REPORT 035
THEME PARKS
Steve Alcorn is an American entrepreneur, engineer, inventor, author, teacher and founder of Alcorn McBride & Associates, best known for his involvement in the theme park industry. This is an excerpt from the book: Theme Park Design - Behind the Scenes with an Engineer by Steve Alcorn.
SHOW CONTROL ENGINEERING
It was the night the curtains went berserk that I decided we wouldn’t make opening day. I had been sitting in the American Adventure pit watching one of the engineers program the stage control system. Suddenly there were cries from above me on the proscenium and other voices shouting out from the darkness around me. I looked up and saw that the main curtain - an incredibly complicated affair with individual wires that could lift different sections to different positions, and that probably cost half a million dollars - was raising and lowering in scatterbrained craziness. Off to the side, smaller fly curtains were also going up and down wildly. And several heavy overhead scrims were attempting to drop. Derek, one of the Show Control Engineers, ran for the curtain control room and madly hit every stop button he could find. Later, examining the animation cabinets, we saw that we were being flooded with bad data from Epcot Central. The problem was traced to a faulty transmitter at the other end of a half-mile of cabling. The card was swapped out. It took days to unsnarl the main curtain.
PROGRAMMING AND ANIMATION
While the engineers down in the pit sweat out the details of programming the com- puters that run the ride and show, a completely different kind of programming was going on upstairs in the theater. Up there, skilled - and specialized - artists worked at an animation console, adjusting the way the Animatronic figures move. They’d run the show - or small sections of the show - over and over, tweaking and adjusting controls one by one to match the soundtrack and to make the movements as realistic as possible. It’s an arduous process, because for each figure they must learn its mechanical limitations and then take advantage of them. Sometimes a hip twist can provide the extra momentum needed to make that arm movement look just right. But then the figure is turned the wrong way for the next move. It took weeks to get Ben Franklin to convincingly climb a short flight of stairs. All that while we sat downstairs, chafing at not being able to move the sets and get our own work done. But there’s always the night
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