A favorite type of tourist attraction these days is the theme park featuring so-called "dark rides" which transport visitors into three-dimensional worlds surpassing their wildest dreams. If you've made excursions to Disneyland, Disney World, Universal Studios, Six Flags Over Georgia or similar parks, you've no doubt encountered computerized robotic pirates, presidents, monsters or space aliens. And you've probably wondered where such creatures originate. At Disneyland and Disney World, animated attractions are masterminded and constructed by Disney employees. There are but a handful of companies providing such creations for other theme parks, and one of the biggest is AVG Productions, Inc., of Valencia, California. In fact, AVG is responsible for the Battle of Galactica and Castle Dracula attractions of the Universal Studios tour and the Monster Plantation at Six Flags Over Georgia. The three-year-old company is the brainchild of Alvaro Villa, who moved to the United States from Colombia as a young student. Originally interested in an aviation career, Villa worked on the space program for years before going to work for Walt Disney Productions. He started his own business AV for his own initials and G for the initial of his mother's maiden name in a small building in Sun Valley, California, with only three employees. Today the company occupies a 12,000 square-foot building and employs about 30 people skilled in electronics, mechanics, sculpture, casting, animated drawing and the various forms of cosmetic arts. To begin any three-dimensional animated show or ride, a theme or underlying story is first decided upon. Characters are outlined and an artist draws up full-color sketches as guidelines. Miniature scale models are made of all the figures so that the animators can get a three-dimensional view of how things are going to look. These are placed in a miniature set to determine mechanics, lighting, costume design and color selections. From this the sculptors develop full-size figures. Beginning with a polyurethane base, they add clay to fashion the features, using the painstaking finesse of a fine artist. Room must be allowed inside figures for pneumatic cylinders, air lines and the framework, and the features must be workable. If chin movement is needed, a movable chin must be
constructed from a mold made from the completed sculpture. The mold is used to make full-size fiberglass parts. A stainless steel frame that will be the basis for the figure's movements is designed and inserted into the shell. Movable features such as eyes may be attached at this time. The whole assembly is then corrected from a plastics viewpoint, adapting the body to enable its working parts to fit smoothly inside. This may involve sanding, grinding or even cutting. "It's important to catch errors as we go along so we don't have to start all over again if things don't jell somewhere down the line," says Art Director John Morgan Davies. The next step is to install the plumbing cylinders, air lines, valves and fittings that will give a breath of life to the figure. AVG prefers to use air or pneumatics rather than oil or hydraulics. Pneumatics makes it fairly simple to close down one section or one figure without shutting down an entire attraction, and it avoids the mess that can occur with oil. "There's an electronic circuit which gives a signal to a pneumatic or air valve," Davies explains. "That valve allows air to go through air lines into a cylinder and that cylinder moves a piece of plastic which may or may not have a flexible skin on the outside of it. That's essentially how things move in pneumatic theatronics."
Up to now our basic monster has little character other than its shape and proposed movements, but a trip to the "beauty parlor," or cosmetics department, is about to change the ugly duckling into something more swanlike or more horrible, if that's what's prescribed. Acrylic fur, hair, feathers, paint, clothes and a variety of other accessories are added. Then it's on to the programming room where the creation receives such characteristics as a previously taped voice. Most of the pneumatic cylinders, interface boards and electronic components used are manufactured at AVG. "We use standard equipment from a computer company for the CPU the brains and we have our own electronics department to adapt this with the animated figures," Villa says. "Then we put the whole thing in one big package and in a console which will control the whole show." Where early Disney "dark rides" needed a console the size of AVG's computer for every one or two figures, micro-electronic advances now allow AVG to use a single computer for an entire show. "Disney was ahead of his time," says Villa, who patented three inventions for Disney and has strong respect for his former employer. "What we are doing now is not more sophisticated, but more simple." New technologies have improved the quality of the rides and the animated figures. A first-rate animated figure is now capable of doing about 50 different movements. Altogether, the Monster Plantation involves around 1,000 individual movements. A truly free-walking, human-type figure is still a thing of the future, although the effect has been achieved realistically with the use of a track on wheels. But AVG made a walking skunk that comes very close to the movements of the real animal. The final step in the preparation of an animated attraction is bolting the figures to a place on the set. At that time, AVG normally turns routine maintenance and upkeep over to the purchaser. One of the AVG's goals is to have properties of its own to maintain, the same as Disney. One idea that has been under discussion is an AVG attraction which would feature animated show business celebrities.