THE YOUNG & THE RESTLESS
Four years into their careers, FUNWORLD catches up with five designers who at one time dreamed of working in the attractions industry. Did they make it?
by Keith Miller
In October 2005, FUNWORLD profiled five up-and-coming designers (“Ready to Dazzle Us All Over Again”) who had creative interest in various segments of the attractions industry. They represented the next generation of artistic and engineering talent responsible for creating the astonishing designs that hopefully would keep us entertained and awed for years to come.
Fresh out of school or about to graduate, they all talked about their passion for design work, what originally inspired them, and how they dreamed of applying their skills. Three of the designers were graduates of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, one was a current student there, and one was a graduate of Yale and MIT.
Fast forward to 2009, and all five are still designing, including two in the attractions industry. FUNWORLD caught up with them recently for an update on their careers: what they’ve designed, what they’ve learned along the way, and what they want to do next.
Robert Bennett
Orlando
When FUNWORLD profiled Robert Bennett in 2005, he had just joined KX International in Orlando and was working on some animatronic characters for a zoo and for a Rainforest Cafe. This year finds Robert still in Orlando and still working on animatronics, but the past four years have had all of the ups and downs of a roller coaster.
 “First, I left KX and went to work for a shop making [architectural] models for resorts,” he says. “I left there and went to Nassal [Company] and worked on Phase Three of Atlantis [resort] in the Bahamas. Then I left Nassal, and a friend and I started Serenade, our own animatronics company, but that quickly failed. Then I went to work for UCFab (www.ucfab.com/animatronics), then left. And now I’m back at UCFab!”
Bennett says though he’s been with several companies, he worked on some amazing projects. “I installed the Rainforest [Cafe] in Cairo, then the Rainforest in Istanbul, and next I go to Dubai for about two weeks to do the Rainforest there,” he says. “I was also the art lead for the T-Rex [restaurant in Orlando] for the animatronics and will be doing the T-Rex in Reno, Nevada.”
Bennett says the ups and downs of his career thus far haven’t quashed his enthusiasm for theme parks; he holds annual passes for all the major parks in Orlando and attended IAAPA Attractions Expo when it was in town last year.
Jason Battin
Morgantown, West Virginia
Jason Battin was the only one of the five designers FUNWORLD originally profiled who was still in school at the time. He later graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in December 2005 and went straight to Chatham University in Pittsburgh, earning a master’s degree in interior architecture. There he learned to do the interior design and casework on buildings, mostly commercial.
 “I then worked for Burt Hill [architectural firm] in 2007 and 2008, doing interior design work in Dubai and Abu Dhabi on shopping malls, skyscrapers, and housing developments,” he says. “One of the skyscrapers was 100 stories tall!” But the international economic recession that hit in 2008 and severely impacted fast-growing markets like Dubai eventually had Battin laid off from Burt Hill, which greatly disappointed him.
Now he’s designing custom-built wood furniture in Morgantown, West Virginia. Though he’s glad he has work, it’s not his dream job and not what he envisioned doing four years ago. Battin says he still loves going to amusement parks and hasn’t lost his dream of working in electronics design. “It’s still there, but it’s going to take some work to get to it,” he says. “I feel the beauty of this is that as long as I keep working, I’m always learning.”
Shawn McKinney
Los Angeles
One word to describe the design skills of Shawn McKinney: versatile. From scenic painting, to animatronic masks, to sculpture, to music video sets, to display posters, to custom motorcycles, he certainly has a breadth of talent and experience.
McKinney worked for KX International in Orlando making animatronics after graduating from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in September 2004. But he says about a year later, KX began laying people off, so he headed for Los Angeles.
 “I went to L.A. and thought I’d be in the makeup industry and doing stop-motion, but I fell into the art world where I got a job as a scenic painter, and now I’ve become an art director and production designer,” he says. He has a 6,000- square-foot design studio and opened an art gallery called Nomad Los Angeles (www.nomadlosangeles.com) with two friends. He’s continued to dabble in animatronics and says he recently did a full mask for a children’s movie, “Nic and Tristan.”
Comparing design work in the attractions industry versus the movies, McKinney says: “I loved how much in the [attractions industry] people put the budget into making the work beautiful and perfect, and the animatronics we did were fully finished, whereas in the film industry, we just do the ‘show side,’ where it’s all just a facade. We just do the side shot by the camera, and it doesn’t have to last.”
His latest design venture involves products of a more enduring nature. “Recently, I’ve been doing an apprenticeship building motorcycles—custom choppers,” he says. “I’m doing the metal fabrication I learned when I was working at KX. I’m still a kid at heart—playing with motorcycles and skateboards!”
Mo Nasr
San Francisco
Shortly after earning his master’s degree in structural engineering from MIT in 2005, Mo Nasr went to work as a ride engineer for Great Coasters International in Hebron, Kentucky. He stayed there a little more than a year and worked on “Kentucky Rumbler” at Beech Bend Amusement Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and “Renegade” at Valleyfair in Shakopee, Minnesota.
 But the opportunity to work in San Francisco—a hotbed for structural engineering with an emphasis on designing for seismic events—and a desire to get back to the West Coast where he grew up, led Nasr to take a job with an architectural firm.
“They build a lot of tall buildings,” he says, “and I’m doing structural engineering and design for new construction in the U.S., China, and the Middle East. I enjoy coming up with the general design, the holistic approach—some of the big-picture design issues.”
Though he’s no longer designing them, he still likes coasters. “I have a Six Flags season pass,” he notes. “Also, when I was at my college reunion in Connecticut in May, I went to Lake Compounce to ride ‘Boulder Dash.’”
Nasr makes an insightful remark about the value of relationships in the attractions industry after spending over a year at Great Coasters: “Our firm was small, and I was working with individual owners at that time and getting to know them on a personal basis. The Great Coasters owners would develop personal relations with these people that would last beyond the projects, and those relations got them business in the future.”
Danny Kanitz
Loyalhanna, Pennsylvania
Danny Kanitz has already learned in his short career that what can at first seem to be a dark day can lead to the best of times. After graduating from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in March 2005, he was offered a position at the Creation Museum in Florence, Kentucky, and was also accepted into Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He turned down both opportunities to take a job at a point-of-purchase company in his hometown of Pittsburgh. But a corporate buyout led to layoffs, and Kanitz was one of the people axed.
“Getting laid off may have been the best thing that ever happened to me,” he reflects. “I love what I’m doing now!” He’s designing paintball products for SmartParts (www.smartparts.com), located in Loyalhanna, Pennsylvania. “I’ve been successful here—this is one of my dream jobs,” he says. “We’re known for making paintball [guns]—some of the best in the industry. I’ve also designed some of the best hoppers, which is what sits on top of the gun and feeds it the paintballs.”
 Four years ago Kanitz said he wanted to work with animatronics, but he has stayed away from them because he had a bad reaction to some of the chemicals he’d have to work with daily. But with more and more family entertainment centers incorporating paintball, he’s still associated with the attractions industry.
“One of the challenges with paintball has been bringing it to the mass market because it’s perceived as an extreme sport,” he says. “But that’s changing because the balls are lighter and they break apart more easily, so the energy at impact is much lower.”
Kanitz doesn’t envision a career change anytime soon: “It’s not what I expected to be doing … it’s better!”
Contact News Editor Keith Miller at kmiller@IAAPA.org. |
