[Evans] When we're working to build a new experience,
to bring a new experience to life, we have to start somewhere.
Anything to try to put something tangible, be it physical or digital,
in front of the people around you, so that you can get a sense of,
"What is this? What's exciting about this?
Should we move forward with a project like this?"
[Evans] My name is Leslie Evans,
and I'm a senior Research and Development Imagineer.
I'm an engineer and a designer that works using cutting edge technology
to bring new experiences to life for parks and resorts.
It's a safe place where people can dream big
and try to do a project that's ambitious and kinda crazy.
People can try to solve problems that feel impossible.
It's our job in this group to identify and try to solve those problems
so we can really push the boundaries and bring next-generation experiences to life.
I was actually born in Florida.
So as a very small person,
I was very close to Walt Disney World, and we went there all the time.
I have very vivid memories of this totally magic-filled day
where you just had no care in the world.
It was just you and a bunch of cousins just running all over this park.
There was some knowledge that was going in when I was a real little kid
going to this park all the time that later started to percolate back out of like,
"Oh, wait. There must be people making all of this stuff."
So from a very young age, you know, I was making things.
I was curious about how things were put together.
I wanted to understand how things worked.
I had a hard time choosing what I wanted to do, in all honesty.
I was getting an engineering degree and a business degree at the same time.
I also got a Fine Arts minor, because I was passionate in art and design.
There was this broad background of knowledge that I had accumulated.
But the great thing about this job is
I can apply all of these disciplines at one job.
I love the fact that I don't have to choose.
And we are trying to solve new, different, hard problems every day.
Okay, so we're gonna tie his old brain
-into his new perception system. -Okay.
[Evans] There are three vyloo that are on display in the queue line
of the Guardians of the Galaxy - Mission: Breakout! attraction.
Our guests love our characters.
They are amazing, magical moments of connection
that people have with characters that they have seen in movies,
that they really feel that they have this deep connection with.
So, the vyloo project started as, sort of, a question we asked ourselves.
Which was, "Can we build some relatively simple animatronic characters
that really have the ability to emote?
And can we think about how we can program and edit those personalities,
kind of based on how you would talk to an actor?"
We literally had a control palette that you could slide back-and-forth
to, sort of, control how introverted or how extroverted were those characters.
So we did a lot of studying up front to try to understand,
"How do they respond to the stimulus around them?"
We went in the direction of actually building our own creature
that didn't exist anywhere on this planet.
We didn't wanna get locked into a character that we already know
and has, sort of, a defined personality and defined motion set.
We wanted the ability to experiment.
If a guest leans in or does a face tilt toward him,
we have different things to do for that.
How can you tell by looking at this thing that it's seeing you as a person?
That maybe it's excited to see you.
Maybe it's not totally certain about who you are,
and it might be a little bit shy.
We wanted to be able to play around with
all those personality types on one character
and that was, sort of, how we ended up doing the character design we did.
What's incredible about this place inside the Walt Disney Company
is that we're making things all day, every day.
We will always continue to make things,
and I think no one else is really doing it in this way.
We're using them for entertainment.
We're trying to bring robots to life
to make them into characters to entertain people.
That always requires us to get our hands dirty and make,
because even if there's something existing that we'd wanna use,
we always gotta twist it a little bit to make it work for our use case.
Over the last couple of years, I have spent a fair amount of time
working with animatronic faces that have tons of complex geometry,
that you really need to get in there, model, print it out and understand,
"How does it look? How does it move?"
I think that's part of what drew me here, was this hands-on aspect to this job
that really will stay with you the entire time you're with this group.
And for me, as someone who's been hands-on since childhood, it's a dream.
I wanna be someone here who is supporting this legacy that Walt Disney started.
If it was pushing the boundaries of what animatronics could do,
or if it was pushing the boundaries of what immersive worlds are,
and work on a great team with the most talented people in the world.