I saw the “Design your own Nightmare Before Christmas character” contest listed on the The Disney Blog and decided to enter it because I enjoy creative contests where they just don’t pick a winner at random. I thought the video from Tim Burton would be a pretty cool prize.

I spent about 2 hours designing a headless character, but I was wondered if it invoked Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow movie more than Nightmare before Christmas, so I scrapped it. In thinking about what would be more in spirit with the movie, I came up with the idea of playing off of the 3d aspect of the re-release. Soon I had the idea to combine two one-eye’d heads onto a single body. Read the rest of this entry

I recently got back from a trip to Walt Disney World, where I was lucky enough to play a still-in-testing game that is unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. The game is called Team Possible, and was at the EPCOT park at Walt Disney World. I was very impressed by the activities involved and the overall scope of the game. It’s not really a cell phone game -- it’s a game that uses a cell phone, in addition to many other physical devices, to create a real-world gaming environment hidden inside of a Disney park. I’ll explain below.

SPOILER ALERT: Below there are spoliers about the game. I’m not going to explain the game’s plot-step by-step but I am going to discuss some of it, and talk about the effects used and the experiences I’ve had with the game. If you want to play Team Possible yourself and remain spoiler-free, don’t read past this.

Amazing website designer, intrepid tiki reporter, and my girlfriend Humuhumu has an incredible story that starts with her wearing a vintage Tiki Room dress to a Disneyland Fan convention in Anahiem, and ends with her modeling a reproduction of the dress for Dinsey’s online retail website.

While we were at the NFFC convention to help with a presentation, I snapped a photo of Humuhumu wearing a vintage Tiki Room dress that was on loan to her from Disney artist Kevin Kidney. That photo got posted to my Tiki website, where some other Dinsey artists discovered it and mistook it for a vintage photo. Inspired by the photo, Disney decided to reproduce the dress design and sell it online as a limited edition item. The reproduction dress is a different color than the vintage one because the fabric was reproduced first for another Tiki Room hawaiian shirt.

When the reproduction dress was ready to be photographed for their website, Kevin contacted Humuhumu to be the model! Disney had us drive down to LA for the photoshoot, where I got to see a lot of the cool stuff they make for the Disney catalog and website while Humuhumu modeled the dress. The rest, as they say, is history!

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