Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
When we think about our favorite attractions, it’s easy to just consider the concept designers. That’s just the first step to bring those ideas to life. It takes sculptors and other artists to create the places and attractions we enjoy. A perfect example is Valerie Edwards, who worked as the Director of Sculpture and Chief Sculptor at Walt Disney Imagineering for more than 20 years. She learned from the masters and developed her skills to meet changing technology during her time at Disney.
Valerie is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about her background and career. Her father, George Edwards, worked as an animator at Disney on films like Sleeping Beauty. This exposure to various types of art as a child helped to inspire Valerie’s path. She first worked at Alchemy II for Ken Forsse, a former Imagineer who also created Teddy Ruxpin. Afterwards, she started at the model shop at WDI in 1988 and became the successor to the legendary Blaine Gibson.
Valerie and I talk about the important relationships that shaped her time at Disney and beyond. She developed a close friendship with Disney Legend John Hench and visited Gibson to receive his blessing and guidance. We also discuss challenging projects like sculpting President Obama for the Hall of Presidents in 2009 plus Johnny Depp and Barbossa for Pirates of the Caribbean. Valerie describes how technology for sculpting has evolved to make such remarkable work possible. I really enjoyed the chance to speak with Valerie on this episode and learn more about her career.
Show Notes: Valerie Edwards
Learn more about Valerie Edwards’ art and projects at Walt Disney Imagineering on her official website, valerieedwardsart.com.
Read an interview with Valerie in Didier Ghez’s book Walt’s People: Volume 22: Talking Disney with the Artists Who Knew Him.
Listen to episodes of The Tomorrow Society Podcast with artists from Walt Disney Imagineering like Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards, Jim Sarno, Don Carson, Daniel Joseph, and more.
Photos in this post are used with the permission of Valerie Edwards.
This post contains affiliate links. Making any purchase through those links supports this site. See full disclosure.
Transcript
Valerie Edwards: This underscores for me the brilliance and the success of character sculpture. The original character sculptures designed by Blaine for Pirates. These were designed for the suspension of disbelief. You believe it for the sake of enjoyment because it’s storytelling art. It’s not realistic. It’s speculative fiction and it works beautifully. I think a great example of that now is like the Na’vi Shaman. It works so beautifully because it’s not human necessarily.
Dan Heaton: That is Valerie Edwards, former Chief Sculptor and Director of Sculpture at Walt Disney Imagineering for more than 20 years. You’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
(music)
Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 132 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton, coming to you from the cold of St. Louis with lots of snow and low temperatures, but I am hanging in there. Hope you’re doing okay, and I’m very excited about this week’s show. My guest is Valerie Edwards, who of course was the Chief Sculptor and Director of Sculpture at Walt Disney Imagineering and has a really interesting background going back to her dad, George Edwards, being an animator on Sleeping Beauty and other films.
And then her work for Alchemy II with Ken Forsse, and of course, so much with Disney. I was familiar originally with Valerie through her Barack Obama sculpture for the Hall of Presidents after he was inaugurated in 2009 and really enjoyed her work there, plus Johnny Depp and some of the other additions to the Pirates of the Caribbean.
But I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t know that much about her story. I did read what I think is a really good interview in the Walts People book Volume 22 by Didier Ghez. She’s in there talking about both her father but also her own career. All of those books are great, but I think that version really gave me some background. Then of course, getting the chance to talk to Valerie here was a real treat to learn more about her relationships with Blaine Gibson, the Disney legend who was the original sculptor for Hall of Presidents and so much more.
And then her close friendship with John Hench, who is someone who, as you know, was so influential at Walt Disney World and so much more with Disney’s theme parks and beyond. I found all that very interesting from talking to Valerie. And if you’d like to check out her art, valerieedwardsart.com, it’s her newly designed website, which includes so many cool images of a wide range of the sculptures she’s done for Disney and beyond.
Just a lot of great material there where I think it’s a great companion piece while she’s talking about her background and career. Then you can go out to her website and there is a lot there, animated figures, maquettes area development, some concept design. Just a really cool website that I would highly recommend you check out after the show because we dig into the story behind what Valerie did, but it’s going to be enhanced so much by seeing the art that she put together. So let’s get to it. Here is Valerie Edwards.
(music)
Dan Heaton: My guest today was the Director and Chief Sculptor at Walt Disney Imagineering for more than 20 years, beginning in 1988. She has over 35 years of experience in arts, entertainment, and product development, and she currently works as an independent sculptor. It is Valerie Edwards. Valerie, thank you so much for talking with me here on the podcast.
Valerie Edwards: Thank you for letting me talk to you.
Dan Heaton: Oh, no problem. I’m excited you did so much for Disney and I haven’t talked to someone who’s a sculptor like this in the past, so this is really a first for me. So I’m curious, really, what led you to becoming an artist? And I knew you grow up, your dad worked at Disney and was an artist himself, and I know that your childhood obviously probably played a role in becoming Imagineer. So I’d love to know for you, how did everything come together when you were growing up with your father and then just with becoming a sculptor?
Valerie Edwards: Well, that’s a great question. Strangely enough, the events in my life that led me to art in Disney began at the time of my birth and way beyond my child mind comprehension as fate would have it. I was born during Disney’s Sleeping Beauty production where my dad was busy at work in animation and he was forged connections with the likes of Marc Davis, Colin Campbell, Ken Anderson, and so many more in and these connections that he had, they showed up in force in my life.
When I think back on when or how I became interested in art, I’d have to say it was like a slow simmering ongoing process. And it wasn’t specifically geared to a single art form, but the exposure to all art forms in a wide range of subjects. That really seems to fit perfectly into the imaginary. When I look back on that, and I was raised in my little home at the base of the Susanna Mountains.
I was a second of seven kids and an ever-growing snake and wraps and buns and birds in our house. It was a lot of things, but it wasn’t typical. It was not; It was just always bursting with life. But in the best possible way, it was noisy, noisy, noisy, and in perpetual motion. There were scores of projects happening all times from science to arts and crafts. There was bagpipes being played and lots of highland dancing for me. We had this extensive library at our home.
It was an incredible source of information for me, and I used it all the time as an Imagineer, even like the hundreds of pieces of architectural ornamentation for TokyoSea, and a lot of detailed reference came from my dad’s out of print architectural booklet. Even the furniture I grew up with, crazy antiques, floor to ceiling books, story artifacts, cleaning sculptures, all these played a part in some project at Imagineering.
I’m so grateful for my parents crazy at collective tastes and the fact that antiques at the time when the truth is way to furniture home. And my mom, besides raising seven kids, and that’s something I still can’t wrap my head around, was a writer, a poet, a philosopher, a humanitarian, and a big time environmentalist. My mom was our moral compass. She was joyous, brilliant, and a shining beacon of love. I had the best mom ever, ever.
And my dad, he was a tall kind gentleman who was in constant, constant pursuit of knowledge. He was recruited from Chouinard Art Institute, pretty famous place by the Disney Company to join animation in the fifties. At the same time that he was doing animation, he was translating hieroglyphics for the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. That’s where I spent a lot of my time as a child after school.
And that seems unusual, being well an animator and a translator or hieroglyphics, but that wasn’t from my dad because he was also self-taught in Anglo-Saxon Gothic, Japanese, Hindu, Chinese, German, Spanish. More than that, he was also a trained Russian interpreter, a sculptor, an illustrator painter. He was a weaver, a metalsmith, a carpenter, and our teacher for the LAUSD, he was a history teacher and a photographer teacher and a student of medical plans. So my dad, he just didn’t dabble in stuff.
He became proficient at things even in his seventies. He was hired at Dreamworks as a CG game artist. The guy read stacks of computer manuals. You can still see some of my dad’s buried skills throughout the theme parks, like the paintings for King Arthur’s in Paris. And he designed the Victorian scenes for the mainstream and pouring those full-sized ones that are above eye level on that mezzanine.
So that’s just a sample of some of the sculptures he did when I was there when it was a kid. Going to Disneyland was a big, big deal. It took years for us to save up for a visit, but I think that’s really what made our trip special and the anticipation monumental. I still feel that when I go there on the days that led up to our trips to Disneyland, my brothers and sisters and I, we lay a map on the floor, and we because we couldn’t risk wasting a single ticket. Every selection was absolutely paramount when we had three E tickets and that wasn’t anything to be trifled with, that’s for sure.
So Disney and I was almost a surreal experience. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d become a part of it, but in hindsight, it surely was growing up the daughter of a Disney artist and witnessing and participating in that big adventure and learning, that was the most important component of my personal evolution, and that’s what led me to becoming an artist and an imagineer. My parents instilled in me to believe that there was nothing that I couldn’t do and no place I couldn’t see if I used my imagination.
Dan Heaton: Well, that makes a lot of sense that I know that it’s been common that others that had parents that were involved with Disney or just growing up around that would be such a big deal. But before you went to Disney, you ultimately went and met and worked with Ken Forsse at Alchemy II and who he’s known for Teddy Ruxpin and other projects there. So I would love to know what it was like to work with Ken and how that experience went for you.
Valerie Edwards: Well, when I was a little girl, my dad spent a lot of time with a guy named Ken Forsse, and he was the animator that sat next to my dad during Sleeping Beauty. So now later on Ken would become an Imagineer and he was actually one of the co-creators of the original Haunted Mansion. Anyway, my dad and Ken, they became best of friends and they even started business together making museum replicas for displays and films and TV throughout my child and my dad and I would go visit can periodically at his house.
And boy, I’m telling you, I wouldn’t miss that for the world because at Ken’s house, he would always experience the most amazing mystifying illusions and creations. It was pure magic. Well, my childhood went of course bed by and off. I went to college where I thought I’d avoid the siren call of art by studying science, which I loved, which, and would have it about the same time I was ready to cut the school in umbilical, which was long in my case.
And getting into the work world, I found out that Ken started a new company called Alchemy II. Well, I went with my illustration, and Ken graciously accepted me into his Alchemy family. It was under the mentoring of Ken, who was a sheer genius and the sweetest guy ever. Along with the collection of sterile talent, a lot of former Imagineers that the next phase, I would say was the next phase of my education that began.
I started out for him as an illustrator on concept drawings and book illustration, but then pretty soon Ken would ask me to do other art tasks when there was a job that needed to be done and Ken thought I could do it. Didn’t matter if I knew how to do it or not, Ken would just say to me and his beautiful low voice and always with a twinkle in his eye, so you don’t know how to do that.
Well, time you learned, I mean, who does that talking about? Blind space. Needless to say, you got to repeat that phrase a lot because I didn’t know a lot. I got a pretty swell education in blueprint reading model making in plastics and manufacturing, and my teachers in plastic and manufacturing were actually the former Disney airway animals and what I learned from Looney Tunes. He asked me to try sculpt them something for ’em. I was like, okay, sure. I always loved sculpting for fun, but it wasn’t anything I’d done professionally, but I’d give it a shot.
So the rest for me is history, or as they used to say, if it was a snake, it’d a bitch up because the sculpting tool has been in my hands every day since, every day. And then shortly after that date at Alchemy, I became their head of sculpture and I went on to work on film and TV and theme parks and educational material and robotics and toys, including Teddy Ruxpin when the first audio animated toy and I guess you could say you name it, and we made it there.
Dan Heaton: That’s great. And I’m glad that that worked out so well and you were able to connect with so many legendary and talented people that led you into what ultimately got you started at Disney, and I know you were involved with the Model Shop and working with John Hench, and I would love to know from you too, how you got started at Disney and that experience and then where it went from there.
Valerie Edwards: Well, in 1988, Alchemy was winding down, but at the same time, Imagineering was winding up and there was this really lovely lady from Imagineering named Peggy Van Pelt who was on the hunt for talent. Peggy happened to be in touch with one of Alchemy executives, and at the time she asked if I’d like an interview. I was like, well, yeah, you better believe it.
And two weeks from that time, I was sitting in my own little cubicle in the Model Shop at Walt Disney Imagineering. Lemme talk about crazy little did I know the Model Shop was a sort of rite of passage kind of place. And I got to say that place was a little bit confusing. It turned out that when I got there, the guy that hired me was on a vacation for a couple of weeks, and so nobody knew what to do with me when I got there.
They said, you’ll figure it out. And in the meantime, they said, why don’t you clean and vacuum the EPCOT model? So okay, the EPCOT model for anyone that doesn’t know it’s huge and it’s really up at these high model tables. So there I was and the EPCOT model in my socks with a portable vacuum cleaners strap on my back and I feared God, try not to suck up any little trees, but most of it I cleaned with tiny little brushes and I just kept repeating that mantra that they gave me to figure it out.
You’ll figure it out. And at least I can say I learned every inch of that park in my first two weeks. But I kept thinking, well, hey, when am I going to get the sculpt around here? But it turns out that you’ll figure it out kind of thing, something that they did, and it was kind like Marty Sklar blank piece of paper.
It was scary, but at the same time, you got to make your own mark. Shortly after that, I’ll call it indoctrination, I settled into one of my first sculpting assignments. It was called Tokyo Bridge Project, and now we know it as the hub figures. That was the Fab Five plus five that were going to be manufactured in bronze, and we’re going to put these on a bridge from the train station to the entrance of Tokyo Disneyland. But the catch, here’s the catch, they’re in a hurry.
It was only a few weeks for the sculptures, and they said, you’re in charge. So that was my first trial by fire and talk about breakneck. All I had was rough art and the base sizes, but fortunately with the help of five willing and really capable, wonderful sculptors and a whole bunch of model shapes, picked up night pizza, we got it all done.
But this was, I mean, it was the first in a career of late night working and food, and it was actually in the midst of craziness and the late night working that a tall, very dapper gentleman started to visit my tiny little cubicle and he just introduced himself simply as John. And each day he would sit with me for a while, I sculpted, I was doing a little Pinocchio for the bridge. Our conversation was easy. It’s like we’d known each other forever, which was just one of those things with us. We talked about everything from art to philosophy. It was just wonderful. I’m not sure what it was during those first few weeks that this guy from the mall shop, he came up to me practically hyperventilating and shaking, and he is like, do you know who that is? That’s John Hench.
Okay. Okay. And not to be a total goof, I figured I better look it up. So I went over to the research library and let me just say it was a good thing I didn’t do that before he started coming in there because I think as I’ve read about him, all the color drained from my face and my knees were just shaking. I am really glad to say that from our first days, our relationship was absolutely forged.
And I continued to see John almost every day until the day he died. I can’t say I really have a favorite memory of John because every moment with him was my favorite. He was so brilliant. I bet everything though he was humble and generous, and the knowledge he imparted was just so priceless. He just gave it freely from the conception of Disneyland and EPCOT his time with Walt and his travels with Salvador Dali, and he shared that all with me.
And sure, there were lots of whoa moments, like Sandy’s assistant saying, John, Salvador is on the phone and witnessing the conversation in French between Salvador Dali and John Hench or sitting on the patio and having Ray Bradbury plopped down next to you. Those are great memories, but even better we’re just sitting next to him eating ice cream sundaes every Wednesday at the Big D cafeteria or hugs. John was a lover of life. He found beauty in absolutely everything from the taste of coarse bread in Spain to the shadows as a light filters through trees. That was John Hench. John Hench was my supreme mentor, my friend. He was my family, and he’s certainly one of my life’s biggest blessings. I still thank John every single day, and I still carve his initials in the work that I do. He’ll always be a part of me.
Dan Heaton: Well, that’s great to hear because like you mentioned, John Hench was involved with so many amazing things, and the fact that you were able to end up having such a close relationship with him is really amazing. Another person that is also well known at Disney is Blaine Gibson, who of course did a lot of this sculpting for many years. So I’d love to hear about how you met Blaine initially and worked to get approval, and then what you learned from him as you started to work with him.
Valerie Edwards: Blaine Gibson. Well, not long after I joined Imagineering, I was told that there was a possibility of promotion sculpture, but first I need to take a trip to Sedona, Arizona and a few days with a guy named Blaine Gibson. It’s like, okay, Blaine Gibson. I knew who that was, the legendary sculptor, the animator, everything that ever was or will be Blaine Gibson. It’s like I hopped on that plane double quick, and I met that legend. And from the minute I met him, we hit it off. We’re like two peas in a pod.
We talked and talked for days. We even hiked together at the time. He was such a nimble guy. Needless to say, I got the job as the official Chief of Sculpture and later the Director of Sculpture, Chief Sculptor. And then in that capacity, I was in charge of all sculpture from budgets through production, all of theme parks to ships, hotels, and fly ship stores.
And that’s according to my job description. So I have to shout out to Maggie Elliott and Marty Sklar. They’re the ones that wrote that from Blaine’s. I came home with a brain full of new techniques, lessons in sculpture and life and new tools. He introduced me to the reducing glass. It’s a little known tool that looks just like a magnifying glass, but does the exact opposite. It allows you to shrink an image, you can use it while you’re sculpting to view what you’re working on at the same size as your reference.
You can also use it to look at really big work and view it as a guest would see it inside or an outside of an attraction. And I use it a lot, particularly to look at really big stuff like the giant balloon for Pop Century. It helped me to make accurate, and it matched the color and the shape of the film shots.
I remember once when I was standing in front of the balloon, a parking lot, it was enormous. So I was back in the parking lot and I was explaining the reducing glass to somebody, and then I heard this loud behind me and somebody saying, I thought you were going to look at it with a magnifying glass. I got to say, well, I did have a reputation for being a defender of quality, but that was even too much for me. The poor guy thought I was going to go over that 40-foot structure with a magnifying glass. So I’d fly out to Blaine when he was sculpting his latest works, and then Blaine would come back to me and come out to visit the shop and visit and give us the okay. Blaine and I stayed friends forever. We were always friends.
Dan Heaton: Well, that’s great to hear. And I admit that I know very little about the reducing glass, so I would probably think it was a magnifying glass. So it’s glad to have that clarity when you’re thinking in terms of sculpting. Of course one of the big sculptures that I know you worked on is of course, of President Obama when the Hall of Presidents was updated because Blaine Gibson, of course, was so involved with the Hall of Presidents and with the presidents that were added. And then I know you were involved for President Obama after he entered office in 2009. So I’d love to hear what that was like for you to actually sculpt the incoming president.
Valerie Edwards: For the 44th President, Blaine decided to pass the torch, and it was a big deal since Blaine had done all the other living presidents. And it was a good thing that prior to this, I decided to continue my education and bump up. I learned an anatomy class, so I went back to the University of Oklahoma to get a certificate in forensic reconstruction. So armed with that knowledge of tissue depths and eye diameters and lots of measurements and facial planes, I felt confident, pretty confident on boards of reference and lots of video to study the speech, to see the facial changes, a compression in speech. They even brought on anatomist and she of course was armed with even more knowledge and that was great. I love that.
But as it happens in the production of things, schedule and budget rules. So there was just a few weeks for me to sculpt that head and nobody so happily though the head sculpture, it seemed to pass muster because Blaine flew out and he gave his final okay. And it was great to see him. Of course, the most important thing is I always believe in that system, a checks and balances that they had because it just always made things better.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, definitely. I’m sure that helps, especially when you’re trying to do something as complicated as that. Speaking of the sculpting process, I always think of sculpting more in terms of the artistry side of it, but I know there’s a lot of math and science involved, and of course the technology for all of that has changed a lot over the years. So I’d love to learn a bit more for a lot of us who I’m sure don’t know about some of the math and science and what’s involved with sculpting.
Valerie Edwards: Well, the sculpting process actually, it starts way before the sculpture itself. It starts with the inspiration of course in blue sky and content design and how that idea or that dream is going to look when it’s formed. It can present itself in an illustration, a rough sketch; it could be inspirational photos, it can even be a verbal description. From there, depending on the complexity of the piece, its size, its weight, its connection to buildings, even it could be plumbing, whether or not it has mechanics into consideration and put into usually an elevated plan.
Eventual materials are also taken into consideration because it makes a difference if it’s bronze or stone or cast stone, fiberglass, wood. Once all those variables are worked out, we can start to gather information and research the subject, which is really important because it could be a certain style or period time like the Italian Renaissance that we need to study and we have to become comfortable with it.
Maybe it’s the musculoskeletal system of a particular animal. Research is done on everything in the most minute details. It could be particular style of clothing, drapery, buttons, fringe could be the feather pattern of a bird. Each sculpture is unique and it takes into account every detail, and it has to be in 360 degrees. But while working the clay itself, there’s constant measuring with calipers and dividers and grids and referral to reference. It’s a figure ultimately is going to be covered with fur. And the fur itself is used as a subtractive method in sculpture.
If a figure is animated, there can be many structural requirements for movements and mechanisms. And then we get out the precision measurement devices. And one of my personal favorite old techniques is, believe it or not, using a big mirror to look at work. So you look in the mirror at the piece that you’re doing, and this helps you to correct any kind of, we all have eye dominance.
When you look in a mirror, you can see that something’s tilted to the right or to the left, but a mirror is a simple way to correct that. All these tools and methods, those are old school. But while I was at Disney, I did make a jump into technology. Actually. We got really busy at one point with the flagship stores and the ships and multiple new parks.
After we did Euro Disneyland, we moved into Tokyo DisneySea and California Adventure and Hong Kong Disneyland, just, it was perpetually busy. And I found myself researching new technology. So I’d go to these trade shows and I started reading publications, and fortunately, there was a technology that caught my eye. It was a guy in Montrose of all things working out of this tiny converted building. And he was milling complex shapes and foam, and it was called Five Axis Digital scanning and milling or CNC.
It was terrific. So a CNC machine or a computer, numerical control, you take a small sculpture to scan it and transfer the instrument into a cutting tool, and then it moves in five directions on a rotating bed. So it accurately reproduces a small sculpture in foam. Well, foam says other materials too, but we were using foam and just about any size you want, and it ends up with a surface, like a topographic mat because of the drill bits that they use. I mean the different size drill bits, but the structure is right there. With cleanup, it’s just absolutely dead on. So I knew this was one of the big deal when I saw it, but how and when I could present a new technology, let alone get our management to buy into a radical shift in production methodology. There’s other divisions that do that.
However, there was a situation that came up where maybe I could try this new technology out. I was asked to sculpt all main characters from the, at that time, they were latest animated film, which was Hercules, along with this giant Pegasus. And it needed to be sculpted, manufactured, painted, and shipped. I think we had less than a month. First off, that’s humanly impossible. So the five axi milling was my only hope of getting through those darn Hercules figures.
But there was a well, and here it comes. There was always a big, but no one had ever done that before. I got the, you better not fail or else, because they took a giant leap of faith in me saying, well, this is how we got to do this. Let’s say I’m still alive. Thanks to the beautiful animation that were already existing and an incredible team of artists who sanded all that milked foam and made it perfect, and they painted it, they sealed it, and they shipped it.
I mean, it was mind boggling. But we made that deadline. So that was it. I mean, in the years of all that, the technology does make so many more flawless, monumental works than we ever had. And it really upped our production for all sculptures. Whether it was Dinosaur icon for Pop Ventury or show figures like Roz for Monsters, Inc. It’s now a sculptural standard in the entire entertainment industry and fine arts. So now there’s an entire department at WDI that’s dedicated to this technology, and it’s really grown its size and advancement.
Of course, it’s also now common to know from information directly from digital films, which that’s how they get their information now. So you don’t even need a maquette. You can just sculpt directly from the digital information. Some of the sculptors now are digital sculptors. So there’s a lot of different ways to sculpt now in the computer by hand, but it’s all, it’s done together and in tandem. I think probably that was one of my biggest contribution was finding that technology for the company. But I think that’s a really Imagineering kind of thing to do. They were always looking to the future and trying to embrace it.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, you think of some of the things like the dinosaurs that you referenced or the giant Pop Century figures, and I think, wow, that technology has to benefit you a lot because some of those are really large and really detailed. So I think it’s great that change happened that you were involved in it because I’m sure it helped with a lot of attractions. And speaking of an attraction you worked on, one of them that had a big change of course was the Pirates of the Caribbean, which a classic attraction. But then they brought in because of the success of the movies, Jack Sparrow and then Barbossa were brought in of course, to the attraction. I know you were involved with sculpting that, so I would love to hear about that.
Valerie Edwards: Well, that’s an interesting question, and I really discussed that in my mentors question, because for me, presenting a likeness of a famous living person is about as hard as it gets because we’re all experts. We’ve seen them all on the big screen on television print. We know what they look like, and we know how they move. In the case of Jack Sparrow and Barbossa likeness, well, they were greatly helped out in the sculpting process because we actually started out a new process, which was a clay print from a digital information.
So it was brand new and it was kind of mucky a little bit. It was a lot to clean up. They were pretty rough. I cleaned the skin, opened the eyes, part of the mass adjustments of robotic movement for robotic movement. But the sculpture was there. But one of the most difficult parts of realistic robotic head is the integration of the mechanics and the animation process.
So when there’s no connected eyelid tissue or no valve mal shape, or well, they didn’t at the time have those in all these things, plus having to make the figures stir enough to withstand all day cycles, it’s almost impossible to make an exact likeness, although they’re of course continuing to make great stride in animation. But this underscores for me the brilliance and the success of character sculpture, like the original character sculptures designed by blame for pirates. These were designed for the suspension disbelief. You believe it for the sake of enjoyment because it’s storytelling art.
It’s not realistic, it’s speculative fiction and it works beautifully. I think a great example of that now is like the Na’vi Shaman. It works so beautifully because it’s not human necessarily, but they’re doing amazing things with figures now. So who knows what they’ll come up with the future, but that’s the complication of doing an exact replica of a living person.
Dan Heaton: And I mean, especially with Jack Sparrow being so well known at the time for that attraction that I think it turned out great, especially having multiple Jack Sparrows in the attraction. But I think there was a huge challenge. And again, being so in the forefront where there’s one moment, two moments actually, where Jack Sparrow is right there and everybody’s eyes are going. It’s not like in Pirates, like you mentioned, where it’s kind of a lot of different pirates. You may not focus on one.
You’re always focusing on that. So I think it’s great. Beyond Pirates, though, I would love to know too, you’ve worked on a lot of really cool projects and you’ve mentioned a lot of them here. I would love to know what some of your favorites were, and then also on a different note, who were some of the other people you worked with that really were important to you and were just great people to work with?
Valerie Edwards: Well, it’s hard to pick a big project, but I’ve got to say, Tokyo DisneySea was probably one of my favorite projects thanks to Steve and Tim Kirk and well, a whole bunch of other people. The architectural package alone was extraordinary, I think, for that park. And it was huge.
We really got to flex our muscles on that research, and the sculpture on that was so in depth and diverse and intricate. Also, during that time, the sculpture studio was in its zenith now, Frank Armitage, the very same, my dad would watch painting backgrounds for Sleeping Beauty was painting giant murals with his daughter Nicole, not 20 feet away from me in the sculpture studio. At the same time, I was watching Frank paint just like my dad had done before. And at that time, Walt Peregoy, he’s the designer of one-on-one dalmatians, he was in front of Frank, and he’d come in and visit and he would just blaze in and lining up the place.
He was one salty guy, and the clay and the paint was flying. There was music playing, people laughing, and we’d have daily visits from John Hench and Marty Sklar would freeze in and out and chow would come in to check the proverbs, the sculptures for the hotel, and then not to mention, of course, the talented loving group of sculptors that filled that room, my sculpting family, and they made every moment a delight. A couple of other favorites are Remy’s Restaurant on the Disney Dream and the Disney Fantasy where they let me do the Art Deco design overlay.
Throughout that, I got to design the furniture, everything from that to the screens and the seating. And I was also able to design another Art Deco centerpiece for Walt’s restaurant in Paris, which was a large fireplace art nouveau with a model of the Nautilus in the center. I love it because I love art nouveau from all those Disney legends to the plastic shops, the mechanics, the figure finish research library, and the guy even that changed the drinking water all through WDI. The people were brilliant. They were funny, they’re kind. They were hard work, and they were always helpful. So I think all of them were my favorite people.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I totally understand that because there’s just so many people involved in everything that happens at WDI. So ultimately, I know now you don’t currently work at WDI, but I would love to know a little bit about what you are doing now as a sculptor in your current work.
Valerie Edwards: Well, I mean, I have done several projects actually for Disney since leaving Disney, but now I’m still sculpting full time, so the clay is still flying around here. I do have a small signature line of merchandise in the parks while that was before the pandemic, we’ll see called the Magic Key Collection, and I was really lucky on that too. I’m really lucky that for the original story background on those keys, it was edited by Marty Sklar, my buddy, and I think the biggest current job that I have right now, I go by a different name, mom. I have a 12-year-old daughter, and I’ve got to say that every day I work on trying to life my life as consciously as possible, and like my dad, I’ll always be a student and learning and forever grateful.
Dan Heaton: Excellent. Valerie, this has been great to learn more about your career and what it takes since some of the projects to be a sculptor. So thanks so much for talking with me on the podcast. This has been amazing.
Valerie Edwards: Thank you so much for allowing me to speak. It’s been a joy. Thank you.
Leave a Reply