This week started early.

3:30AM to be exact.

Our team met during a snowstorm to head over to the airport for our 5:55AM flight to sunny, 70F, Orlando.

Once we landed, we did some good ol’ fashion team bonding and spent the day at Disney World since we ended up getting there a day early.

On Tuesday we visited the Give Kids The World Village. We met Abby who we had been contacting via email before, and had a wonderful time touring and learning more about how Give Kids The World got it’s start and the past/current attraction there. When we got to the Castle Of Miracles (where the star program is located) we saw the past ETC projects that worked with the Star Tower and Star Fairy. We also visited the Pillow Tree and noticed that it had been a while since it had been updated.

Abby also shared with us some of their upcoming plans to relocate the spa in order to make room for a Star Observatory in order to expand on the star program.

After returning to Pittsburgh later that day, we got an email listing some of the projects that we their top priority. On the top of the list was the Pillow Tree, which had been an ETC project back in 2007 (Project Sweet Dreams). Followed by the Star Observatory that will replace the spa. They left it up to us on what we wanted to focus on.

 

Our team met a lot about what we wanted to focus on. On the one hand, we were never quite sure what we were going to work on, but we always assumed it was building off of the previous star program projects. However, be began to get more and more ideas on how we could improve on the Pillow Tree vs. how we could help design the Star Observatory.

 

We met with Ricardo and Brenda and decided to focus mainly on the Pillow Tree while doing design documentation for the Star Observatory on the side.

 

Once this was decided, there was a lot of work we needed to get started on. For starters, since we are planning to create a new animation, we needed to get started on the character design and development. We decided to start drawing concepts for squirrels, creating a new color scheme, and extensively researching the project Sweet Dreams.

 

Some ideas that we have already for the pillow tree:

  • Reincorporate the shakers in leaves
  • Use DMX lighting
  • Change the plot so that it makes more since for the pillow to appear in the tree trunk next to the attraction
  • Change the character to something more energetic
  • Change the physical aspect of the tree to fit the theme of the castle more
  • LED lights in the tree to represent stars
  • Shadow play
  • Non-tech interactions (like jumping up and down or spinning around)

 

Some ideas we have for the Star Observatory design:

  • Use chips for easy input into the computer and finding where the star goes
  • Create a galaxy on the wall, which to guests looks like just a painting, but to staff is a grid for where stars are

 

Lastly, we completed our first drafts of our logo and poster for the critique next week. At the moment this is what we have.

 

Next week we will be critiquing and modifying our poster and logo, doing concept for both the animation and the area, playtesting, and getting ready for quarters.