[Ayala] My job is to bring characters to life.
I am a perfectionist.
To make a character believable, every detail counts.
This audio-animatronic head that you're looking at here
has all these little mechanisms to make the face move and create expressions.
As humans, we all have these unique things that we do that defines
that we are alive and that we have a personality.
Of course, we have the eyes, the eyebrows,
that allows to express sadness, happiness, thinking.
If you can make an animatronic look like it's thinking,
and people think that that character you developed has thought,
that's when life emerges.
I am Alfredo Ayala.
I am with Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development,
and I am an R&D executive.
At R&D, we want to apply the latest technology,
wanna learn about the latest technology,
and see how can it help us tell stories in different mediums and different ways.
[Walt Disney] When we needed a cast of lifelike figures
for our most ambitious project, Disneyland,
we created a new type of animation, so new that we had to invent a new name for it.
[squawking]
Audio-animatronics?
Right, audio-animatronics.
[Ayala] Audio-animatronic robotics really evolved in really big steps.
It goes back to when Walt introduced Lincoln in the 1964 World's Fair.
It really astonished people because people just knew Lincoln through books.
We've gone from just deliverance of performance
to actually having the audio-animatronic robotics be aware, respond
and be reactive to our guests.
I've been here with the company for 25 years.
Throughout my career, I worked on some of the most fun things
in material science and robotics.
I look at the motion of the character.
I focus on how it delivers the speech, the sounds or the songs it's delivering.
The costume has to be right, the hair has to be right,
the texture of the skin has to be right.
For me that is the key to making something come alive.
If we find that that robot's not doing that,
we go and correct it, and we work with it until we get it right.
This here is Destini.
-...look into the future, my friend? -Yes.
[Ayala] The Destini project was actually a very fun project.
The question we were asking ourselves was,
"What happens when our characters become reactive and responsive to our guests?"
-[chuckles] -Now let me show you what I see.
[Ayala] This took our robotics to a new level.
Basically, we started applying artificial intelligence to our robots.
Now when people come up and they say,
"Where did you get such a bright and shiny future?"
Who are you going to thank? Huh?
-Destini. -Yes! Destini!
[Ayala] Luigi's Rollickin' Roadsters.
That was a great learning lesson for us
because we had to create an animation that brought the vehicle to life.
We were able to use traditional animation software
in order to program the vehicles themselves.
[singing in Na'vi]
[Ayala] So the Na'vi Shaman was a challenge for us.
She had to be expressive.
And so, we had to develop a new type of skin material
that would allow us to have that flexibility in the skin
that makes it look like she's alive.
This is actually an experimental setup that we had done of the lower face
to better understand how the lips move and how the--
It's gonna announce every word she says when she was singing in the attraction.
We wanted to tell our guests
that this character is not just there present as a robotic,
but it has a soul sitting there, and it's sharing that soul with you.
In order to do that, she had to have fluid motions.
So, instead of going with our traditional hydraulic ways
of moving mechanical systems,
we started using electric motors to deliver that smooth motion.
And people that saw her thought she was alive.
As a perfectionist, it's always really hard to let go.
You wanna make it perfect to what your vision is,
and at one point you have to stop,
and that's usually the hardest time because it's like letting go of your baby.
In that cross section between art and science,
Imagineers have to be in both worlds.
As an Imagineer and a scientist,
you want to take that artistic thing and be able to represent it
in the mechanical world, in the electronic world
and make sure that it reads like you're looking at a moving painting.
Imagineering to me is to ask that question, "What if?"
To look at something and say, "What if?" And then make it come true.
In a nutshell, that's what we do.