Joe Rohde's Collected Pandora Instagram Posts

[the.dreamfinder]

I am flying on the 27th back to Orlando, and to Pandora. I will miss most of the opening day, but I hope to get a chance to check in. I received the paperwork to begin this job in the late summer of 2011. That's a long time. One of my sons graduated high school, went through college, graduated college, and got a job... in the time I've spent working on this project. That seems like a long time, until you contemplate the time that it is likely to stand… which is much longer. So here's to a future for Pandora and for all the stories it has the tell for children not even been born yet.

5/27/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Today, on each coast, two projects opened to overwhelming crowds and very high praise. Both of these were the results of incredible teamwork by talented and devoted individuals, some of whom worked both projects!! I had the privilege of overseeing these, but make no mistake, the work was done by two extremely talented groups of master storytellers. It interests me that both projects were announced to considerable skepticism. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and skepticism is a crucial component of good creative work. But there is something I wanted to comment on. Much of this skepticism was directed at the idea that "nobody cared" about these subjects. This is a false lead. Subject is nothing to holler about. Treatment is how stories work. Do you want to hear a story about two girls in a boat, a spaceship, a lost dog, or a man struggling with his identity? How could anyone possibly know? What makes story great is how it is told, not what it is about. If humans only told stories about subjects that people were familiar with and never changed the subject, every story on earth would be about a successful mammoth hunt. We, who are storytellers, take our charge seriously. We open the dream-channels of human minds, so that people have the power to believe in something more than what they believed yesterday, more than they see with their eyes. And hopefully, they transfer that open belief in the yet-unseen to other enterprises, to science, medicine, architecture, and politics. We always need new stories, about what? No one can say. But if they are well told, moving, and inspiring, they will work like seeds in a garden to help us all grow.

5/27/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

I did this sketch for our D23 Display when we announced the beginning of Pandora…quite a few years ago. These sketches sat at a desk in a cubicle that looked like we had just come back from our first recon trip. At that time, we didn't even have the model, all we had was the idea. That idea has remained consistent, that Pandora would be a mirror of Earth. One of our goals was that no matter how alien the world of Pandora was, there was always something we could learn about our own home planet. The lessons of Pandora are both cautionary and hopeful. Cautionary because nature will win. Nature will win over even the strongest and most devastating forces of human agency…however, humans may not be part of that victory. Hopeful because it is a story of various people working together to help a damaged and fragile place return to the full beauty of its natural self, and because we can see that beauty all around us, as we can see the beauty of our own home planet if we take the time to look. Pandora exists to illustrate to us, in a fantastically vivid metaphor, how surprising, wonderful, and precious our own planet is. If you open your eyes, which is all you need to do, you can find yourself on the most astonishing and unbelievable planet we know to exist anywhere in the universe. Here. #dak #animalkingdom#atanimalkingdom #pandoradisney #pandora#conservation

6/1/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Theme Parks and the recursive nature of the picturesque. The term "picturesque" was popularized by William Gilpin in the mid-1700s. It means, loosely, "having those properties one might associate with a really good picture." This sounds innocuous enough, but remember, back in the day, a picture was a very expensive, time-consuming, and rare thing imbued with a lot of symbolic significance. So, a place that just happened to have the qualities of a really good picture was a very special place indeed. The cultural practice of seeking out such edifying picturesque places fed directly into the development of tourism. People began creating places, like gardens, to embody picturesque qualities, romantic ruins, winding streams, gnarly old trees… all derived from the content of great paintings. Nobody would argue that there isn't a direct relationship between tourism and theme parks, but theme parks and Edmund Burke, John Ruskin, and Goethe?? A traceable pedigree links the design of theme park settings back to English landscape garden design, through the philosophy of the picturesque. It's no accident that the modern themepark landscape presents so many opportunities for spectacular photographs. It is actually a tautological loop. Picturesque destinations went from being historical and natural places, to privately created places, then to public spaces, and then to commercially created places. Meanwhile, the visual aesthetics of the picturesque became encoded in film, because film is a picture, and this globalized a picturesque way of looking. Picturesque film environments then inspired picturesque built environments, leading to the present moment, when an artificially-built picturesque environment is once again converted into thousands of pictures, precisely because it is picturesque, and makes a really good picture. Recursive and tautological. Salvator Rosa, Piranesi, Capability Brown, Bierstadt, Casper David Friedrich, Pugin, Viollet-le-Duc, Cole..any of these romantic era artists would recognize the world created by themed designers working today. A picturesque world that only exists by being looked at. Photo: K.M. Kealey#dak #arthistory #philosophy#picturesque

6/2/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

These things are not exactly manhole covers. I mean, they ARE manhole covers... but they're supposed to be corner-locks for the prefab deck of the old RDA encampment. Four slabs would be laid down and fixed in place with one of these circular locks. Imagineer Stephen Hellwig, veteran of Expedition Everest, who was the landwide creative director for the project, developed this concept and design. It is worth considering because it's not an added detail, it's a required detail that has been pulled into the story. Everything has to get built anyway, including manhole covers. Depending on how much attention a designer pays, details like this can end up neutral to the design story, contradictory to the design story, or promote the design story. However, neutral and proactive are better. Contradiction erodes story fast. Like seeing the zipper on a scary monster costume in a B movie. If you see them, they are in the story-world so they cannot be unintentional accidents.

6/4/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

We made a bunch of these coffee mugs as props… because presumably scientists will still drink coffee in the future. There were extras! So this is my cool souvenir Pandora Conservation Initiative coffee mug.

6/6/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Truly tiny details with potent meaning. Notice the little weld marks along the joints of the old RDA Amp Suit out in front of the PonguPongu Bar in Pandora. This huge walking suit, basically a pedestrian tank, is a relic of a long past conflict. How to signify that it is no longer able to be militarized? Weld off the joints!! I grew up in Hawaii when Waikiki Beach still had huge 7-inch-bore guns mounted along the beach. They were actually WWI guns pulled out of mothballs for shore defense in 1941, but they were big, long, grey hunks of metal with lots of gears and cranks and we thought they were cool. We played on them as if they were just another jungle gym. They, too, had been welded into non-working condition. Big machines are impressive, and we wanted people to enjoy the big machine without the connotation that it could still be used to attack. We needed to absorb the very contradictory presence of a big machine into our themes of regeneration, vitality, and the power of nature. Rust helps. And the welds...a signifier of choice, not just time. The welds are discrete, respectful, but effective to say, "This thing isn't going anywhere. Have no fear." (By the way, they are also tiny masterworks of scenic illusion because, after all, none of this is really metal.) #dak #design#storytelling #pandoradisney #pandora #ampsuit#pongupongu #animalkingdom #atanimalkingdom#illusions

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Father and sons eating the cheeseburger flavored pods of Pandora at Satuli Canteen. The interior filling was inspired by my boys childhood invention of what we called "Hamburger Hash." Mom, (not depicted here) wanted the boys to learn to cook and Hamburger Hash, which included cheese, was their first foray. All components including bread, condiments, etc, scrambled together in a skillet. The pod was not part of our tradition. Very proud of my two kids, now men, for being smart, funny, generous spirits, with the good sense to remain fascinated by the world. Nothing prepared me for how much fun it has been to raise them.

6/18/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Some compositions are just too good to be true. Like the equinoctal passage of the sunset through this loop of roots. I mean, you could plan things like this… But it would be kind of irresponsible. Pandora is very deliberately based on great landscape paintings and designs from the 19th century… It is not an accident that it presents a variety of framed views which seem very painterly. It is a direct byproduct of design decisions. If you like Pandora… You should look at Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Church, and Thomas Cole...

9/29/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Just after the sun sets, while there is still light in the sky, but the landscape is becoming dark, is one of the best times to visit Pandora. The bioluminescent plants are all glowing, but there is still enough light to also see the details of the landscape around them. It's the best of both worlds.

10/1/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Design. Pandora. One of the things that makes a place resonate is the harmony of parts. No pun intended. Reality is randomly assembled. Narrative is not. Narrative rhymes. It nests, one idea within another. In this image we have two disparate objects. One is a cultural object, a totem, woven by hand around an armature. The other is the roots and vines of the floating mountains. These two objects share the same compositional language of positive and negative space. Even though they are different things, they say the same thing visually. They rhyme. When you stack up lots of these rhymes, the place really begins to resonate. People sense the extraordinary level of harmony in the parts. It is an actual sensation in the brain and it's nice

10/2/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Kind of a Hudson River school view of Pandora. Thomas Cole sky, Frederick Church landscape.

10/2/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

More of the magic hour in Pandora as bioluminescence appears before true dark.

10/2/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Tadpoles in the shadows of the floating mountains. Much of the water in Pandora is recycled from the river of Disney's Animal Kingdom. That water is…"alive." So now we have tadpoles living in Pandora… And they are big like the size of big Concord grapes. Already sprouting legs, after all fall is coming. No idea what species, but I wish them luck. It's nice that live wild stuff likes our designed environment as well as live tame humans.

10/2/17

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Creative solutions by pre-Imagineers.
Consider a comparison of the Avatar floating mountains with the dome of Santa Maria Del Fiori in Florence, Brunelleschi’s masterpiece of engineering. Everybody thought that it was impossible to cover the rotunda of the basilica with a dome. The problem was that the wooden scaffold needed to support the dome while it was being built was impossibly huge. So...therefore, a dome was impossible. Brunelleschi’s first epiphany was that everyone was working on the wrong problem. They were focused on a scaffold...not a dome. B was focused on the right problem. What if a dome could be built without a scaffold? What would be the nature of such a dome? What tools would be needed to create it? Each of those questions turned out to be answerable and the dome went up. But, to the populace...it was still and impossible thing. A magic trick. All of Brunelleschi’s solutions were now hidden and all you could see was the thing everyone had said could not be done. The magic lay in the difference between what B knew and what the general public knew about tension and compression. Brunelleschi’s final form obscured the technical solution and presented only a fabulous artistic shape. It is not unlike the floating mountains at Pandora at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The drape of the limp vines conceals the fact that they are the steel supports. The structural solution is right there, as with The Duomo, but the illusion supersedes it. Imagineering.

3/7/18

 

[the.dreamfinder]

The floating mountains of Pandora sometime after sunset… The purple color of the clouds is not from the sun but from reflected light of the surrounding urban environment… That having been said, it makes a wonderfully alien looking landscape against which to photograph the floating mountains and their bioluminescence. I don’t usually get much chance to wander aimlessly around Disney’s Animal Kingdom because I’m usually there to work. But I’m actually here for a few days and there is enough leisure in the after hours to walk around and just enjoy the park a bit… It really does have some lovely moments. Rides and attractions are all well and good, but place making is the discipline that is hundreds and hundreds of years old and has less to do with the momentary thrills of new technology than it does with timeless principles of design. What I like about these timeless principles is that they are timeless… They are not trend-based, they are not brand-based, they are not based on the momentary advantage of a particular technical trick. They are based upon something that is inside of us as humans, someway that we look at things, and dream about things, and respond to things that has been true since the first humans began to manipulate their environment to increase this sensation. At its heart this art is no different than that of the shamanistic painters in the caves of Lascaux. Our goal is transport, The exhilarating disassociation of the body and the mind that allows the mind to convince the body, against all logical defense, that it is somewhere else.

4/18/19

 

[the.dreamfinder]

The floating mountains of Pandora at sunset. This was after a giant thunderstorm. When the storms are happening you think they’re never going to end… And then they’re gone, and the sun comes out, and it’s usually late in the afternoon… And it’s really really pretty. Now, that’s not exactly a profound statement of design philosophy. But it is an admonition. If you want to find beauty, you’re gonna have to go out and look for it. You’re taking a chance there might be another thunderstorm… But if you just go hide inside you’re going to miss the sunset.

 

[the.dreamfinder]

This image is painted on the flank of the big Avatar AMP suit out in front of the bar in Pandora, the World of Avatar, at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It is kind of a quintessential Imagineering idea. We try to do things that have never been done before. That does not mean that we are going to succeed, it means that we are going to try. That may seem like a trivial distinction… But it’s actually a very big deal. It is very very easy to do things you have done before. It is very very easy to do something that you know is going to work. It is very risky to do something that has not been done before… And it takes a huge amount of work to be sure that it has a good chance of succeeding… I’m gonna call that 80%. Pandora at Disney’s Animal Kingdom is not just the result of hard work and smart thinking… It is also fortunate that so many things we tried to do actually worked. The audience plays a huge role in this… Because they are the people who decide whether something works. But this is absolutely true… If you do not try, you can be guaranteed it won’t work.

 

[flyerjab]

5/7/17

I love that he does this. I wonder, though, if any of what he posts gets pre-approved by Cameron's team since he really seems to writing about things that wouldn't play into the movies. So many posts are things at a micro level that they would never make it to the surface in one of the movies but they still exist in Cameron's world none-the-less.

 

[the.dreamfinder]

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