A look back at my self-produced sypmosium at the 2018/2019 EPCOT International Festival of the Arts.

Starting with an experience we can all relate to, coloring with crayons as small children, I take Guests on a magic journey to reconnect them with their creative spark. Through the use of audio clips from and artwork reminiscent of EPCOT Center's original version of the "Journey Into Imagination" attraction, I try to share how each of us collects sparks of inspiration from the world around us and how those sparks can combine to create new "Figments"... tangible connections to our life's most magical moments.

Originally presented during the 2018 season of the EPCOT International Festival of the Arts, this fully self-produced symposium served as the "opening act" of the 2019 season and played to a "standing room only" crowd of festival Guests during its run.

Using recordings provided by attendees and Disney, I have created this "souvenir edition" of the presentation to commemorate the experience. Enjoy!

In late 2017, I was invited by the festival team at Disney to be a featured presenter/artist at the 2018 EPCOT International Festival of the Arts. The request was that I produce and present a 25-minute symposium on a creative topic, and it was suggested that I consider demonstrating how I use Adobe Photoshop to "paint" the digital wallpapers the company was releasing through the Disney Parks Blog.

Realizing how little I would be able to accomplish in the time allotted (and how boring that presentation would probably be to the attendees), I offered to take attendees on "an abstract journey that will remind them that they are a creative individual."

They loved it.

Now, I just needed to figure out what the heck that all meant!

As a huge fan of Disney history, I decided to leverage one of my favorite extinct EPCOT attractions... the ORIGINAL version of "Journey Into Imagination". Through artwork inspired by scenes from the ride paired with clips of audio from the attraction that I could interact with, I realized I could use the attraction's thesis that "one little spark of inspiration is at the heart of all creation... right at the start of everything that's new, one little spark lights up for you!" as the message for my symposium.

About one week before I was scheduled to give the first presentation in 2018, I experienced a catastrophic computer crash that resulted in the loss of over 50% of the beautiful original artwork I had created and the video file I had spent weeks perfecting the timing and audio of.

Rather than contact the festival team and cancel my participation, I took whatever artwork had survived the hard drive crash and a few of the incomplete elements I had randomly saved on a thumb drive and pieced together a symposium that was just a shadow of the one I had prepared to present. While he script didn't change much, all of the interactions with the Dreamfinder and Figment Audio I had planned to do were no longer possible, and all the paintakingly re-created attraction scenes were reduced to simplistic title screens that lacked any of the magic I wanted to bring to the presentation.

But...Even with all of the setbacks, I was informed that the presentation was highly-rated by attendees and that I was invited back to present at the following year's festival. I immediately began the process rebuilding the entire presentation. Having learned an important lesson during the crash and ensuring that I wouldn't experience another total loss during the process, I saved backup copies of all of my work on a thumb drive every 15-minutes. Let this be a lesson to other young desigers... BACK UP YOUR WORK!