Written by Eve Katz, Photo courtesy of Abby Cox
“Without paint it would be a gray theme park, you really need paint to push the story,” said SCAD alumna Abby Cox, B.F.A. production design 2016. Cox works as a scenic painter for Adirondack Studios, referred to on their website as, “A solutions provider, helping our clients bring their vision to life.”
While there is no Adirondack theme park or experience, they have brought several projects under different companies to life. “We work for lots of different clients, including Universal and Disney,” Cox said. “For different projects they’ll contract out to different companies [like Adirondack] and have us come in and work on those projects. One of the ones that I’ve gotten to work on that was really fun was Pandora in Animal Kingdom, that was the first thing I worked on right out of college. We also got to work on Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge recently, which was pretty cool.”
Themed entertainment is one of the most collaborative industries, with a diverse array of disciplines coming together to create large-scale immersive experiences. Professionals in fields from concept art to mechanical engineering have to have a system of communication in place, which can be difficult. “Communication on these giant construction sites [can be an issue], it’s thousands of people all having to work together to do one thing versus maybe hundreds that you would have doing a theater production. There’s probably 100 other little tiny things that all have to come together as one, and getting those schedules and stuff, it’s a lot.” Cox advised that SCAD students who are interested in working in themed entertainment make sure they form strong collaboration skills and get used to working with teams.
Theme parks are known for their ability to whisk guests away to whimsical worlds. Be it Toy Story Land in Disney’s Hollywood Studios or Diagon Alley in Universal Studios Florida, entering a land inside a theme park is akin to walking right into some of your favorite stories. Without the detailed scenery done by artists like Cox, the immersive element of these experiences would fall flat. “I think in any capacity, regardless of intellectual property, we usually come in with the paint to do final touches,” Cox said. “You have to really think about the environment and what has happened there, or what you want the guest to feel has happened there. You can do some of that with set dressing and carving things, but I think until you get paint on it or stain or get some sort of color, it’s just going to look too new. if you want something to look lived in and old, you have to get something on it. Even things that are supposedly brand new, they don’t look real until there’s at least like a little bit of dirt or a little bit of something in the tiniest little crack. In some cases, if you want something to look 700 years-old, that’s not gonna look like that, until you put layer after layer after layer of gunk or goop or whatever to make it look old.”
Suspension of disbelief is a hugely important element of immersive experiences, but it’s far more difficult for a guest to let go of the “old world,” so-to-speak, and enter a new one in a themed entertainment space if there is a lack of detail that brings them out of the narrative. A lot of the detail that allows guests to really anchor themselves in a story comes through in scenic painting. Processes like aging an object through paint are what make a space not just interesting to look at, but it looks like a real world in which real characters have lived. Guests aren’t just surrounded by the imagery of their favorite stories, they’ve become characters.
