Veteran Walt Disney Imagineer Joe Rohde has revealed his secret to storytelling in theme parks, saying that to successfully utilise an IP, attractions creators must put visitors at the centre of their own immersive fantasy world.

Recently celebrating the launch of his latest Disney project – Pandora ‘The World of Avatar’ at Orlando’s Animal Kingdom – Rhode said that creators of attractions based on film IPs such as Avatar or Star Wars must consider format in the theatre versus format in the theme park realm.

“We build story worlds, not necessarily story plots,” said Rohde, speaking as part of the IAAPA Legends Panel.

“A film is a format that allows you to explore the character-based side of the storytelling world. You follow characters through a plot and it takes about 90 minutes to do. What we do is much more about direct experiences – what could and is going to happen to you inside this world where these things also happened to those characters.”

According to Rohde, who joined Walt Disney Imagineering in 1980 during the development of Epcot, the main trap attractions creators can fall into when working with a film IP is recreating a world but not including the visitor as an active part of that world.

“When you go into a theatre to watch a movie you’re rendered pretty much inert,” he said.

“You sit in the dark, in the quiet, and you watch something happen to somebody else. A lot of our emotional attachment to the story comes from the things that happen to this person. But it takes time. It’s not done well in the first two minutes like it might be in a theme park, it’s done well over an hour-and-a-half.

“When I go into a park, I’m up on my feet, my body is moving though space either under my own volition or in a vehicle. In the theme park, I’m anything but inert. I don’t have the spare mental framework to pay attention to what’s happening to some other person, I’m paying attention to what’s happening to me.

“The whole meaning of the story has to turn upside down now and we have to figure out what it is about this world that could ever be meaningful to a person who is experiencing it directly as something happening to them.”

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