Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/526878
m ay . j u n e 2 0 1 5 c g w 7 "The way Brad and Damon tell the story, it's made of fun chunks that come together for an adventure," Hammack says. "The city [of Tomorrowland] is the goal in the movie, but you don't spend a ton of time inside any one development of the city. The film is made of many individual gags." Nor did the filmmakers spend time in any one place. In total, the film has more than 90 different combinations of sets and loca- tions, including the It's a Small World ride in Disneyland and the Carousel of Progress in Walt Disney World; a Bahamian beach; Paris; the City of Arts and Scienc- es in Valencia, Spain; Cape Ca- naveral in Florida; a winter wheat farm in Pincher Creek, Alberta, Canada; and a cornfield in British Columbia. One practical set, the Bridgeway Plaza, which took six months to build, is half the size of a football field and features a fully functional monorail. Even so, the majority of ILM's work was in creating digital en- vironments and set extensions, according to Pasquarello. T O M O R R O W L A N D T I M E S T H R E E "We visit Tomorrowland three times," Pasquarello says. "When Frank was a child in 1964, again in 1984, and the third, when things go wrong." In the film, the 1964 Tomor- rowland is under construction, the 1984 version is an idealized city seen in a vision, and the third is a dystopian version of Tomorrowland. Although Disney's first Tomorrowland opened in 1955, it was Walt Dis- ney's vision of tomorrow for the 1964–65 New York World's Fair that captured the imagination of Tomorrowland Writer Lindelof and, soon, Writer/Director Bird. It began with a mystery box discovered accidentally in a Disney Studios closet. The box, labeled "1952," contained mod- els and blueprints, photographs, and letters related to the inception of Tomorrowland and the 1964 World's Fair. Lindelof imagined that the contents were a guide to a secret story that nobody knew, and a place called Tomorrowland that was not a theme park but existed somewhere in the real world. So, the Tomorrowland writers send young Frank to the World's Fair. He is carrying, in his back- pack, a jet pack that he made from Electrolux vacuum cleaner parts. He visits the Carousel of Progress and sees a demo of the Probability Machine in the IBM pavilion. When he sits on a bench, a character named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) gives him a pin. Odd. Frank picks up his pack, moves on, and sneaks aboard a Small World boat. "We had to faithfully re-create Disney rides at the World's Fair, true to what they looked like in 1964," Pasquarello says. "We were able to use some things that they shot in Disney theme parks, and then did set exten- sions – the Pepsi booth, the Tower of the Four Winds. We used the water ride entrance at Disney and added a monorail." As the Small World boat nears the Eiffel Tower, a laser scans Frank's new pin. The track drops, becomes a ramp, and shoots the boat downward. Frank is alone, underneath Small World, in a secret passage, and on his way to Tomorrowland. Aer Frank enters Tomor- rowland, he finds his way to the top of an unfinished skyscraper. From there, he sees builder ro- bots hard at work, and he meets one named Goliath (see "Ani- mating Giants," page 10). When a series of events causes him to fall, he straps on his homemade jet pack, and, in an all-CG shot, takes us on a great fly-through of To- morrowland under construction. "The environment is all ours," Pasquarello says. "Brad [Bird] wanted everything in an under-construction phase. The art director, Scott Chambliss, worked with a lot of people here for years." Thang Le, ILM's visual effects art director, spent three years designing environments for the film with help from Concept Artist Brett Northcutt. The artists imagined buildings in their finished form and under construction. "Although we were inspired YOUNG FRANK JET-PACKS THROUGH A TOMORROWLAND UNDER CONSTRUCTION IN 1964.