by Robert W. Butler
The Kansas City Star
The proposed museum for Walt Disney's
Laugh-O-gram animation studio is several
years from completion.
But you can now "walk through" the site
via the Internet, thanks to the folks at
Lee's Summit-based Trinity Animation.
They've created a three-dimensional
cyberspace preview of the facility you
can access at www.trinity3d.com (click
on the "Disney walk-through").
At this stage visitors to the site will
find mostly empty rooms - the display
cases, posters and other artifacts will
be added later. But you can study the
floor plan, wander through the upstairs
rooms that will house a re-creation of
Disney's first animation studio, open
doors and go up and down stairs, drift
around the exhibition space with its
curving partitions and check out the 50
seat movie theater (a panorama of Disney
photographic images is "projected" on
the screen).
Trinity chief Jim Lammers, who designed
the site with colleague Amber West,
thinks this real-time walk-through is
unique.
"As far as I know, it's the first time a
proposed architectural project can be
walked through on the web by anybody who
dials up," he said.
In the past Lammers and his crew have
created for clients videos of proposed
buildings in which the camera seems to
float through a cyber environment. But
only with the recent development of
sophisticated animation software have
they been able to create a cyberworld
that the individual user negotiates.
"It's not only instantaneous, but you
animate it yourself by pointing the
mouse where you want to go," he said.
The Disney museum will be housed in the
old McConahy Building at 31st and
Forrest. In 1922 and '23 it was the home
of Disney's fledgling Laugh-O-gram
animation studio, where future animation
greats such as Disney, Ub Iwerks, Hugh
Harman, Rudy Ising and others learned
their craft by making black-and-white
silent cartoons.
It was also in the McConahy Building
that, according to legend, Walt Disney
caught and tamed a tiny rodent that
became the inspiration for Mickey Mouse.
Backers of Thank You, Walt Disney
continue to raise money for the
restoration project. The Disney family
has pledged $450,000 toward the project,
but organizers must raise an equal
amount locally.
