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[Evans] When we're working
to build a new experience,

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to bring a new experience to life,
we have to start somewhere.

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Anything to try to put something tangible,
be it physical or digital,

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in front of the people around you,
so that you can get a sense of,

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"What is this? What's exciting about this?

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Should we move forward
with a project like this?"

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[Evans] My name is Leslie Evans,

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and I'm a senior
Research and Development Imagineer.

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I'm an engineer and a designer that works
using cutting edge technology

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to bring new experiences to life
for parks and resorts.

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It's a safe place where
people can dream big

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and try to do a project
that's ambitious and kinda crazy.

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People can try to solve problems
that feel impossible.

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It's our job in this group to identify
and try to solve those problems

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so we can really push the boundaries and
bring next-generation experiences to life.

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I was actually born in Florida.

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So as a very small person,

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I was very close to Walt Disney World,
and we went there all the time.

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I have very vivid memories
of this totally magic-filled day

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where you just had no care in the world.

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It was just you and a bunch of cousins
just running all over this park.

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There was some knowledge that was going in
when I was a real little kid

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going to this park all the time that later
started to percolate back out of like,

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"Oh, wait. There must be people
making all of this stuff."

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So from a very young age,
you know, I was making things.

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I was curious about
how things were put together.

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I wanted to understand how things worked.

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I had a hard time choosing
what I wanted to do, in all honesty.

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I was getting an engineering degree
and a business degree at the same time.

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I also got a Fine Arts minor, because
I was passionate in art and design.

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There was this broad background
of knowledge that I had accumulated.

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But the great thing about this job is

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I can apply all of these disciplines
at one job.

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I love the fact
that I don't have to choose.

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And we are trying to solve new, different,
hard problems every day.

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Okay, so we're gonna tie his old brain

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-into his new perception system.
-Okay.

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[Evans] There are three vyloo
that are on display in the queue line

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of the Guardians of the Galaxy -
Mission: Breakout! attraction.

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Our guests love our characters.

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They are amazing, magical moments
of connection

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that people have with
characters that they have seen in movies,

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that they really feel
that they have this deep connection with.

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So, the vyloo project started as,
sort of, a question we asked ourselves.

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Which was, "Can we build some
relatively simple animatronic characters

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that really have the ability to emote?

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And can we think about how we can program
and edit those personalities,

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kind of based on
how you would talk to an actor?"

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We literally had a control palette
that you could slide back-and-forth

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to, sort of, control how introverted
or how extroverted were those characters.

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So we did a lot of studying up front
to try to understand,

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"How do they respond
to the stimulus around them?"

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We went in the direction
of actually building our own creature

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that didn't exist anywhere on this planet.

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We didn't wanna get locked
into a character that we already know

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and has, sort of, a defined personality
and defined motion set.

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We wanted the ability to experiment.

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If a guest leans in
or does a face tilt toward him,

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we have different things to do for that.

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How can you tell by looking at this thing
that it's seeing you as a person?

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That maybe it's excited to see you.

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Maybe it's not totally certain
about who you are,

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and it might be a little bit shy.

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We wanted to be able to play around with

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all those personality types
on one character

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and that was, sort of, how we ended up
doing the character design we did.

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What's incredible about this place
inside the Walt Disney Company

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is that we're making things
all day, every day.

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We will always continue to make things,

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and I think no one else
is really doing it in this way.

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We're using them for entertainment.

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We're trying to bring robots to life

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to make them into characters
to entertain people.

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That always requires us
to get our hands dirty and make,

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because even if there's something existing
that we'd wanna use,

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we always gotta twist it a little bit
to make it work for our use case.

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Over the last couple of years,
I have spent a fair amount of time

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working with animatronic faces
that have tons of complex geometry,

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that you really need to get in there,
model, print it out and understand,

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"How does it look? How does it move?"

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I think that's part of what drew me here,
was this hands-on aspect to this job

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that really will stay with you
the entire time you're with this group.

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And for me, as someone who's been
hands-on since childhood, it's a dream.

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I wanna be someone here who is supporting
this legacy that Walt Disney started.

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If it was pushing the boundaries
of what animatronics could do,

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or if it was pushing the boundaries
of what immersive worlds are,

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and work on a great team with
the most talented people in the world.