It's kind of funny (to me at least) that I started thinking about this and then I read about the rumor on Twitter that the pavilion is about to get a redo (again). But this came to me when the news that Tony Baxter retired, mainly because I think one of the incidents that finally put him over the edge was when he mentioned in a Q&A with a higher-up that the Imagination Pavilion was broken and didn't "work" anymore. Couple that with the fact that its' sponsor is gone, both financially and practically as a company. So it hit me. ; The most obvious new sponsor would be, mainly because they are currently using the same word,.... Canon. Canon, and with Ron Howard, have Project Imaginat10n - which is basically a project to take various scenes from multiple sources, and then create a film/story around the scenes - using the filmmaker's imagination. The first one was directed by Bryce Howard (his daughter the actor) and used 6 scenes if I remember correctly (they were screening it at SXSW 2012 and giving away camera gear every day). ; At that time the Canon rep said they didn't have plans to continue the project, and lo and behold, they did continue it! So there would be some synergy! ; This is what I could see as the pavilion ride to replace Journey. It would be similar to the idea of Spaceship Earth (and in a way it would duplicate a little...) but basically the ride would be a journey through the various ways humans have used imagination to express their ideas. ; It would go through time but quickly get to the more modern era - maybe get up to Georges Méliès and how he used cinema to express his imagination (hey, are the props from Horizons still available?). ; There would be a section on books as well just before that - from Jules Verne and other authors who used their imagination to create visions. So it would follow how other forms of communication are used to express imagination - photography, art, etc It would get to the modern time where computers are used to tweek imagination - from HDR in photography, and things like 3D, High Frame Rate and CGI in films. ; All while this is going on the scenes would show people using Canon equipment, including their EOS Cinema line. ; At the end the ride would go into a section where they would discuss Project Imaginat10n. ; At SXSW they had walls COVERED with small copies of every picture submitted to them as part of the Project (for the first one). ; The new one has 10 topics rather than 6. Refresher: Ron Howard took 6 different photographs, each of a different topic, and used them as inspiration to create the short film. ; That's where imagination came into play. ; So while it would not be the imagination pavilion of creating new inventions anymore, it would still be about imagination.
