Creative Portfolio Executive of Disney Imagineering Joe Rohde must have a vision and ensure it evolves from idea to reality for such imaginative, gargantuan projects like Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission — Breakout, and Pandora: The World of Avatar.
“I’m not focused on the specific detail,” Rohde said. “I’m focused on carefully crafting the initiating narrative we are going to tell ourselves that it is meant to be.”
The celebrated Disney Imagineer gave a speech about narrative organization last night in front a packed Wallis Annenberg Hall auditorium.
There was a buzz in the air as students and career professionals waited expectantly in the queue hours before the event began.
Hana Kahn, a junior studying psychology and themed entertainment, was one of those in attendance
“He’s one of the few greats left there so I wanna hear him talk about his process,” Kahn said. “He’s my hero. I basically lived in Disneyland and grew up going to Disneyland.”
Rohde outlined his thesis about the driving forces behind the success of Imagineering. Setting the idea of the park, ride or experience, he said, starts from the beginning and takes on its own life as hundreds of people work together to create an environment that invokes reality.
He describes it in geometric proportions: there’s two different points on the line. How you get to the destination, point B, isn’t as important as where it began at point A. Rohde believes the “impulse” of the idea for the experience defines its evolution, design and conception.
The direction of any given project, Rohde argued, starts with a back and forth from his peers. Once an established direction is in place, Rohde and his Imagineers propagate a whole host of ideas, hoping to discover the basal theme of the park or attraction or hotel. Rohde said that only once the theme is set, he and his team can turn it into a reality.
“Rather than focusing on describing the end result I am very focused on describing the engaging impulse,” Rohde said. “What is the underlying meaning of the work?”
He put his theory into practice through the diverse range of projects he led. Rohde, being raised in Hawaii, was especially keen on working his idea of workflow into Disney’s Aulani resort project in O’ahu. Once he figured out the theme of the resort was to be the Hawaiian people themselves, a clear distinction from the monotonous skyscraper beachfront property typically associated with the island, he sought the advice of the native people. Rohde made sure a fossilized rock was blessed by a local shaman and placed at the site’s center, a common tradition among the Hawaiian people.
Those kind of details are important in Rohde’s work because they manifest themselves through other designers and artists when a clear theme and direction are put into place, he said.
“Direction is about creating freedom so that people are free to create,” Rohde said.