Hello, all. This Sunday I'll be traveling to Disneyland for five days (with my first day ever at Knotts Berry Farm right in the middle! But that's not important for this discussion...) Ever since becoming a volunteer for the Walt Disney Family Museum back in August there's one thing that's become clear to me...Walt Disney saw a story in every little thing he did. Disneyland is the ultimate enbodiement of that story. So many people talk about the filmmaking elements at play at Disneyland...The forced perspective...the detailed sets that wouldn't look out of place on a Hollywood backlot, the fact that the entire experience of going through the tunnel to Main Street is meant to represent the experience of going to a movie theater lobby, watching trailers (the posters) before the film finally begins. The view of Main Street from the train station is a perfect "establishing" shot, and hell...Disneyland even has freaking OPENING CREDITS in the form of the Main Street windows!
You might not actively be thinking about these things while in the park, but they're all around you! From the concepts Walt built into the overall fabric of the land such as the Hub layout and the park's overall mission statement...to what Imagineers have done in the recent future with areas like Critter Country making sense to be in the backdrop of a Southern plantation manor for the Haunted Mansion...Or the fact that soon the rustic history of Frontierland will be transitioned into the rustic "Space Western" sentiments of the Star Wars Galaxy...Or the myth that Toon Town was designed by Walt himself and actually represents a living space...an early precessor to what the Imagineers would top decades later with Cars Land.
The question I have then is, with all these different elements at play...what exactly is the STORY of Disneyland as a narrative device? How to all the attractions connect to each other? If you use your imagination hard enough, can you truly come up with a narrative that weaves its way through the course of an entire day at the park from opening to closing? That's exactly what I aim to explore with "Disneyland: The Movie" which I aim to be the most compresive documentary about the storytelling elements of Disneyland that has ever been attempted.
Disneyland: The Movie will be shot over my five days at the park, even though the finished product will be used to simulate a single day at the park. I'll be using a TON of pick-up shots, voice over narration, and a framing device that turns the Walt Disney Family Museum model of Disneyland into an Indiana Jones "Travel by map!" to our various destinations.
I'm making this thread both to promote the project but more importantly to get ideas for it. What is the story of Disneyland to YOU!?!? I've already got a very rough framework for the narrative in mind that ties Esmeralda the fortune teller to the rest of the supernatural elements in the park, but I'll need a lot of help filling out the gaps.
The style of the documentary will be unique in that a third of it will be a standard narration-driven documentary using the pick-up shots I'm going to get during the trip...A third will be vlog-style and will feature @MANEATINGWREATH and @monkey92514 joining me in the parks to talk about the unique storytelling Disneyland represents...Finally another third will be the narrative of the park itself which as I said will be a group effort! I hope to have a solid attraction-by-attraction outline of the "Day" I want to map out before I leave.
Again even though from a narrative point of view the documentary takes place over a single day I'm going to be filming it over all five days I'm at the park, to make the schedule less hectic, to allow a lot of time for pick-up shots, and to make the actually narrative of the "Day" in question more epic than what might even be possible in real life.
I'd absolutely LOVE to hear everyone's thoughts on this project.
You might not actively be thinking about these things while in the park, but they're all around you! From the concepts Walt built into the overall fabric of the land such as the Hub layout and the park's overall mission statement...to what Imagineers have done in the recent future with areas like Critter Country making sense to be in the backdrop of a Southern plantation manor for the Haunted Mansion...Or the fact that soon the rustic history of Frontierland will be transitioned into the rustic "Space Western" sentiments of the Star Wars Galaxy...Or the myth that Toon Town was designed by Walt himself and actually represents a living space...an early precessor to what the Imagineers would top decades later with Cars Land.
The question I have then is, with all these different elements at play...what exactly is the STORY of Disneyland as a narrative device? How to all the attractions connect to each other? If you use your imagination hard enough, can you truly come up with a narrative that weaves its way through the course of an entire day at the park from opening to closing? That's exactly what I aim to explore with "Disneyland: The Movie" which I aim to be the most compresive documentary about the storytelling elements of Disneyland that has ever been attempted.
Disneyland: The Movie will be shot over my five days at the park, even though the finished product will be used to simulate a single day at the park. I'll be using a TON of pick-up shots, voice over narration, and a framing device that turns the Walt Disney Family Museum model of Disneyland into an Indiana Jones "Travel by map!" to our various destinations.
I'm making this thread both to promote the project but more importantly to get ideas for it. What is the story of Disneyland to YOU!?!? I've already got a very rough framework for the narrative in mind that ties Esmeralda the fortune teller to the rest of the supernatural elements in the park, but I'll need a lot of help filling out the gaps.
The style of the documentary will be unique in that a third of it will be a standard narration-driven documentary using the pick-up shots I'm going to get during the trip...A third will be vlog-style and will feature @MANEATINGWREATH and @monkey92514 joining me in the parks to talk about the unique storytelling Disneyland represents...Finally another third will be the narrative of the park itself which as I said will be a group effort! I hope to have a solid attraction-by-attraction outline of the "Day" I want to map out before I leave.
Again even though from a narrative point of view the documentary takes place over a single day I'm going to be filming it over all five days I'm at the park, to make the schedule less hectic, to allow a lot of time for pick-up shots, and to make the actually narrative of the "Day" in question more epic than what might even be possible in real life.
I'd absolutely LOVE to hear everyone's thoughts on this project.
I'm looking forward to capturing the moment the snow falls on Main Street. That should definitely be a major high point in the narrative. Moments like this are exactly the kind of thing I want to capture.
The parks were incredibly busy which made it difficult to stand in one place for very long to get shots without getting in people's way and blocking traffic. Had a lot of social anxiety regarding that throughout the trip. I managed to get just enough usable shots to maybe put together a 30 minute Youtube video, but it certainly won't be anything feature length at this point. I'm hoping to edit together all my workable shots into a very rough cut and then fill in the blanks in terms of framing device, narration etc. afterwards. I've still got 