Seuss Details – Little House Parting Shot

Here is the parting shot for one of the little houses at Seuss Landing.  This is the same house that we have explored all week.  As we began the week I described the lightning rod, so that seems like a good place to end.  The company that fabricated the lightning rods was was very accommodating.  Since each rod (or actually finial) was to be custom made they were very willing to make each one different.  The problem was that would have meant that I would have had to design each one.

I'm not exactly lazy when it comes to design.  I really love to do it.  But as field art director I had seven buildings with countless details to manage when the offer came up.  This sort of design is easy (and relatively inexpensive) during the initial design phase.  But not so in the field.

I knew that each finial would be bent differently because of the crude bending method.  By turning and pointing the finials in different directions they would all look different.  Also, it's difficult to see more than two, or three of the little houses all at once.  Finally, if one were on a mission to investigate the design of each little house, one could only conclude that the similarities were intentional.  The similarities give houses a sense unity within the Seuss world.

Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Seuss Details – Little House Window

When you're trying to make dreams come true one of the most important things to remember is the truth.  It doesn't matter what kind of whimsical place you've designed, the truth is that gravity won't change -- and neither will the effects of rain water.

This little house at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure in Seuss Landing fell victim to the laws of nature.  The sill of the window was sloped slightly in instead of out.  Now this isn't exactly the kind of structure that one takes a level to, so the error was easily missed.  That is, until the first rains came.  A standing pool quickly developed that would have eventually damaged the structure.  Fortunately the problem was quickly noticed (it was actually hard to miss), and easily corrected.

The foam finish was so easy to work with that the repair was made in a couple of hours.  The patch had to completely dry before it could be repainted.

Seuss Details – Little House Door

The details at Seuss Landing Islands of Adventure just keep getting smaller and smaller.  This a door for one of the little houses that sit on top of the Emporium shop and the Moose Juice, Goose Juice drink stand. The door was designed as an access panel to maintain the interior lighting.  The door is less than three-feet tall.  The door was carved out of a resin coated foam and glued onto a frosted plastic panel.  It is intensional that a crack of light is left around the outside edge of the door.

Seuss Details – Little House

In Seuss Landing at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure there are so many wonderful little details.  This is one of the many little houses above the Emporium shop.  That crazy little finial is actually a lightning rod.  Several of these rods were custom made and then bent into odd directions.

Seuss Details – Lightning Rods

This week I’ll be posting some details from my field art direction work at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure. 

When I’m making dreams come true I have to pay attention to all dreamers.  My bosses, and the Theodor Geisel estate, dream of a world that looks just like something Dr. Seuss would have drawn himself.  The Florida building department dreams of buildings that meet the building code, including things like lightning rods. 

In Seuss Landing nothing is straight, and that includes lightning rods.  The silver stem coming out of the pillberry bush, on top of the Gertrude McFuzz entrance to the Emporium shops, is actually a lightning rod.  We carefully researched the code and there was no requirement that lightning rods had to be straight – they only needed to be a certain distance away from the structure.

This is not the only crazy lightning rod in the area.  But it might be the only one that you’ll be able to spot.

Seuss Landing

By the time that Seuss Landing at Universal’s Islands of Adventure was complete I had art directed seven facades. The final buildings are the icons that make Seuss Landing what it is today.

Here is just one example of a completed façade. Visit Universal’s Islands of Adventure and Seuss Landing to see more of my work – it will be all around you.

The Colorful World of Dr. Seuss

Before the Islands of Adventure project moved to Florida, art director Wes Cook had painted color elevations for all of the buildings. The colors were carefully chosen, often using the books as reference. The two-dimensional paintings seemed to cover every side of the building. But Seuss Landing is a 3-dimensional organic land growing in the Florida sun.

Colors that had high contrast on paper appeared pale in the field. Two-dimensional drawings have lines at corners where Seuss buildings don’t have corners. Figuring out how to respect Wes Cook’s original vision while working with the reality in the field presented the ultimate challenge for making dreams come true.

I convinced management that the models had to be painted in order to solve the problems at a small scale and a small price. Repainting a giant green ham was expensive (I know because it happened). Colors had to be pumped up.

The stripes on the cat’s hat are a deep salmon in the book. That’s fine in print, but in the Florida sun the primer coat that matched the book looked pink. Management asked me repeatedly if this was the right color. There was only one right answer, “No, that’s just the primer.” I chose a new deep red that actually fit what everyone had in mind.

Here is a photo for one of the models after it was painted. I had permission to the have the models painted, but I only had one painter assigned to the job of seven models. I ended up painting on much of the models myself in order to get the job done in time to be useful.

Shaping Up Seuss

I had seven facades to art direct while I was in Florida working on Seuss Landing at Islands of Adventure. The sculptors did a brilliant job of carving huge blocks of foam into the world of Dr. Seuss. The foam thickness varied from 2-inches to 2-feet. As the Styrofoam was shaped white beads were shed and floated about like snow. But this was Florida in the summer and, even though it looked like Christmas, this was very hot work.

Here sculptor Joe is shaping a header over a window on the Emporium retail store. Generally the talented team of six sculptors could look at the ½ -inch scale models, that we kept for them nearby in the field, and turn it into a full-scale reality. On rare occasion I tried my own hand at the work, especially when it came to wrinkles.

After the foam was carved into shape it was covered in a thin coat of plasticized concrete and fabric mesh as a weather-tight hard-coat. Then it could be textured and ready for paint.

Seuss in 3D

My time at Universal was extended from the original 3-months and I was assigned to draft all of the rest of the buildings in the area. I worked from Wes Cook’s concept designs and filled in all of the missing information necessary to turn these 2-dimensional drawings into 3-dimensional models and buildings.

Management was pleased enough with my work, and my easy ability to communicate with others, that it was decided that I would art direct the construction of the show models. There were seven building structures in the island and they were all constructed off the studio lot at Rijn & Reisman.

This is an example of their work. Believe it or not, as organic as these models are they were carved from wood. Bondo (a putty often used in automotive body repair) was used to fill in gaps and make changes. Of course, other plastic materials were used too. Once the model was completed it was all painted in a primer gray.

After the models were done they were digitized (points on the model were found in 3-dimensions) so that computer models could be created. The architects used the computer models to add internal structure to the forms.

Once the model work was complete the project was ready to move into the field for construction and I was ready to move onto my next assignment.

Universal Studios Creative

I left Landmark Entertainment Group and went to work for Universal Studios Creative. At Universal they were in the midst of designing a new theme park for Florida called Islands of Adventure. The park was divided into several lands, or islands, and one of those was based upon the work of Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss.

The art director and conceptual designer of the island was Wes Cook. Wes was brilliant, and a little bit eccentric too. But his eccentricity was always tolerated because of his brilliance. No one else could have conceived of the island in quite the way that Wes had. Some of his previous work included Sid and Marty Krofft’s H.R. Pufnstuf and the Living Island. For Seuss Landing Wes had designed a whimsical collection of buildings and rides that defied the rules of architecture.

It took senior art director Wes Cook, art director Gary Lee and three show set designers to execute the plans for the buildings. The only problem was that Wes wasn’t happy with the work of the show set designers. Wes wanted me.

When I came on board I immediately became the replacement for two show set designers and in 3-months I did what two people couldn’t do in 6-months. I took the wonderful concepts and designs that Wes had generated and I turned them into drawings that the architects, engineers and model builders could work from.

This is a drawing for the Emporium shop in Seuss Landing. The island was designed without any straight lines and this is an example of the work needed to accomplish that. The twists and turns in the buildings were created in a particular rhythm with each other and those twists and curves had to be reproducible. My drawings showed just how to recreate these shapes and still hide a simple structural shape inside.