Designing a Cruise Ship | Making the Disney Wish | Mini Episode 3
The ship needs to be all about enchantment. We take you into a world where the design idea of Enchantment will bring our shift and the stories that we tell alive. We have over 1.2 million square feet of spaces. If you have chopped the ship up and you laid it on the ground as one-story pieces of venues and staterooms and you name it, it would cover over 28 acres.
Our Disney Wish will be 144,000 gross tons, so she's a really big cruise ship. There are boats that are smaller than 39 meters in length, right? But this is the width of the ship. The most impressive space on the Disney Wish is going through the Grand Hall. Nowadays, cruise ships don't typically have very impressive Grand Halls anymore. It's actually really challenging from a structural point of view.
The Grand Hall is the heart and soul of the ship. It's of that intimate scale that welcomes our guests very personally onto the ship. That's where we want you to begin to forget everything else on the outside world. You're beginning this magical cruise. We have a lovely bronze Cinderella; she is holding court over the hall. She's going to be welcoming us into the cruise ship.
The right look for Cinderella was a matter of going back to the original film and collecting many stills of her. My favorite close-up of hers is this one here, and it has the look on her face that I wanted to have when the guests come into the ship. A Walt Disney Theater is a large space inside the ship. Not only does it have to be free, so there's no columns, no pillars in the middle because we want free sightlines for all our guests to watch the show, but then you have the added element of the show itself.
The green on the walls originally was going to be another color. Interestingly enough, though, we have a tremendous amount of map projection in this space. This color takes projection really well. Map projection has been a game changer for us; it really immerses guests in the story. We take over the entire space through map projection, right? So it comes out past the proscenium and just envelops the whole theater. It just really helps tell the story.
I'm really looking forward to this, you know. It's been a couple of months since we've been here. Whoa! Before it's built, the 3D renderings and the way that we walk from space to space, it truly was this incredible guide. We can see the finishes, the materials. We have over 126 unique carpets. It might sound easy, like, "Oh, watch the carpet for the 1243 staterooms," but that was where publishing really helped us out.
It was great when we met Laura. She came with her old design team; she wanted us to help her with the carpet design. I pulled out a vintage Cinderella book, and there were these amazing borders that were hand-painted. We just got really inspired by the vintage art and the feelings we got from it. Matt filigree, you can see how that has made its way through so many things on the ship.
The Animation Research Library houses the vast collection of animation artwork from the company that stems back to the early 20s. We have about 65 million pieces of art in our collection. We have well over a thousand pieces of artwork on this ship; it's really incredible. For the 1923 restaurant, we had 14 display cases, and we found some of the best pieces to help support that storyline. It's a museum in itself; there's no other place in the world you'll see that amount of Disney artwork.
True immersive design is guiding all of your senses, all of the emotions in your guests in a way that's so touching. It's unforgettable. [Music] [Music]