going to be here in about a half an hour. And I said, Dave, I can’t do that. So I missed it. I was not there for the presentation, which was absolutely fantastic. And Frank fully approved the project at that point. Unfortunately I wasn’t there.
Dan Heaton: Well, I mean there’s a good reason. Yeah, if there’s any reason in the world, that’s a good reason. I love that Indiana Jones ride, and I’m glad you got to be a part of it there. And I want to ask you too, I know you joined Sony Development, I believe in 94, and worked there for quite a while on a lot of interesting attractions. I’ve seen the list where it’s like museums, I mean, not even just Sony, but you’ve done things for MGM, you did a lot of interesting things in between when you worked at Disney to some of the recent projects. So I’d love to know a little bit about some of the other work you did and just what were some of the things that stood out that you worked on in that mid-‘90s to early 2000s?
Trevor Bryant: So the transition to Sony wasn’t an easy one. There was an exodus from WDI at that time because of changes in senior management. Frank Wells had died in that helicopter crash. We had felt very, very close to Frank and him making a lot of the decisions about research and development within the company. So Dave and I and Dave Spencer all made the decision collectively to leave WDI and go to Sony because Sony was offering really another research and development opportunity.
So Sony, Mickey Schoff at the time who was the head of Sony, had been looking for someone to develop location-based entertainment for Sony, and we were on the target list of potential people to do that. We interviewed and went really well, and Mickey brought us on and we were ready to make the transition out of Disney. Going into Sony though, it was not to build something, it was really to create an R&D group to look at opportunities to build location-based entertainment.
And we set up a small shop in Burbank and we started developing things. And then also Bob Weis at the time had left Disney and he started a group called Design Island, and he also was getting contracted by Sony to look at this idea, whereas we were focused on R&D and really becoming more of a technology group. Bob was focused on the creative side, and Bob was really looking at how to create this place and started working with Maurice Sendak. He had an idea with David McCauley, several other people to use those as IP. We started meeting with Bob and collectively working together.
What happened was that Bob went along with this for a while and then decided that he didn’t want it to be as focused. He actually wound up working with Dreamworks for a while, and so I inherited the designs that Bob had started and Design Island had started, and also a lot of the people that worked at Design Island came to work for me at Sony. So I had been hired as a vice president within Sony to look at developing this location-based entertainment, and at this point, Loew’s, which was their theater company, had contracted to build a big theater in San Francisco, and we started looking at that building in that site as a location for this big idea, and we developed models.
Now, about that time, I did something that was a little bit miraculous. I developed a relationship with the Japanese side of the company. There was a woman, Ko Mogi, who was working at the design center, and I actually brought her over to work with me. I remember Mickey Steinberg wasn’t particularly happy about that. He thought that I shouldn’t be working that closely with the Japanese side of the company, although it wound up really working in our favor because we started to understand what their requirements were a lot better, especially with the language difficulties.
So that was something to have a Japanese person right on site with us working with us. So we developed this idea called Metreon, and the idea was to create a location-based entertainment company that would focus on Sony and offer really new forms of entertainment. We did a focus group in San Francisco at one point where we presented this. It didn’t go all that well to be honest. They looked at it and they said, well, this is San Francisco. We don’t really think this is going to work here. I think a lot of management above me thought, well, if you build it, they will come.
Let’s just focus on what we need to do and make it work. We built it and it was extraordinary place. I remember there was a great review I read at the time that said it was mind blowing in the sense that you had Microsoft there, you had Discovery Channel there, you had Maurice Sendak and where the wild things are, you had David McCauley and his idea of the way things work, and we had Moebius, Jean Giro, who is an incredible comic book artist, that we developed this whole interactive attraction called Airtight Garage, which was all about playing games, video games, conceptually it was brilliant.
The problem was if you build it, they will come, didn’t really work. It was in an area by the Moscone Convention Center, so they would come when there were conventions, people would flock into it, but when there weren’t or and the idea of getting kids and small children to that part of town, there was insufficient parking. There were a lot of problems that we should have recognized early on that we didn’t, and so it didn’t last all that long, and also I don’t think Sony’s appetite for it at that time was there. They kind of got into it and then realized they had to manage it and they didn’t want to manage it, so they hired people to come in and manage it from the outside, and it started to deteriorate.
I think the first one that left was a Discovery Channel, and then that was followed by Microsoft leaving, and from those two leaving, they were two big anchors and it was, I think it’s a target now, so it really worked, but if you were there when it opened, it was really a pretty spectacular place and unlike anything else, and I’m very proud of it creatively.
I think there were things that Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are was a phenomenal interactive space. The Moebius area with hyper bowling, if you ever got to try that, that was unbelievable. So there were some things there that were pretty amazing.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it amazing. I admit that I don’t know much about it, but it sounds really cool. I want to make sure, you mentioned about kind of gaming and everything else that kind of leads well into much later, but test track second version, which I know you were involved with as a show producer and creative director for reimagining that attraction, which I think turned out great and I’d love to hear a little bit about how that came together for you and your experience.
Trevor Bryant: So I got a call from Joe Garlington who I’d worked with way back in the Tron Arcade days, and Joe called me and said that he had some interactive requirements, and I had been doing, after we finished Sony, I had been doing some museum work. I did a lot of work interactively with a little children’s museum here in L.A. called the Zimmer Children’s Museum, and I had done some other interactive museum work. So Joe said he had seen some of that.
He thought, well, maybe there’s a fit for some of this. Would you come in and help us with some of the interactive development? I came in, started to review the attraction with Brent Strong, who was the kind of show producer at that time, and started to get more involved on the creative side of it and what it might be. Brent was busy with a lot of other things going on at that time, and he asked me if I would take a bigger responsibility for the overall attraction development.
I said, sure. I actually got hired at that point as a Show Producer and came into it having been gone from Disney for 12 years, to be honest, I didn’t get a whole lot of support within the company. They kind of said, oh, go do this thing, and I didn’t really know organizationally how the company worked anymore, but I said, okay, I’ll do my best. What happened was that I developed a really strong relationship with General Motors.
There was a fellow there named Jeff Lennick who was my counterpart. He was at GM. He was responsible for all of GM’s event programming and event design for trade shows and things like that. Jeff was just a fabulous designer. He had a great team, and I became very dependent on his input and let them really take a strong role in the design development, which a lot of people at WDI told me, don’t do that.
We’ve done this with other companies before. It doesn’t work. You’re going to fail. This is not going to work. I didn’t believe it. I believed that they were really super talented people; I put together a very small team from WDI. There was Mike Overman, Alex Greenman, Debbie Gonzalez, and Daniel Joseph on the effects side. That was a minimal team creatively.
So we went to GM and we said, okay, we’re going to work with you guys and we’re going to actually let you do some design work, and they were great at it. They were absolutely spectacular, and so if you go to the attraction, that free show, we staged it and we figured out all of the interior design and all of that, but like those models that are in there and the actual sets, they built those. They were so involved and dedicated to doing that and willing to put the resources in it and absolutely spectacularly beautiful. I don’t know that using WDI resources, I could have ever done that, certainly not for the money, and we did a great job creatively with that entire attraction. I’m very, very proud of what we did there. A spectacular show.
Dan Heaton: Well, so much of that too is making it interactive and having you design the car and then the whole style is different. It’s very futuristic with the music score and everything, but I’m curious, the interactive part, how challenging was that to do that where someone’s going, designing a car and then it connects to the post show and it connects a bit to the ride and how that comes together?
Trevor Bryant: It was completely insane because when you looked at the creative budget, and I can’t remember the numbers offhand, but I would say when you looked at all of the budget for the ride, for the interior design for all the stuff that I just described, and then you took that number and at least 75% of it was going to go into making it interactive, so it was a big number and a huge risk. Disney at that point was working on the magic bands concept, so we knew that they had technology for the magic bands, and Joe Garlington was instrumental in doing a lot of this.
He really formulated that direction and really worked with those guys. In taking that technology and making it work, working with General Motors, we decided that we really wanted to design a car and let guests have that experience of designing a car, so we started really focusing on that. It was overwhelming in its scope, the whole idea, I think we figured out at one point the number of cars that you could actually design in that attraction was well beyond the billions.
It was unbelievable how many different cars you could design, what variations there would be, and the idea that you would connect with that design and then take it with you into the ride and have using that wristband technology, have that what you had designed, take it with you, and then have that report back to you how well your car performed in the test track ride experience. Just unbelievable that we were able to accomplish that, and then you took it into the post-show and you had post-show experiences where you used that same information, your car to drive on a little track where you would kind of race other drivers and you were racing your car that you designed.
You got to design or create a television commercial using your car that you designed. I mean, it was just staggering that we accomplished that and we did it in 18 months. We did it in 18 months. The fact that we were able to take that from concept and bring it all the way through to completion of construction in 18 months, there were some complaints at the end of the project about what it cost, but I got to tell you that the costs were not in the creative side or in the technology side. The costs were actually in the construction side. It kind of fell apart on that side, but I am immensely enormously proud of it. It was just great.
Dan Heaton: Well, I’m glad to hear that. I think it turned out really well, and especially given that, like you said, 18 months, I mean, most new attractions take 3, 4, 5 years if not more, so the fact that you did that is incredible, so I really like it. Well, I want to finish and ask you briefly about your work on the Tron Realm post show, which a lot of people compare the current test track to Tron. I have not been to Shanghai. I actually haven’t even written the neutron in Magic Kingdom yet, but I’m curious to finish up with your experience working on that post show, which I know is a big part of that attraction in Shanghai.
Trevor Bryant: So I think that when I finished Test Track, what I realized about myself creatively was that I was very good at being able to look at what a guest experience should be in an interactive environment for them to get reward out of that. I’m not a gamer. I don’t particularly like video games.
I never play them, but I do like the idea of in a interactive experience in a theme park of being able to give people reward from an experience like that within the timeframe that you have, that you don’t have hours and hours and hours to there and play a game, you’ve got a couple minutes, maybe two or three minutes to get that experience and make it fulfilling and rewarding for people; I love that. That was kind of where I finished up with Test Track and where I felt I really kind of fit.
I had gotten a call from the Shanghai team asking me to meet with them about this development they had in mind for a Tron attraction in Shanghai. They knew my experience with General Motors, and it was likely that General Motors was going to be the sponsor for the Tron Attraction and Shanghai, so I kind of got buried into it that way.
Scott Drake was really responsible for the Tron attraction and even the theming of the overall Tron Realm at the end, but they asked me to really look at the interactive and developed the interactive for Tron Realm, which I felt very comfortable doing. When we laid that attraction out, it had to take a lot of people off of the ride, get them through Tron Realm, get them through all that interactive and let them experience that feel rewarded and get out of the building as quickly as possible.
A lot of people flowing through there. So we started looking first of all at the test track experience for designing a car, and we decided that we could create an experience like that where you design a Tron car. So we did use a lot of the tech from that early on. We talked about it being interactive in the same way where they would connect via wristband or something like that.
To be honest with you, I ruled that out from the get-go because I knew the cost involved with doing that, and I didn’t want to spend the money there. We really focused on the different independent attractions. I think one of my most favorite ones is that kind of hockey game that you play in the interactive area. That originally was supposed to be a driving simulator and we couldn’t make it work. It just wasn’t fun.
We had spent some development dollars on that and then finally went back and said, wait a minute, the air hockey is something everybody loves to play. Can we make it work with everything else in here? So we completely changed directions on that very smart move. We were able to develop that and build it, the attraction where guests see themselves as a Tron figure and then actually get to drive a Tron car. And there’s a moment there where it captures your image when you’re standing in front of there and you actually see yourself in the Tron car, the physical cars, you exit the ride or exit.
That interactive experience, that was something nobody else had done. We really broke ground on that and made that happen. The driving simulator itself, we knew we didn’t have money to put a lot of vehicles in there and do a traditional kind of multi driving. So we created these three cars that you would get in and a big giant screen. No one had done that before. So they were both very, very unique interactive elements in that attraction. And I think guests love ’em as far as I know and what I’ve read about it since it opened. Unfortunately, I never got back to see it fit.
Dan Heaton: Well. I think that just you mentioning all those kind of innovative sides that fits with kind your whole career and what you’ve worked on. So Trevor, this has been really awesome. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you and thanks so much.
Trevor Bryant: Yeah, I loved it too. It’s really been fun.
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