Imagineers have updated The American Adventure montage film, Golden Dreams, to catch it up with the calendar and complete a trio of scheduled Epcot film enhancements.
“When the show was being developed in 1980, we knew that the passage of time would be a factor and that the story would be never-ending,” says senior vice president and executive show director Rick Rothschild, who was part of the team that created the original attraction in 1982. “We did the first update in 1992, which included a longer version of the song written for the film montage Golden Dreams to make room for the additional ten years of history. Now here we are, 15 years later and we didn’t want to add another verse to the song, so we remixed it and, with some clever editing, we repositioned the elements to present them earlier in the song, which gave us more time to present the history from the late ’60s to today.”
Golden Dreams is not so much a history lesson, but more of a refresher course in the diversity and endurance of the American spirit, illustrated by images of the “dreamers and doers” throughout history who exemplify it. This time, the team focused on the “spirit of giving” and the philanthropic side of Americans to broaden the perspective of what makes the spirit of America unique. But identifying which events and icons would resonate with the widest audience turned out to be a tough assignment for more than the Imagineers.
Which Story is History?
Hoping to get a fresh perspective on such a serious selection, the team contacted a noted historian from George Washington University, who recruited 13 graduate students from his American History department for a semester-long assignment to help with the Epcot enhancement.
“We provided a script, some background of the show and a version of the Golden Dreams sequence of the show,” says Rick. “Their assignment was to help us select up to 100 images and give us reasons they believed this person belonged in the montage. The result was a document that provided us with names and moments in time that they felt were worthy of consideration.”
Collating the college list with one independently generated within WDI, the team developed the final roster, gathered the images and worked out the best way to add them to the ages.
“Ultimately, we were able to incorporate about 115 images during the same song and still maintain the smooth, soaring pace that we always had,” says Rick.
“With the MTV generation, people are able to take in more imagery than they used to,” says digital media producer, director for Theme Park Productions Ken Horii. “So this format allowed us to fit a lot more in, and we think that really added to the film’s emotional impact.”
However, the team was highly aware that they needed to elicit the right kind of emotion, especially in treating such tragic events such as Sept. 11.
“The whole piece is about the American spirit and our resolve and our ability as Americans to bounce back from incredibly bad situations,” says Ken. “Yes, 9/11 happened, but we’re Americans and we come together during adversity. It was a moment in time when everyone felt as if we were one and I think that’s what we wanted to show.”
Technologically Timely
“The great special effect in this piece was the process in which it was done,” says Ken. “We’re using new technology to get closer to the original creative vision. We stepped up the existing images; manipulated new ones in much more subtle ways and created some amazing fireworks for the Statue of Liberty shot, and we added things that we always thought should have been there�like the image of Rosa Parks�because now we have the technology in-house to do that.”
“With the digital process, original film and low resolution video clips are brought in, cleaned up, stabilized, time stretched and composited all within the computer,” says digital media designer Michael Jackson. “A lot of the material we resurrected from the archives was originally 16 mm, which was bumped to 35 mm, which was projected onto 65 mm, so we took a lot of care in cleaning up the images to make them look perfectly smooth.”
Achieving that perfect combination between history and technology proved to be a truly delicate balancing act for the team, but, thanks to that perfect Imagineering balance of talent and innovation, the new Golden Dreams debuted this summer and The American Adventure is once again up-to-date and aging gracefully.
