6/7/2010 Susan Kantor, ECE ILLINOIS
Written by Susan Kantor, ECE ILLINOIS
Brent Dirks hadn’t been to Disney World until his junior year of high school. Now, just a few years later, he will be presenting an idea for a new Disney attraction to a panel of 25 Disney Imagineering executives—the people behind the Disney magic.
Dirks, a recent computer engineering graduate, was part of a team of four undergraduates who have been named finalists in Walt Disney Imagineering’s 19th ImagiNations design competition being held June 8 to 16.
Imagineers conceptualize and create Disney’s entertainment venues, including theme parks, resorts, and attractions. The competition allows students to try their hands at Imagineering; teams are instructed to design a ride, attraction, hotel, restaurant or themed land for an existing Disney theme park or resort or develop a concept for a new park, resort, or venue. The projects are for the purpose of the competition only.
John Wieser and Marchelle Gant, both seniors in architecture, formed the team for the Spring 2010 semester. Dirks responded to a flier about the competition, and he joined the team with Samantha Juna, a senior in industrial design.
“I’ve always wanted to do one of those national competitions,” Dirks said. “I like meeting new people, and this goes outside of ECE, which was kind of cool.”
The team worked on the project through an independent study led by Matthew Niermann, a visiting faculty member in the School of Architecture. Gant had the idea to make a ride based on “Tron,” the 1982 live-action Disney film about a computer hacker abducted into a digital world.
“Marchelle came up with the idea for ‘Tron,’ but the concept for the ride and the concept of our back story was a group thing,” Dirks said. “We spent two weeks in January knocking out a story before we started on any of the drawings.”
In the team’s attraction, “TRON: Gridlock,” guests are digitized and put into a computer where they travel through TRON city in a Light Shuttle. The shuttle is split in two by an enemy vehicle before guests are returned to the real world.
The team submitted a concept description, boards with architectural renderings, posters, a video to welcome guests, and a model of the vehicle guests would ride in, the Light Shuttle.
“We made this really cool model of our ride vehicle,” Dirks said. “If you think of the light cycles from ‘Tron,’ it’s a variation on that, just on a bigger scale. We called it a light shuttle instead of the light cycles.”
Wieser used CAD to design and laser cut the vehicle, and Dirks wired the vehicle’s LEDs and helped assemble it. Dirks also created a program in C++ for the judges to easily access their project materials.
The team will be judged on how the technology, architecture, costumes, transportation and attractions support the story it created. Dirks was optimistic about the team’s chances in the competition.
“‘Tron’ is a Disney movie, and I feel like it gives Disney an edge that maybe other teams haven’t thought about before,” he said. “People don’t always realize that Disney does have real-life movies that aren’t animated.”
The purpose of the project is to identify possible talent for future Imagineers. The team will present its project and have opportunities to network with Imagineers at Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale, California during the competition. Dirks said he was excited for the final competition.
“We’re finalists in the competition out of hundreds and hundreds of teams. We’re one of six of those teams,” he said. “We get to go backstage at Disney Land. It’s going to be a blast.”