from 2009
DON DORSEY
talks about Epcot's Reflections of Earth

by Scott Wolf

The first time I ever became aware of Don Dorsey was in the 1980s. I was watching a special on the Disney Channel about the Main Street Electrical Parade and Don was making musical magic. I remember thinking, "That is so cool!" When I finally had the chance to sit down and discuss some of Don's work and career, he had one of those personalities where I felt like I knew him for years. It was like an old friend but with the added bonus of being able to tell me all about those cool kinds of things like I saw on that Disney Channel show. Don's really a brilliantly creative guy, and a key behind many of the great entertainment experiences you've seen at the Disney parks. I'm proud to be able to include my conversations with Don on here for you!

(I did this in-depth interview with Don about Epcot's Reflections of Earth for a story I was writing on Disney's D23 website. There was so much fascinating information that I couldn't pack it all into my D23 story, so here is the interview in its entirety.)

Scott Wolf: What was your role in "Reflections of Earth"?

Don Dorsey: I was the creator and director. I had been a consultant for Disney for many years and one of the projects I had was Creative Director for the air launch fireworks project as that technology was being developed. My involvement with that led to proposals for many things, including around-the-world fireworks for the Millennium and ultimately to the use of air-launch in Reflections of Earth.

SW: What are air launch fireworks?

DD: Air launch is the system that Disney invented that propels firework shells into the sky using compressed air instead of the normal bag of black powder under the shell. It's actually an idea that was adapted from the military. The military in war games fires dummy projectiles as part of their training exercise using compressed air.

Tom Craven, who was technical director for entertainment came across that idea and said, "You know, since we've got environmental issues with firework smoke and chemicals and all that stuff, let's see if we can adapt this idea of using the compressed air to shoot shells instead of the explosions... if we can use that for fireworks and if there might be any benefit to doing that. Certainly the environmental benefit, but maybe there's a cost advantage..."

So they got into that project and because I'd been around entertainment for awhile, Tom said, "Why don't you come on as our creative director, and while we're developing the technical aspects of how to make this work, help us understand the creative possibilities."

So over a number of years, we developed prototype launching machines and they actually invented a small computer chip because when you launch the shell with black powder, an initial explosion starts a little fuse burning up the side of the shell and that's usually the trail you see going up in the sky, and that ignites the shell when it gets to the peak. If you take away that black powder explosion, there's no fuse burning as it goes up so you have to have something to actually trigger the final explosion.

They created a little computer chip that carried an electrical charge, and on that computer chip is a circuit that has a timer, so you program the chip before you launch the shell and when you launch it the wires break and it starts counting when it launches. Then it releases that electrical charge and ignites the shell.

SW: So the chip actually goes in the air?

DD: Yes, the chip is carried on the shell. You implant it where the fuse would normally go in the side of the shell.

The timing accuracy increased 100%, and we get rid of the visual trail so you now have shells that can come out of nowhere.

With the compressed air, you also have the ability to decide on the height. “Do I want it to go this high?” “Do I want it to go super high?” It depends on how much pressure you put in there.

Now with those two variable possibilities, the height and the timing, you can take one shell that normally would go up and look like a ball, and you can time it so that it explodes early going up and it would create a blossom, you can send it up high and then time it so that it broke coming down. Now you not only have more intricate timing control, you have some staging possibilities and some different things you can do with the same piece of product.

We developed the Mickey ears shell which is actually three shells, but because of the air launch we can fire them at exactly the right angle and exactly the right heights so they all go together. Now you can have Mickey Mouse’s head in fireworks! In fact, they had been trying for years to do that with conventional shells and it never worked, and as part of our testing I said, "I wonder if we can do this with air launch, let's try it!" And the first time out of the guns it worked perfectly and everybody went, "Whoa! That's pretty cool!"

SW: So that’s how Disneyland does it now?

DD: Yes. All of the Disneyland show right now is air launch.

THE SHOOTING STAR

DD: We also invented the shooting star effect which is a sideways effect. We invented that the year that Holiday Illuminations debuted. We created it for that show. Sandi Patti sings, "Oh night devine," and I wanted this great star to come across the lagoon and they said, "Oh, we never tried that, let's try it." That's basically an air launch shell, and that's half of the effect that we used in the opening of Reflections of Earth where that one shell comes in. What you don't realize is that there's a second shell going up that meets it. That's the stealth that you get without seeing the fuse go up.

In the shell that explodes there are fragments of the same kind of product as the shooting star, so even though you see the shooting star go through it, you're not aware of that because all of a sudden there are a lot of pieces that look like it comes out of the center. It's a trick with timing, it's a trick with air launch, and it's a trick with the eye.

It was one of those big finger-crossing moments when we said, "All right, this is how we're going to try to do it," and it actually worked!

IDEAS FOR THE MILLENNIUM

DD: I was working on the air launch project for a number of years and also starting in the early '90s I was researching the millennium, trying to figure out what it was all about, what it meant to me, what it would mean to somebody else, should I get called on to do a millennium show, so I had done all this research about history and cultures and all kinds of stuff. Then Tom Craven asked me to prepare an air launch concept for the millennium.

I came up with the concept of fireworks all around the world for the millennium, introducing Disney's new technology, because roughly a thousand years ago is when black powder was invented in China, so as sort of the millennium of fireworks, here's Disney with a new idea and a new way. It made sense that that was their angle into the millennium. How could Disney be a part of the millennium without just seeming like it was glomming on and it seemed like fireworks, since Tinker Bell flies over the castle and the World of Color and lights the fireworks… the fireworks are sort of a Disney brand element, and I thought let's use that, that visual that everybody knows to represent Disney around the world during the millennium. We picked cities in every time zone and all this stuff.

Just on a whim I said, "How big could this get?" and I did a presentation which I called Big Bang 2 and it involved taking all the Disney parks, leveling the hub and building almost like a Stonehenge thing with ten pillars with video screens in them and creating a big meeting place in all the parks and then using air launch fireworks over the castle and all around them and so on. I involved the cruise line and I involved the Studios (in Burbank) and it was just sort of a "let's see how big could this thing can get," hoping that maybe they would pick a smaller package and we would have something to do. But that kind of made everybody step back and go, "Wow! This millennium thing, there's a lot of possibility here, what can we do?"

Meanwhile, separately, Michael Eisner had suggested to Ron Logan that they put together a millennium committee which was headed up by Jean-Luc Choplin who came from the Paris parks and he was brought over to be an advisor to Michael Eisner. I think there were ten of us on this millennium committee. Jean-Luc wanted us to put a list together of a thousand things to do for the millennium and his background was Paris opera. So his approach was pretty European like we develop a unique flower, we have a special wine, just a thousand different things that you can do for the millennium and out of that we were supposed to find some appropriate entertainment things. So I participated in that report.

Then David Malvin, who was working for CFO Richard Nanula, called and said, "I'd like you to develop a concept for the Millennium for the corporate level because Richard’s assigned me this thing.” So I came up with something where the idea was to take a thousand corporations and have them donate a thousand shares of stock and then pick children from all over the world, as almost like a child's United Nations, to vote on how to use these assets over a thousand years, to pick projects that they would fund with the proceeds from this stock fund, this massive millennium stock fund. Of course everybody scratched their heads at that one, so that never went anywhere.

So I was involved in all these millennium projects and we were pitching the world fireworks air launch project at the same time that Jean-Luc was developing what they thought was going to be the millennium lagoon show. At one point, Jean-Luc got up and gave his presentation for what he thought should be in the lagoon and it was just not possible to do what he was proposing to do. There had been another idea previous to that which was called The Crane Show, that was the working name that Mark Fisher, who's a very famous lighting and stage designer for rock 'n' roll concerts, had designed. It had big cranes coming up out of the lagoon with lights and water squirting off of them and everything, but that could not be engineered to function.

So when Jean-Luc's show ran into a dead end they had nothing and it was now 1997 and it was time to get busy on building something.

THE BIRTH OF REFLECTIONS OF EARTH

DD: Because of my previous involvement with New World Fantasy and Laserphonic Fantasy and Illuminations, I said, "Well, I've got an idea,” and I just kind of wrote it up on the airplane and sent it to Scott Powhatan who at that time was a producer at Epcot. That is what turned into Reflections of Earth. They said, "Oh, this is actually kind of doable."

I was flying home on a Friday when I got the idea and I got a phone call that said, "Can you come back on Monday?" So I was back to Florida and we worked through it and the budget was going to work and it was reasonably achievable technology. That's how the show got put into motion.

SW: So it was your totally your idea?

DD: Yes, I came up with the concept for the show, I proposed the show, I pitched the show, did everything. It came out of ideas that had been talked about lagoon show stuff for years and years. Just random bits and pieces all came together with all of my thinking of the millennium and all of my experience in the lagoon and all of my technology background, my programming background, my music background and everything.

All of a sudden I had this idea of how it could go: We could tell the story of Earth in twelve minutes.

One of the hardest things to do is to figure out how to create something meaningful for people who don't all speak the same language, don't all have the same culture, don't all have the same experience. You have to try to find that emotional connection. So I tried to create this show not as a history, a list of accomplishments and things, but to just put up images that people would recognize and connect to and form their own meaning.

I’d take this idea of a beginning, a development arc, and a promise for the future, and let people see things that make them feel connected somehow and represented in the show and they will create their own emotional experience from that.

INTRODUCTION DIALOGUE

SW: Who does the opening narration?

DD: I wrote the introduction for Jim Cummings.

SW: So (the voice of) Winnie the Pooh does the introduction?

DD: Yes… Fat Cat, Don Karnage... He's great. I had done some work with him because I recorded a lot of Disney shows and did audio post production on countless shows here at my studio, so we had worked with him before, and I knew that voice. I was looking for grandfather, Indian chief, international, your conscience. I was looking for some voice that could embody this idea without being any of them. Saying, "Come, in this grand story, let's sit around the fire and let's share."

He was just (snap) three takes and we're done. It was almost not enough fun. It was so fast, you're in, you're out. It was perfect, no reason to stay, thank you very much, we're out.

It just had a marvelous feel to it, exactly what I had hoped for it.

I think the idea to have him blow out the torches came along at the voice session, he had this tone and I said, "Could you just like (blows), give us that." I wasn't sure that we had made the connection but it just felt like that's what we wanted next. Then we did it and it's a great, great moment in the show where everybody goes, "Oh, the voice is connected to all this stuff somehow." It's a manifestation in the physical world that you don't expect.

SW: Was it your idea in the Electrical Parade to have the lights go out right on cue?

DD: Yeah.

SW: So you really have a great feel for a great lighting cue.

DD: I'm a big fan of synchronization. When I look at a piece of entertainment, I think, "What goes with what? What can make this great musical crescendo that would make this better? What can I put with that, that feels like it belongs?"

The first time I saw the Electrical Parade which was 1972, standing on Main Street, the lights went out and this oscillator sweep happened and the music faded up. Of course the parade came along and nobody had seen anything like it and that was fine, but when it was going to come back and I had the opportunity to suggest ideas and so on, I created this fanfare and I said, "Look, this gives you an opportunity now to give you this moment with a sound when it happens." I just knew that would be stronger. I didn't anticipate the kind of reaction that it got on the street, which was great, but it just seemed like it was appropriate and right to take advantage of a musical moment as it was getting into the tempo, and take that sound which sounds like something electronic happening and connect it to the lights. It wasn't a moment of brilliance, it was just, "Well, that seems obvious."

SW: And then another great cue in Reflections of Earth.

DD: Yeah, it really is derivative of the same idea. I had not really thought of it that way, but it indeed it is the same gag.

MUSIC

SW: How did you find Gavin Greenaway for this?

DD: Originally Hans Zimmer was supposed to do the music. Hans had made a deal with Michael Eisner. At some point they were talking and Michael said, "You should do a lagoon show soundtrack someday," and Zimmer said, "(casually) No problem, I'll do it for you." So when it was decided we were going to do this show, then it was like, "Okay, we already have a deal with Hans Zimmer so he will be the music guy."

We came out to L.A. and we met with Hans, I described the show to him, gave him the timings and laid out the format and all that, and he said, "This is great, but normally the way I work is I'll do it the night before it's due. So when is it due?" He was being frank, he said, "Listen I've got a lot on my plate, I know I promised this to Michael, so I'll do it, but the way I normally work is when it has to be done it'll be done but don't expect it months in advance."

To pull these kinds of shows together you have to have something to work with because mechanics have to time a certain way and fireworks have to burn a certain length and all those things require lead time to get manufactured.

So we met with him and came back to Florida and reported in and they said, “That's no good, let's see if we can get him down here." So we scheduled him to come down to Florida to see the existing lagoon show and talk to him so we could get a feel for the existing lagoon show and hear it and understand what it was that he was being asked what to do.

He wasn't available for three months, so we waited three months and the day before he was supposed to come he cancelled, he had something else to do. We put him off for another several months and when he cancelled the second time, Ron Logan finally said, "All right, we can't do it this way. Something has to be done." So I called up Hans and said, "Hans, we can't be waiting, is there somebody who's under your wing who you can assign to this?" And he said, "Yeah, I'll have Gavin do it."

SW: Did you know who Gavin was?

DD: I knew nothing of Gavin. He didn't have credits other than he had conducted some scores for Hans. So Gavin came down and he was a little quiet, British guy, very polite, very non-descript, you wouldn't pick him out of a crowd, he's not boisterous or outgoing. He's very quiet and very nice.

I played him music that sounded like this and like that and I want to do this and here's the timings and all that and he goes, "(Nonchalantly) Okay, I've got it." He didn't take notes, so I'm going, "Oh, what am I going to do now?" He went away and I didn't bother him for a month, then I called him and he said, "I've almost got something. I'll send it to you in a few days."

A few days later a CD arrived at Federal Express and I'm shaking as I get this thing going, "Is this just going to be another horrible moment in this thing or is there promise here?" I put in the CD and started playing the music and it brought tears to my eyes because it was good, it was exactly what we needed. Actually his first draft was very close to what we ended up with. Remarkably close. Normally you don't hit the nail on the head the first time out. You get some ideas going and you say, "All right, let's take this and can we redo this part?"

It was so thoughtful and melodic and uplifting that I thought there's something inside him that he really understands what this piece of music has to do. So from there we went through three or four different drafts of little things and then we put the acceleration on the beginning and that was that. Then we went to London and recorded it.

SW: What direction did you give him before he wrote it?

DD: He had the complete format of the show and evolution and the subjects that I wanted to include in the history part. He had that, he had timings, and I had specific moments that had to have a certain kind of a visual effect, certain moods that I wanted to create. I gave him lots of clips, I gave him clips from Cirque du Soleil, clips from jazz, clips from John Williams scores for examples of feeling.

We did have conversations specifically about using odd tempos because the opening sequence, the chaos sequence, I didn't want it to be straight 4/4, so that everybody felt really comfortable with it. I wanted it to feel a little bit off-balance. So I said, “If you want to put this in five or seven or change in the middle, go ahead.” He ended up creating something that goes all over the time scale. There's a lot of it that is in 4/4, but much of it is in five, some of it is in seven.

There's a sequence as it's accelerating towards the end that goes 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 and then you get the big explosion up high. We used that concept of acceleration throughout the show.

I decided on that as a motif as I was watching a hockey game on TV at the Yacht Club one night. I was thinking, "I need some kind of an idea that expresses how things seem to move slowly and then they get a little faster and then a little faster..." If you look at the history of the universe, it's kind of that way. If there was a big bang then it was a long time before things settled down and then some planets formed and then nothing happened and then a little bit of life evolved and then it took a longer time before it came out of the water and just thinking about all these things, this idea of accelerating time seemed like it brought us here and then it moved us into the future.

I said, "Let's use this clapping thing (like the hockey game) that everybody knows what to do... you hear that and you know they're speeding up and you know where they're going so right away your audience is in sync and knows what's going to happen at the end which is it goes so fast you can't keep up." So I said let's do that in drums to kick us off.

One of the hardest things that I had to nail (with the music) was, in this idea of history and the evolution of Earth, the moment at which humans appeared on the planet. Some people would probably say this is a big deal, we're all humans, we're celebrating this, so let's make this a big moment when man arrived, but I said no, "Let's make this just a subtle little turn when things change. We don't know what that means until much later." It's not (snap) now we're born and all right, let's go to town! It's like this is a pivotal moment but you don't know that at the time.

I kept having to back him off of that moment, saying, "No, just find some little subtle thing, unless you know what's happening it means nothing musically, it's just a change." So he finally got this little oboe thing and a modulation there that was just perfect. It's very subtle in the video. It's actually a moment that a live horse freezes and becomes a cave painting and very subtly leading up to that, we chose pictures of animals where the animals all sort of look towards the camera for a brief moment as if they're aware they're being watched and then we see the cave painting which is the result of them being watched, and that's how we introduced the idea of humans on the planet.

We tried to keep it very artistic rather than literal and the only computer generated shot in the whole thing is coming out of the cave, turning from the cave paintings, coming down the corridor and bursting into the sunlight and then we're off on our adventure. Everything else is actual footage. (chuckles) Of course there was no footage way back then.

SW: Why is it that I've heard the Reflections of Earth in non-Disney things. I think maybe commercials?

DD: What happened was, that because Disney bought this piece of music and owned it, and Disney owns ABC, ABC said, "This is great music for bumpers for news programs and they used it for their millennium coverage, they did photo montages of fireworks all over the world to this music. Gavin won an Emmy for the music for the millennium coverage but it was this piece of music. Because ABC owns it you see it on political convention coverage, it's all over the TV.

The songs that we wrote for the end, "Promise," and "We Go On" are derivatives of each other and have been used in numerous weddings. It's used in charity events, cancer survivors want to sing it at their thing.

SW: Are both songs used in the finale?

DD: "We Go On" is the finale piece in the show and then Promise is the playout song. The chorus is from We Go On and the verse is the theme from Tapestry of Nations. It's not as apparent because in Tapestry of Nations it's instrumental and now here it is with lyrics, attached to the chorus from the show. So you tend not to connect the two.

SW: Who wrote the lyrics?

DD: I wrote the lyrics. That was a last minute thing, because as part of Gavin's creative package, he was supposed to provide the lyrics.

After we had done this great musical adventure it seemed like to do something new and fresh we couldn't just have more music. We had to connect to a human voice, and again it's the idea of acceleration. It starts with one voice and then two and then a choir and then a bigger choir and then bigger. It's that theme that we're trying to find a way to really build back up that next acceleration moving into the future and do it a little more quickly.

So Gavin, not being a lyricist really, had some people he tapped into and said, "Can you put lyrics to this piece of music with this kind of an idea?" There were a few different drafts that we got and none of them really hit the spot.

As the recording day got closer and closer, we kind of needed to know what the lyrics were going to be, if we had to pick a certain singer in a certain range because the orchestrations had to be done. It was all kind of like, "C'mon! We've got to figure this out!" and nothing was happening so I said, "All right... I'll write them." I hadn't wanted to and I had never written lyrics before. Finally, it's like, if I don't do it it's not going to get done.

The original producer that was working with me, named Mark Nichols, was removed from the project right at this time. He was promoted sideways and someone else was brought in. Mark and I had become very close developing this show and I was on one of my trips flying home from Florida, just after he had been moved aside.

I called him from the Dallas airport and we were having this conversation. I said, "I know how disappointed you are and I'm extremely disappointed, I'm very mad even. I'm frustrated, but we go on."

It wasn't until I had hung up and had gotten back on the plane that I'm ruminating on this idea of "we go on" and listening to the music and going, "Oh, you know what? That fits!" Then I thought, that really speaks in a generic way to what has enabled humans to survive. In any day there's up moments, there's down moments and yet the core message of the human race is, "No matter what… we go on." I said 'that works for me because it isn't 'rah rah, it's the millennium, let's celebrate, we're great.' It isn't 'oh my god, look what we've survived.' It's just a simple statement. It's non-judgmental. It's just states a very clean and simple fact, and you can make that what you will. I wanted something that just really was sincere.

Disney has several themes that they tend to do over and over. We celebrate. We wish. We dream. We believe. You can name all the shows and those are the things that we do and we do them over and over again. I said I really want something that isn't typical, that hasn't been done, and that can appeal to everyone, not just Disney people. Epcot is a unique opportunity to do that. The shows that you do at Epcot can speak to cultural elements and outside the influence of the characters and the stories and the fairy tales and all of that. You really can kind of celebrate all of human experience which is what World Showcase is really doing. That's why with this show in that venue we were able to do things that you couldn't do in a fireworks show over the castle.

THE SINGER

SW: Who was the female singer in the finale and how did you find her?

DD: We knew we wanted a female vocalist and Gavin had done some temporary tracks with a girl that he knew before the lyrics were written. She came in and she just sang, "Oo oo ooo," and it was really beautiful just as a non-lyrical thing. For awhile we were thinking, "Could we get away with that?" It was pretty but it didn't really connect. It was just kind of like background.

After I wrote the lyrics we had his vocalist sing the lyrics and her voice when she sang was a little more strident, a little more edgy than we wanted. So we called Dan Savant who was the music contractor and said, "Find us some voices that could do this kind of a thing..." So we got several demos and we listened and we liked Kellie (Coffey) and another girl. Kellie was originally going to sing "Promise," the walk-out song and this other girl was going to sing "We Go On." So we recorded the other girl first, and because of the song, it's a little bit rangy, so the higher notes are harder to reach and tend to get a little shrieky. We weren't really completely satisfied with the girl that we had chosen at the end. So when we had Kellie come in to sing "Promise," we said, "Why don't you just try this other track, too?" We thought it would be out of her range but it turned out to be beautiful and she was great, so we kept her on both.
(NOTE: Kellie has a website at www.kelliecoffey.com)

THE GLOBE

DD: During the lead up to the millennium, one of the things they were looking at generally was whether or not they could cover the entire Spaceship Earth with LEDs. We had some conversations about that, and the structure of Spaceship Earth was not strong enough to support all of this added weight. So there was a physical limitation and then there was the question of what are the pictures you're going to show on it, and who's going to do all that programming and how do you shape images on a sphere?

One of the ideas that had been stuck in my brain was what does the millennium lagoon show need to look like? As soon as I said this has got to be the history of Earth, then it was a pretty quick jump to say Earth can tell its own story.

Instead of being a complete ball only a third of the earth is land so we thought we can cut two thirds of the cost by only having the continents be the LEDs. Then we had to figure out how do you do a screen that's shaped like North America instead of just a rectangle. Not only physically was it a challenge, but electronically how do you address all the right pixels when you don't have them all? So there were a number of challenges involved in making this work and LED screens were very much in their infancy back then.

Looking back it seems like I had the best of all possible positions because all I had to do was say, "No, it has to do this..." and it was somebody else's problem to figure it out. I'd say, "Okay, I want a barge that does fire," so the special effects people said, "We've got three fire effects: this, this and that," and I said “I want something more active. How can we do this?” They said, "Well, those are the only effects we know that are off the shelf." I said, "Can't we play with some stuff? You know, let's get some pipes and try squirting it sideways and squirting it into something else that it bounces off of.” We were like kids playing with fire. We did all of these probably not safe things, but we did them in a safe way, experimenting, trying to find different visuals so we created six or seven different-looking effects and then created the inferno barge and then the question was how do you program this?

PROGRAMMING THE SHOW

Typical WDI is that you make a special programming console and then you sit and then you fine tune. It all sounded very intricate and difficult. Being a keyboard player I said, "Why don't we just hook it up to a midi keyboard and I'll play it like an organ?” Every key on the keyboard would trigger a different valve on the barge. Somebody said, "Hmm. I guess we could do that."

So we did that, we hooked it up and I sat in a trailer in Showcase Plaza, and I said I wanted certain valves on certain keys and then I kind of had to feel my way around. What does this look like? What does that look like? If I do this what happens because there's a lag time? How long can it burn? Does it get bigger or does it just sit and do this? I had to get a feel for how the fire behaved. It's a new instrument.

When it came time to actually do the recording, you press record on a computer and the music plays, but I can't watch what I'm doing because there's a lag time from what the music is, so I have to just practice and figure it out and just do it from memory. Then since it is saved in the computer as a music sequence, when we watch it back we can offset the delay so it is seen properly.

We were done in an evening. Again, it was one of those things that went by so fast that you go, "Wait... it needs to be more fun. It needs to last longer." In that particular aspect, one of the challenges was that we had a budget for 200 gallons of propane a night. We had so much expendable per night and we knew what the fireworks cost, so what was left over went into the propane. You can't just go wild and do anything you want, you have to make some assumptions like I need to keep things short if I can, as long as I can get the effect that I want. You have to be responsible about not going bananas with it. I could have juggled it if I needed to but it worked out pretty well.

THE VIDEO

DD: The video was a challenge, and all from stock footage because there's no budget to go travelling all around the world taking pictures. You need to find what you need from what's already there.

SW: Was it Disney's stock footage?

DD: No, we went to several different stock libraries and made deals with them, for a blanket price we could take anything and use it. We had to find the right images that looked reasonably good in those unique shapes, and an additional requirement that I had was that they sort of had to be geographically appropriate. We're not going to put pictures of the pyramids in North America. So that added an extra level of difficulty on choosing the images.

The way we actually produced that is that we would work on North and South America, then we would work on Eurasia, then they would composite them together. A lot of it was, "Let's try this," then you have to wait for them to render, then you get to look at it, so that was quite tedious and time consuming, especially the opening sequence which was abstract where we go from red hot to cooling into vegetation and then reveal animals and so on. All of that was much more abstract. Once you get to where I need a hit where we go to architecture, you find all the architecture things and you go boom. That was a lot easier to do after you found the pictures than to create this sort of evolution from random things in a way that really went with the music.

So there were a lot of interesting challenges and we were all just sort of hoping that it works.

We did a distortion on the video, wrapped it around a fake sphere and had it rotate. We were able to simulate what you see when the things going around and at what speed. We determined the speed that the barge needed to rotate.

There's an interesting aspect, when you see something coming you're automatically waiting for it. And there's always something coming so you're always waiting, so you're always connected to the show. It's just a natural function of that globe that it's hard not to look at.

SW: How many separate images did you end up using?

DD: Eurasia, we tried to keep it one but sometimes it was two next to each other. Africa is one obviously and Europe is part of Eurasia. Australia was kind of small. When we designed the globe we knew that we had to take some artistic license with how big continents were and how big they were, because most of the land masses to the north, there's not too much down here, so we knew we had to cheat stuff down. We knew we wanted to cheat continents bigger so we had more screen space. We knew we wanted to make Australia bigger.

We had to have New Zealand and Hawaii because those people would feel slighted if we didn't, even though there's not enough pixels to make an image we had to put them there and they had to be part of the thing. I insisted on that, people would say, "Can we throw away Hawaii? It's one light." "No, you cannot throw away Hawaii. That's a fiftieth of your visitors."

We got a big ball of styrofoam and we painted it and we played with the way that the earth looked on the globe until we had it right. We would repaint the coastlines and say, "Can we move that here?" Until we had that model right we didn't do any construction or any electronic figuring out. We got the model of the Earth right, maximized the continents, made it look artistically appropriate and geographically reasonable. Then we photographed it in slices and then they mapped that around the engineering model. Then they figured out where the pixels go in there and they gave me the pixel layout and I did some coastline redesigning based on how it would appear to the eye.

SW: Is each light one pixel?

On the original screen it was 12 LEDs in one pixel because you needed four blue and four green to balance three red just because of the way that LEDs used to be. The new screen that they put on last year is different and I'm not exactly sure how that's made up but they replaced the whole screen.

There was some finessing just for visual impression of how the coastlines needed to be. If you looked at it, you'd think that doesn't look quite right on the drawing but when you see it in light and it's moving, it works. So there was a lot of detail, hands on, before they said, "All right, these are how many pixels we need and where we need them.” Then all the electronics people had to figure out how to do that, so I was pretty involved in that.

FOUNTAINS

The fountains are essentially the same fountains we started with back in 1982, in terms of capability. The back row goes up, these go out, and everything else has to come from the way you use them because they don't swivel, there's no animation there. All of the movement of the water has to be created out of how you program them.

One of the things that we had done in the previous lagoon shows to make the fountains look more spectacular was to try and do very intricate, fancy stuff... keep the water moving so they look as animated as they can. We had never done slow things, just let the back row grow slowly. With this show there's the whole thing when the vegetation is coming into the picture, we take that idea and we use it with just a growth with green. When we do the whole fire thing with the cave, we come back down to just a single jet that's that fire orange-yellow.

SW: So the nozzles don't actually move? All movement is created based on how much water flows through?

DD: Movement on the fountains is done by changing the flow rate, whether they are pointing up or out. By quickly switching the flow off and on again, a tall stream of water would become discontinuous, so that the later "on" would go up and smack into the previous "on" water which was now falling, creating small burst-like effects or splashes. Changing the flow rate on the fountains that lean forward creates a sort of "waving" effect.

There are four different lighting circuits so you get four different colors, and that's it. You pick the colors and that's the way they're gelled. They're glass lenses with color so you don't have every color available, you have to pick exactly and it's a piece of glass that goes in there because a gel would melt. So you're limited in the colors that you can create and pick.

We chose the colors for the fountains very carefully based on what we were doing with the pyro and what was in the video and we came down to four colors that would allow us to create the most interesting looks on the fountains that we hadn't used before.

In previous fountain shows we used yellow, green, red and blue. We wanted to do something different so we picked four colors we could match with the pyro. Specifically, the colors are lavender, mint, pumpkin and lagoon. Then we lit the synchro lights, the rooftop searchlights, we gelled those with the same colors to match the fireworks, so while we're shooting fireworks, we're also lighting the smoke in the same colors as the pyro displays and creating as close as we can on the fountain barges. Color coordination was a tricky aspect because you're very limited in the color palette available on the fountains.

In other shows, programming the fountains was done with lines of computer code specifying pressures and times. Now, for the first time we were able to program them using a lighting board so we could do fades and create a pattern and repeat a pattern without having to figure it out numerically and type it in and hope that it was what you wanted. So we sat in a trailer with a lighting programmer and worked out the timings and the feelings and all of that.

SW: So it was a lighting board actually controlling the water?

DD: Yes. It's a pretty quick process. You sit in the marina and I created a timing chart from all the time codes so I know where every beat is, I know I want the water to hit here and to fall here, but what you have to take into account is gravity. You don't just turn water off and it's gone, you turn water off and then it falls, so there are several times in the show when I actually used that as an effect. The water falling is part of the programming. The water rising at a slower rate, or the way in which it comes in is a look, a timing, a color thing. I just tried to approach the fountains differently than we ever had before.

LASERS

DD: The lagoon is a huge place and because the safety aspect of lasers is quite complicated, they're regulated by the government, there's a Bureau of Radiological Health, and if you shoot a laser into the atmosphere you either have to terminate it on a building so that the beam ends in a specific place, or you have to get the FAA to shut down the air space.

In Laserphonic Fantasy we obviously tried to use the lasers as much as possible, so every night we'd have to call the FAA tower in Orlando and say, "We're going to do the show now," and they'd route planes in a different way. We also terminate as many beams as possible.

When we were laying out what we can and can't do with lasers... we're bouncing off a mirror here and it's got to go there and it's got to end at that spot. They actually do an alignment before the show at low power where they go out and they make sure that it's ending in the right place.

We had always just had the argon, which are the blue/green lasers, in the buildings before. We had been trying to get money to do full color, but the problem with full color up until that time was that you could spend a lot of money and the color output was very low, just the way lasers are, just the gasses that they use. They tend to want to be blue/green, so to get white light or the orange, yellow, red spectrum, you had to put krypton in there and that again, unlike the LEDs, you had to use more reds and less blue/green to get a more-or-less white color balance. It works the opposite in laser beams, you have to balance more red with fewer blue/greens.

The way we solved that on the laser barge which was under the fiber optic sphere was we had two kryptons and one argon that were all combined to give us some color but we had never had color in the pavilions and I wanted color in the pavilions.

There isn't a lot of call in the concept of Reflections of Earth to use lasers. There's no reason to really do it but it's sort of an expectation that they're going to be in the show. People talk about it as a laser show. "You've got to go see the laser show." It's not really a laser show, it's an experience. So there was pressure to have them in the show and I said, "If we're going to have them in the show then we can't have blue/green. That's not in our color palette, that's not appropriate. That's like old school laser.” I said I won't program them in. They could do what they want when I go away, but I would not do it.

Finally they came up with the money for full color. There's a couple of times like when the earth is coming in, in the smoke that's left over which is very little from the opening sequence there's a kind of a sky effect that kind of works thematically. They're used more for effect because people expect them to be used.

FINALE VIDEO - WE GO ON

SW: For those who have never seen the show, how would you describe that video finale?

DD: Well, the whole setup for the show is we're sitting around the fire telling stories, passing on traditions and that is what we wanted to show in this video. This is almost a dream sequence because it's not like you'd have the United Nations sitting around a campfire working out their difficulties, but that's kind of the idea is that we can all come together... it's almost a show within a show, symbolic of all the people at Epcot from all these different countries, gathering around the fireworks to share this moment. I wanted to kind of put that inside the ball.

For the "We Go On" visual segment, we wanted international people, people of various ethnic backgrounds to be in the video. The company that was producing the video for us put in a casting call and for two days we interviewed a couple of hundred people probably, who all came in their personal costume and we sat and had little interviews. We tried to interview them quickly but it was like, "Tell us about your story, how you came to America." "What's your family background?" "What country are you from?" "Do you speak the native language?" "How do you feel about the millennium?" We filmed all of these and then I had to go through and review who had the most interesting looks and who do we put them with and all of that.

I think we narrowed it down to twenty people because that was the budget we had for actors that could be paid. We had them come back and we had them set up with a firebar so they could be filmed in front of flickering fire light. It probably could have been done better with just lighting instead of actual flame, but we had actual flame. It was fun. Then the camera would track back and forth and we would film them talking to each other and shaking hands and passing candles. So we did a whole day of filming and I think it's only five or six different people that you see in the actual final edit, but we shot hours and hours of footage.

I wanted it to be sort of slow and dream-like, but we also didn't have a lot of time. When you're filming you try and move the camera more quickly then you know you want it to be because you know it's going to be slowed down. We were doing a lot of guess work to try to figure out what it was really going to look like when it was edited.

We also had to keep in mind that it had to fit inside South America and all these funny shapes. I had cardboard masks that I would put over the video monitor to try and watch through and the cameraman was just trying to get footage. So while he's shooting I'm trying to figure out, "Does this fit?" That was probably the most nerve-racking day, was making sure that we had on video what would work for the finale. We actually did four or five different edited versions of that before we got to this one.

SW: Why did you ask like what language they spoke?

DD: I just wanted to really know how deeply their connections were to their heritage. Some people were like, "Yeah, my great great grandfather was Lithuanian and I have some lederhosen that I can put on and look authentic if you want me to look authentic." I was more interested in picking people that really had a presence. Not just a look but a real depth of conviction. We didn't really know how well that image was going to read or connect across the distance of the lagoon or what people would be looking at in any particular moment in time, but I felt that the authenticity just had to be in there if there was any hope of getting it across.

THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT FINALE

SW: After the video, you see the torch inside the globe, right?

DD: Right. It becomes a symbol of achievement and carrying on and representing your culture and your people and your accomplishments. It's a symbol of success, achievement and pride. There's ninenteen torches around the lagoon and this completes the twentieth torch, one for each of the hundred years of 2,000 years. From the center of that begins the thousand points of light.

The thousand points of light that come out at the end, there's a number of reasons for doing that. One is that I wanted a "thousand points of light." A thousand is important so we counted the number of stars in each firework. But I also wanted to light up the audience so that you could actually see all the people, which is why that's an all white moment. Suddenly you become aware, you can see everything, it's like daylight.

I don't think people realize what is happening, but I do believe that that moment in the show is important whether people realize it or not.

SW: Don't you think that in great shows, the public may not realize things but if it's not there it doesn't have as great of an impact?

DD: Yes, that's what I try to do. You put stuff in in the hope that it has an effect whether it comes up to a conscious level or not.

THE SHOW PREMIERE

DD: One of the requirements we had was that the old show couldn't go down while we were rehearsing the new show. It was very difficult because we had to put extra tubes on the fireworks barges so that we could do both shows at the same time, because we would shoot the regular show and then take the barges back in and load them up for our rehearsal and finally get to our rehearsal run at four in the morning after the load happened. (pauses) Long nights.

SW: Did the show debut on October 1st?

DD: That was the official premiere. We had previews the week before (starting September 22), which were essentially dress rehearsals and like any show you have an opening night, but people have been seeing it for awhile. We did a two day press event for the whole millennium where it was just like running from one interview to the next all over the property. They couldn't schedule me to do ten radio interviews in a row at Epcot. It had to be two here, get over to the Magic Kingdom, do a TV standup, then get over to Disney-MGM, do a radio, then come back to Epcot. It was just like madness for two days.

So October 1st is the official opening day which is the kickoff of the entire millennium celebration.

This show had always been based on a ten year expected life. When they figure out how much money they want to spend on a show, they say, "How long is it going to last?" "How many people is it going to play to?" They have figures and numbers for how they arrive at a value. This was always expected to be a ten year show but they didn't tell anybody.

SW: And this is the tenth year now?

DD: Yes, this is the tenth year. September 30th (2009) will be the last show of the 10th year. October 1st  will begin year 11.

That ten year figure that they use to justify the cost is never used to keep a show if the show's not good or they want to replace it. They just use it to generate a number. Like Light Magic (which lasted only several months at Disneyland) was supposed to be a ten year show. They use that just to figure out what to do. After it's open if people don't like it, it's going to go away, if people like it it's going to stay longer. The Electrical Parade just keeps going on.

SW: How would you sum up your experience and thoughts on the show?

DD: I'm very pleased that the show has stood the test of time and continues to satisfy viewer experience. Certainly, in terms of an impact I'm very, very proud of the reach that we've been able to have and the number of people that we've been able to hopefully give a connection to their place on the planet.

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