Backstage at Disney: Inside the secret control room for World of Color

[MUSIC] What's up guys, we are here, at the happiest place on earth, here at Disneyland, for their 60th anniversary. Now, we know they've improved the rides, the shows, but what's behind all that magic? It's technology, so we're gonna show you the technology and how they use it to tell their stories. All right, guys, we are here inside the World of Color show control room. Mike, this is amazing. Not a lot of people get to see this every day. So can you tell us, where exactly am I and what is all the stuff behind me? We're in a secret location behind Paradise Pier. Right now like you said this is the show control, nerve center for World of Color. In here we're able to control our fountains, our lights, our video effects, and of course the master show itself and our audio processing. It all originates from this room. Wow so this is just kind of surrounding the lagoon basically? Exactly, so our crew in here has a full view of the show itself to see what's going on. They have the cameras, we have status displays, we have cameras inside of our underwater electrical rooms. And of course we have our media which pops up over here so we can see what our video projectors are out putting throughout the entire show. That's pretty crazy now. Also, I mean there is a lot blinking lights. We like blinky things. How complex really is this if you kinda, just by what is really going on every time someone see the show. How many things are working together at once? We are working multiple thousands of pieces of equipment. We have over 11 hundred fountains alone. And each fountain has 40 some odd pieces of control points on that alone. We also have our strobes, MeeFog, fire effects. What's MeeFog? [LAUGH] MeeFog. Great question. What is MeeFog? MeeFog is an atomized water effect. So what it does it creates that low-lying fog along the Paradise Bay Lagoon. We'll move on from here up onto our top tier where now we'll look at our fountain controller. Okay. This is where it gets really exciting. So over here we have our fountain controller. You are able to initiate cues and you push a button. And then the whole show will keep going. And the fountains will go up and down for us as we want- Okay. It to function. Well, what happens if I press this one, Mike? Is not. [NOISE] [BLANK_AUDIO] So here, we're actually able to look at each fountain individually and tell, check on its status and its updates. Right here, as you look at here, here's our array of our fountains. These are all of our grid fountains which are single shots. She was up in the air. And then, of course, our robots that we developed are just beautiful. they're one of the main performers of the show. You know, they're able to move and dance. So, you get that moving dancing water feeling as the show's going on. And of course, some of them are able to switch nozzle types. So, one night, you're doing a straight slug of water, the next night, you're doing this great far effect [INAUDIBLE]. And of course, the lights around those two, because we've developed this beautiful lighting [UNKNOWN] absolutely beautiful and brilliant. And then of course back here one of the other main components of the show, is video we talk fountains we talk lighting and now we talk the special effects, and now we have video. As you can see right here, we are actually into our show as we speak. And it looks at our output of our 21 projectors in the show. But if you look down here to our main wall of video, we're able to see our big [UNKNOWN] screen setup, which is the largest [UNKNOWN] screen that we've ever created, 60 feet tall and the width of a football field. See, I mean, that's probably one of the most fascinating things about World of Color, that [UNKNOWN] screen. I mean, how much is being pumped through that? Because Pretty much creating a shield that you put that image on. It's really impressive. It is. We're actually creating that with the use of three different [UNKNOWN] nozzles. One on each table. So, each table has it's own nozzle powered off the same series of pumps that we have backstage that actually takes lagoon water, shoots it down through a main pipe out to our tables and keeps that water velocity going. We're pumping thousands of gallons of water per minute. Just drop it right back into the lagoon again and just re-circulating that on and on again. Alright. Well, thanks for your time and we'll be checking out Word of Color, Celebrate. [MUSIC] [SOUND]