Blue Sky Imagineering process sets everyone up for let-down and disappointment!

[PeterAlt]

I was just thinking about how many great ideas and concepts by Imagineering ultimately never see the light of day. I was wondering why, instead of pointing fingers at management. If management was to blame, then every Disney CEO and president since Walt and Roy are guilty as charged. The problem is much more ingrained in the process, rather than outright rejection by management because of cost, or other factors.

The "Blue Sky" process by default will never produce a cost efficient attraction. Sure, this process will try to water-down a project's scope before a CEO decides to green light it or not, but, even the most water-downed variation of an idea that started as a Blue Sky ideal, will never be cost effective because costs were never factored in to begin with. When a project is scaled down and de-scoped, this is done by taking stuff out of its original vision, making it less desirable.

So, what remains is a less-desirable idea that was designed out of the more desirable Blue Sky concept that was put together while ignoring the costs of implementing it. What the CEO ends of seeing is something less ambitious and still very cost inefficient to make. Unless what survives at this point is still very impressive and is estimated to cost around the same as other projects of comparable scope, the project has a slim chance of getting approved; and, if it does, may get de-scoped again and again to fall inline to what the CEO had expected to spend!

Not very encouraging and explains why so many good ideas are ultimate never built, or why those that do get cut to the point that it is barely recognizable from its original Blue Sky ideal.

This could be fixed if the entire Imagineering process is changed. Instead of starting the process by ignoring costs, as instructed by the Blue Sky phase, maybe imagineers should be told to be cost conscience to begin with! Maybe if they're instructed to create the best, most imaginative new attraction money can buy, they will do just that... Make a great imaginative and very creative design that's also complete and not de-scoped that they could pitch to the CEO - at a cost that's more acceptable. Odds would be much greater that it would get green lit under this process than had it gone through the old process.

It would create better attractions because less is likely to get cut from it. By being cost effective throughout the design process, more good ideas could be pushed into the process without adding to the cost, or deleting features from the project. It's called smart engineering, and it does not in any way "cheapen" the project. It's just planning and managing the resources better to get the best bang on every dollar being spent on it. In the end, you get the original vision of the project as an end result and on budget, rather than aone that is de-scoped and still costly.

Thoughts?

 

[Cosmic Commando]

The "Blue Sky" process be default will never produce a cost efficient attraction.

Well, what is "cost efficiency" in regards to theme park attractions? We all know that WDI spends money like crazy, but I think their organizational problems are separate from the basic idea of "blue sky". Being successful in theme parks has, in the past at least, been largely about innovation-- giving your guests something they've never seen before... a magic trick that they can't figure out. Innovation is never cheap.

The blue sky process is important because you don't know what you really can do until you try. Imagine if some imagineer had thought, "We could have giant theater cars take guests through a ride with no track! Nah, that sounds expensive. You can't have cars guide themselves, you'd never find batteries that'd last all day and there's no way to charge them! I won't say anything. Let's not waste the time." We would've never gotten Energy, Great Movie Ride, the DHS Tower of Terror, Pooh's Hunny Hunt, Mystic Manor in HKDL, or the Ratatouille ride in Paris. Blue sky means that you start with the experience that you want guests to have, and then figure out how to make it happen.

Just because something is smaller in scale than what was originally planned does not make it "bad". 99.9% of people never know about the rides that were almost built; even many of the people on the boards here I would wager aren't savvy or interested to know about the "what-ifs". It's only us Disney nerds who want to know everything about everything that get disappointed. Check out this piece of Indiana Jones concept art from DL:

If you look closely, there's the EMV Jeep ride that we ended up getting, but also the DL RR, the Jungle Cruise and a mine car coaster ALL going through the same massive show building. Incredible. But does that make the Indy ride that we got, which is generally regarded as one of the best rides Disney has ever built and gave a serious boost to DL attendance, "bad"? Also, remember that in many ways, WDI is a contractor to corporate and local management for the parks. They may or may not know exactly how much money is going to be spent. Perhaps a concept that is good enough will encourage the extra spending it would take to make it happen.

 

[PeterAlt]

Well, what is "cost efficiency" in regards to theme park attractions? We all know that WDI spends money like crazy, but I think their organizational problems are separate from the basic idea of "blue sky". Being successful in theme parks has, in the past at least, been largely about innovation-- giving your guests something they've never seen before... a magic trick that they can't figure out. Innovation is never cheap.

The blue sky process is important because you don't know what you really can do until you try. Imagine if some imagineer had thought, "We could have giant theater cars take guests through a ride with no track! Nah, that sounds expensive. You can't have cars guide themselves, you'd never find batteries that'd last all day and there's no way to charge them! I won't say anything. Let's not waste the time." We would've never gotten Energy, Great Movie Ride, the DHS Tower of Terror, Pooh's Hunny Hunt, Mystic Manor in HKDL, or the Ratatouille ride in Paris. Blue sky means that you start with the experience that you want guests to have, and then figure out how to make it happen.

Just because something is smaller in scale than what was originally planned does not make it "bad". 99.9% of people never know about the rides that were almost built; even many of the people on the boards here I would wager aren't savvy or interested to know about the "what-ifs". It's only us Disney nerds who want to know everything about everything that get disappointed. Check out this piece of Indiana Jones concept art from DL:

If you look closely, there's the EMV Jeep ride that we ended up getting, but also the DL RR, the Jungle Cruise and a mine car coaster ALL going through the same massive show building. Incredible. But does that make the Indy ride that we got, which is generally regarded as one of the best rides Disney has ever built and gave a serious boost to DL attendance, "bad"? Also, remember that in many ways, WDI is a contractor to corporate and local management for the parks. They may or may not know exactly how much money is going to be spent. Perhaps a concept that is good enough will encourage the extra spending it would take to make it happen.

Yeah, I get your point, but I'm not sure if I was clear in what I meant. An extreme example:

Lets say imagineers imagine a treasure scene at the end of PotC. Blue Sky (taken to the unlikely extreme) would say to build that scene, they would need tons of gold coins, diamonds, etc, making that scene prohibiting expensive to build. Smart cost-effective engineers would figure out how to make a new kind of paint that looks just like gold and a material that sparkles like diamonds that you can't tell the difference between that and the real thing, thereby creating the same visuals as imagined but at a heck of a lot less than had they used real gold and real diamonds.

I know that's a ridiculous example, but it does illustrate my point. Innovation is encouraged for two reasons: (a) the "wow" factor, as you mentioned; and, (b) because innovations actually help cut costs too. The attitude wouldn't be "Oh,we can't do that. Let's give up before we even start" but would be "wouldn't it be great if we could..." The next step would be do research it and first see if any off the shelf technology could do the trick. If not, it has to be decided if its worth it or not to develop it in house and patent it for future attraction use to get the most out of the investment.

Recently, I read an interview of an imagineer who worked on Horizons. He said originally the ride was to go through multiple Omnimax rooms. When they were instructed to cut some millions of dollars from the project, it was decided to use a single Omimax room that the vehicle would pass through multiple times (instead of once for several rooms) and it would have a different film on each pass, effectively having the same effect as what the original plan had, while saving tens of of millions of dollars.

You can say that reason will always win over insanity, but in my Horizon example, it took an order from upper management demanding that they cut something - anything - in order to achieve the requested savings. Fortunately, in this case, they were able to find that something without de-scoping the end result. Upper management didn't make that order because they knew about the wasteful use of multiple Omnimax rooms when one room is all that was needed. They just saw the big price tag and how other projects within the company needed cash for their respective projects. If management felt comfortable that the imagineers did everything they could to deliver their proposed attraction at the lowest possible cost - and engineering ways to build without redundancy and finding multiple uses for a single element, etc. - then, projects won't be so demanding on the budget and, therefore, management would be less likely to ask for cuts - because they would trust that the imagineers did their homework and researched everything possible to deliver at the lowest price possible without cutting quality or necessary show elements.

If Blue Sky was not part of the process, the wasteful design of Horizons of multiple Omnimax rooms would never have happened, and they would have been conscience of not being wasteful but they would be clever about the use of every element in order to get maximum usefulness as part of a whole in order to achieve the inspired vision the project began as.

 

[lazyboy97o]

I do not think you have a very good grasp of Blue Sky. It is not as it is described in marketing where the craziest, most wildest ideas are actually pitched. Yes, there are sessions like this, but most of the time Walt Disney Imagineering is hired by the park or Resort to address something specific. Nobody proposes an E Ticket when asked to come up with ideas for a new C Ticket.

You're example of a treasure scene is silly because everybody in the process is well aware that themed entertainment is very much theatrical. A good designer understands the realities of building and would never propose real gold or diamonds.

You example of Horizons is also problematic because the issues of budget arise as the design moves forward. Somebody deciding to spend less or somethings actually costing more is not something that will be specifically known at the beginning, regardless if a budget is considered.

This is not to say that Disney does not have issues of efficiency and cost effectiveness, as they very much do, but I think you're attacking the wrong part of the issue. A Blue Sky process is part of not just Disney's process, but many processes of creativity and innovation.

 

[PeterAlt]

I do not think you have a very good grasp of Blue Sky. It is not as it is described in marketing where the craziest, most wildest ideas are actually pitched. Yes, there are sessions like this, but most of the time Walt Disney Imagineering is hired by the park or Resort to address something specific. Nobody proposes an E Ticket when asked to come up with ideas for a new C Ticket.

You're example of a treasure scene is silly because everybody in the process is well aware that themed entertainment is very much theatrical. A good designer understands the realities of building and would never propose real gold or diamonds.

You example of Horizons is also problematic because the issues of budget arise as the design moves forward. Somebody deciding to spend less or somethings actually costing more is not something that will be specifically known at the beginning, regardless if a budget is considered.

This is not to say that Disney does not have issues of efficiency and cost effectiveness, as they very much do, but I think you're attacking the wrong part of the issue. A Blue Sky process is part of not just Disney's process, but many processes of creativity and innovation.

In order to design a master piece that's also cost effective, you have to be innovative. There's no way around it without falling into the problems DCA experienced, which was cheap for the sake of cheap, and that's the opposite of what I am talking about. On DCA, they took shortcuts and never bothered to take the time or thought for what they could do to innovate in order to keep costs down and also deliver a flagship product. I say this with the exception of Soaring. That attraction is a great example of how innovation could be used to keep costs down and still deliver greatness.

What it is is the Imagineers are artists and engineers. That's their training. They don't have degrees in business and economics. On the flip side, it he bean counters aren't trained in arts. Not that they're any less creative, but they're displine is very different than the disciplines of artists and engineers. Imagineers should be required to have managerial training and be able to design any said project to be economically innovative as much as the project is creative artistically.

Under the current way of doing things, the artists do what they do best and create great works of art without any thought of care in the world on how much it could actually cost - because that's not their job. That's not what they are instructed to do. Caring how much it will cost and figuring out how much it will cost to build it isn't part of their job responsibilities. There's special people employed for that purpose. The "non-creative" type. Roy's people, so the legend says. The bean-counters, as Walt's people are rumored to have called them. These are the guys who rip apart master pieces, line by line, dollar by dollar. These are the non-artists tinkering and tweaking something whose creators had exceptional talent in order to create and recreating it with a spreadsheet instead of a brush an pallet. This is accepted with no questions asked because that's the system and that's how,it's always been done. Smart engineering comes in many varieties. A design could be smart economically. It could be smart ecologically too, for example. We call that type of engineering design as "green". A green design was designed that way because it was planned to be that way from the start. It does whatever it's supposed to do and does it while achieving its secondary goal of being green. A smart cost effective design is the same type of thing. It does whatever it's supposed to do and it's liked a machine with a secondary goal of doing it in a cost effective way.

The stealth bomber is a essentially a flying wing. This is a good example of smart engineering. Wile the secondary goals are different, the stealth bomber reduces its overall mass and weight by doing away with the traditional body-wing structure of an aircraft by designing its wings as the body of the aircraft, merging the two otherwise big and bulky components into one sleek air frame, functioning as its wing and providing structural support as well.

 

[lazyboy97o]

You are missing huge chunks of the process and analyzing an incredibly overly simplified version. Again, a Blue Sky phase is not at all unique to Disney and defines the desired experience. Starting off with defining the experience leads to defining what needs to be done, how it works into the budget and where innovation is needed.