Disney Cruise Line’s eighth ship is larger than Disney Treasure and Disney Destiny. The new Disney Adventure features several firsts: its home port is Singapore, a first for Disney Cruise Line, and the ship spans 1,122 feet (342 meters) long on 19 decks – it is the largest ship.
It’s also a half-built Disney-acquired ship, meaning the Imagineering team – who designed the rest of the fleet – had to redesign it and turn it into a real Disney ship.
Take the Imagination Garden space, essentially a “main street” at sea, themed after characters from the Once upon a time there was a studio short film celebrating 100 years of Walt Disney Animation. It is also the heart of the ship, with the first “castle at sea” and an ambitious stage that would be a technical feat even on land.
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The screen stretches nearly 30 feet tall and wraps around 50 feet, making it the largest screen ever installed on a Disney Cruise Line ship. It transforms the Disney adventure environment into a stage for everything from daytime character moments to large-scale performances. Think punchy, vibrant graphics at a sea party – “Let’s Set Sail” – or more spectacular environments at a variety of shows.
“This type of venue is really going to give us the opportunity to expand the type of storytelling and immersion that we’re going to create for our guests,” said Will Hastings, show lighting manager at Walt Disney Imagineering.
Shows here will include productions like “Avengers Assemble!” ”, which will see Marvel superheroes take to the stage – and sometimes in the sky – as well as other performances designed specifically for the Imagination Garden space.
Normally on any other Disney cruise ship the main floor is on the upper deck, in front of the main funnel, but that is not the case here. Perhaps intentional or perhaps since Disney had the ship half built, but the solution was the Imagination Garden with the main stage inside an open space in the middle of the ship, surrounded by balconies and guest cabins.
To keep the experience immersive and avoid annoying the cabins with excessive sound, Disney actually hid a sound system within the LED screen rather than installing speakers throughout the garden.
“Most of the stages, the speakers are outside, but we wanted to do something completely different here,” said Joey Licklider, senior audio systems designer at Disney Live Entertainment.
The setup includes 27 modules across 81 bays and around 2,400 speakers, all hidden behind the massive display. The screen itself uses what Disney calls a mesh LED, a transparent design where rows of pixels are removed to allow sound to pass through the screen.
But the stage is not limited to the screen: it is also designed for moments where the characters and superheroes can literally fly.
“This technology was developed to fly a performer anywhere in the garden area,” said Andrew Cooke, CTO of Disney Live Entertainment.
Previous Disney Cruise Line legs typically allowed performers to travel along a more limited aerial path. “Our other ships could just do the flight in 2D, right, X, Y, that’s it,” said Patrick Trzeciak, senior technical director at Disney Live Entertainment.
The system relies on large winches hidden in the ship’s structure to control the performers as they fly across the room.
“The winches themselves are huge. They don’t fit through any doors,” Cooke noted. “So something we had to do was kind of peel off the ceiling, kind of like a can of tuna, put the winch on there, and then close it again.”
The layout of the Imagination Garden makes these flying moments even more unique, as Spider-Man or Scarlet Witch will literally be flying right next to a cabin’s balcony.
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Designing such a large space also introduced a challenge that Imagineers don’t typically face on land: weight.
Cruise ships operate on strict weight budgets, and when designing this space, the Imagineers realized their initial plans far exceeded what the ship could support.
Through a series of design changes and material swaps, the team ultimately removed approximately 70 tons of steel from the project, making this ambitious milestone possible without adding to the ship’s weight, as shown in the episode.
You can now watch We Call It Imagineering Episode 8 on YouTube, and it will soon be streaming on Disney+ – one of the best streaming services.
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