I’ve always been a big fan of Disney Parks. I love being in a place where creative people (the talented Disney Imagineers) use way too much technology to create a meaningful experience and happy memories for guests. Disney Parks are the perfect blend of technology, creativity and, yes, business — combined with strong attention to detail; it’s also a happy place for people with all sorts of OCDs.

In 2018, I organized my birthday party, in our Montreal apartment, mostly inspired by Disneyland famous attractions and landmarks. The living room was Finding Nemo, the guest bedroom was Alice in Wonderland, and the bathroom was… The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror!

This year, I had no choice but to create a sequel to this birthday party — and decided to give it a Pixar flavour. Here’s how I invested way too much time and energy into what was a really fun party.

Welcoming Guests

Disney introduced in their parks the MagicBand a few years ago: an RFID-enabled wristband that carries not only your tickets to the park but also allows you to interact with some elements during your visit. I decided to recreate a similar experience by making badges with Disney characters, all of them built with an RFID chip.

Pixar-inspired RFID badges. Thirty-five different characters were available for the party.

Mobile web app for guests — French

After choosing their badge, guests were able to log into a mobile website made for the occasion and link their badge to a profile. Once everything was set up, they would be ready to start interacting with some elements in the party…

What was it used for? More on that later!

The website was built with Angular 7, and Firebase as a backend. It would call some of the “show” equipment directly in my apartment, via a Ngrok tunnel.

Badges are 13.56Mhz RFID white cards — I just printed a paper badge and inserted it in front of the card. A 2-digits ID on the badge was associated with the RFID chip ID in the database, so guests only entered the two digits instead of the full RFID badge ID.

Finding Nemo, aka. The Massive Jellyfish

Our living room had deep blue walls, making it the perfect underwater scene. We decided to recreate the Nemo setup we had last year, adding a light show in the mix.

We set up four different Philips Hue lights, shooting different colours, and removed a light fixture to replace it with a giant inflatable Jellyfish. We also added a UV light to reinforce the underwater effect.

Our living room is home to an aquarium, creating the perfect fishception.

Guests were able to start the forty seconds light show using their mobile web app (once every 5 minutes — as much as we like First Day from Nemo soundtrack, we didn’t want to trigger the whole light show every second).

A Node.js server would listen for events coming from the mobile web app to trigger a light show with LightKey. LightKey is a professional lighting show software, with a lot of advanced features. It is free for up to 24 channels, which is enough to control 8 Philips Hue lights. I bridged LightKey and the Hue lights with the dmx-hue software. It was not as smooth as real stage lights (the Hue bridge is limited with under ten requests/second, total), but it still did the trick. The light show was synchronized with an audio excerpt from Finding Nemo soundtrack.

When the show was not on, lights would randomly fade to other underwater tones to keep a “floating” ambiance in the room.

Costume Design with Edna Mode — in a bathtub

This one is my favourite. I always loved Edna Mode. The voice, the hair, the attitude.

Guests would scan their badge (just as Edna authenticates in to enter her workshop in The Incredibles movie). The reader would trigger a light show, that guests could interact with using a row of different arcade-style buttons. Each of them would trigger a different costume design — meaning a synchronized light and sound sequence.

The bathtub was filled with 4 LED par lights, and one LED Moving head, all controlled via LightKey and an ENTTEC OpenDMX adapter. Lights were directed to cast on a T-shirt that would act as a costume being built, playing with the transparency of the curtain.

A Node.js script running on a MacBook Pro would handle signal from the RFID reader and arcade buttons, then send a MIDI signal to LightKey to trigger show sequences. Oh, and also turn on and off the light in the bathroom at the appropriate moment.

Here is a look behind the scenes (or, in this case, the shower curtain):

The show configuration in LightKey

A connected photobooth with Inside Out hints

This one was not really about the decor but more about the feature. With all the different rooms we were preparing we eventually never found enough time to create an authentic Inside Out ambiance, so we just played with some pit balls and white lights to recreate the Memory Orbs from the movie.

Yes, I was dressed up as Alfredo Linguini

The fun part comes with the photobooth. A MacBook with a decent webcam would snap pictures of the guests. If they were happy with their picture, they just had to scan their badge — and would find the picture on their mobile app within the second. It was way more fun than expected — as only one guest would be able to get the picture, we were all competing to see who would scan their badge first and get the picture on their camera roll!

Behind the scenes, it worked with an Angular web app to take the picture, combined with a Node.js backend calling the Cloudinary image processing service to add the party logo as an overlay, crop the image and apply a set of auto corrections. Everything was pushed in a Firebase Firestore with the matching ID of the badge scanned.

Ratatouille lounge room

Ratatouille might be my favourite Pixar movie, but the Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy (“Remy’s Totally Zany Adventure”) from Disneyland Paris is for sure my favourite attraction. I love the idyllic Paris image and the tribute to cooking and good food taking place in the movie and the attraction.

With all the special effects happening in the different rooms in our apartment, we decided to have one calm spot, recreating some of this feeling. The room was quickly assembled, with some Ratatouille soundtrack, kitchen equipment in wooden and copper tones, some candles and a projection loop created for the occasion.

This room was a success, as the low volume and light allowed for good discussions with friends — the decor was not mindblowing, but it stood out as the cutest, coziest room.

Looking back on this party

There was way too much technology involved than required for a birthday party — but that’s what made it so much fun to build and experience. It required close to 60 hours of work, programming and assembling everything, with about a month anticipation in ordering equipment and getting familiar with software and accessories.

This party involved a lot of different technologies and helped me get more familiar with the show lighting world, after reading this exciting presentation given at IEEE by the Imagineer cast, almost 20 years ago.

I think I may be done with the Disneyland inspired theme for the next parties, but not with the eccentric technology… I’d love to share some of the elements I built for this party — drop me a line on Twitter, and I’ll be happy to help!

PS: I don’t own any of the intellectual rights associated with Disney, Pixar characters, trademarks or creations, and all the usage I did of their material was intended for a personal context.