<i>The Lion King</i>; virtual reality
As a birthday gift from my parents, I went to a showing of The Lion King last night. (No, I'm not the big three-oh yet. My birthday isn't until June.) It was a fantastic spectacle. They even included Lebo M's african vocals from Rythm of the Pride Lands: Music Inspired By The Lion King, many of which were based on Hans Zimmer's orchestral score, and which were arranged after the film. I've enjoyed that CD for a decade and was surprised and delighted to hear it in the broadway production.
I came away highly inspired about the shows I'd like to create involving costumes and puppets. The experience of epiphany brought back a memory from almost a decade ago, when grandpa took me to EPCOT center and I was selected out of a tour group to playtest a prototype virtual reality magic carpet ride. These days it's finished and employed at Disney's DreamQuest. But back then, outside of science fiction, hardly any "man on the street" could tell you what virtual reality meant. I came down off that apparatus feeling like my life had changed forever. I realized that it was possible to fuse my greatest interests-- animation, puppetry, and interactive computer entertainment-- into a new medium of character storytelling. However, when I asked the staff about it, all they were looking for were inventors, and they just let the inventors create the artistic side. This is why the level designs were poor. If I could live my life again I'd become proficient in technology as an excuse to get my foot in the door of the content-creation side of virtual reality. Currently everybody's just concerned with making the machines and just getting them work.
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