[Davie] So when I walk on this site,
it's a sense of joy and pride and accomplishment.
It's been years of our lives
and then just to see it come out of the ground, literally,
and every day to see it change and evolve into what we created on paper
is an amazing experience.
I'm Mike Davie with Walt Disney Imagineering,
and I'm responsible for delivering magical experiences to our guests.
[Davie] So, I'm a project manager.
And what I do is, I'm responsible for the entire project
from its inception all the way to its completion.
So, that involves from the Blue Sky time period
when we're working with our design teams,
our architects and our creative teams
to come up with an idea, and then taking it from that idea
into schedules and budgets and making sure we can execute
on the creative vision that we're trying to create for our guests.
Imagineering. That's the right word to describe what we do.
We imagine things, then we have to engineer it.
Early on in my career, or early on in my life,
I knew nothing about Walt Disney Imagineering.
I knew what Disney was,
a magical place that everybody wanted to go to and be a part of.
Then I got the opportunity to come and work for the company.
As soon as I interviewed, I knew this was a place for me.
So, what you're seeing here is the form. It's starting to take shape,
is the exterior facade for the entry into the Ratatouille attraction.
The Ratatouille attraction and why it's special to me is that
we're bringing something to Epcot and the World Showcase pavilion
that families can enjoy together.
I've sat in rooms where we just had a napkin, literally, a napkin.
We're at dinner, and there's a napkin sketch, and this idea has been taken
and come to Blue Sky phase where we sit and we talk about it,
and we think of it from a design perspective.
And then, from there, we go into schematic design.
And as that starts to evolve, we'll move into our next phase,
which is live design development. And we really start to get into the detail
and really start to infuse it with the storytelling.
Then, from there, we go into construction,
and that's where we really execute on those ideas that we've drawn,
many years ago, back on a napkin sketch.
This is a huge projection screen.
So, right directly above us, there's a projection room
which projects an image onto the screen
that's choreographed with the ride experience that we're creating.
And they can actually live inside the world that they've seen on the screen.
[machines grinding]
So this theme park wall that you see here is actually blown up to rat scale.
So, you're a human, you've been shrunk to rat scale,
and you see this brick wall that's been all hand carved by our artisans, right.
The challenges with doing this to scale
is that you can't get far enough away from it,
so you have to have some really talented artisans
who are able to stand this close to it,
but still create something that's the right scale,
as what it would be from a point of view of a rat.
The amount of detail that it takes to execute and deliver
on an attraction like Ratatouille is pretty intense.
We labor over drawings for hours and hours and hours
and so the level of detail is second to none.
Well, we created these wood planks out of theme park plaster.
And you can see the mortar joints
that we created to look like they're oozing out of the planks.
It's an exciting part of the project
'cause you get to see everything that we've worked so hard for
really come to life.
So we work with our partners at Pixar to develop the story
and make sure we're staying true to the overall idea and story and richness
that's been created by Pixar.
Every day I stop and say, "Wow. What we do is pretty amazing."
I mean, Imagineers have something in them,
it's creativity, it's passion and commitment.
'Cause every time I deliver a project and at the end, and I see my family,
or I see guests experience it the way that we intended
and the richness we created within the environment,
um, it really just gives me goose bumps and a feeling of pride and accomplishment,
um, with our team and what we've been able to deliver for our guests.