Designing New Worlds

Scholastic Art: What is your job? 

Stefan Hellwig: I am an executive creative director with Walt Disney Imagineering at Animal Kingdom. The word Imagineer combines the words imagine and engineer. We have 140 disciplines of Imagineers, from sculptors to landscape architects. I lead teams of Imagineers to create unique experiences, such as Pandora— The World of Avatar, for our guests. 

SA: How closely is Pandora connected to Avatar, the movie?

SH: We wanted to be authentic to the world of Pandora as depicted in the movie and the upcoming sequels. But our Pandora experience is set a generation after the last Avatar sequel. So our experience connects to Pandora, rather than to specific characters in the movies.

SA: What brings the experience to life?

SH: We paid great attention to detail. There are these incredibly large-scale plants in the movie. One of them was inspired by the agave plant, a real plant on Earth. So for something like that, we could plant a real agave plant at the base of the much larger Pandoran version that we designed and built. One plant is living. One is not. But together they look absolutely real.

SA: What challenges do you face?

SH: With each new project, we are building something we have never built before. So after the concept stage, when we know what we want to create—such as a floating mountain—we then face the challenge of, “Well, how are we going to build that?” So we go down a series of paths, in terms of how we might practically build a concept like that. Some ideas work. Some don’t. But ultimately, we land on a solution that works. And that’s incredibly exciting.

SA: What do you love about your job?

SH: Every day is different. I’ve collaborated with experts in many fields who are amazingly talented. And knowing that families will experience the products of our work is incredibly rewarding.