Day 6

Walt Disney Museum

We started the day by visiting the Walt Disney Museum, where our tour guide Marlon introduced us to the timeline of Walt Disney's life. We began the tour in the centre of the museum, although the museum is set in chronological order. We were introduced to the Multi-Plane Crane which was used to give animation more depth and more realistic so the audience will enjoy it more. There only three models left in the world, one here in the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Franscico, one in California and another one in France, Paris.

Then we learnt about his hobbies and interests, including his interest in trains. He's deep interest in trains led him to building a working train which can travel around the outside of his mansion. He asked his wife for permission to build the train tracks through or around her garden, however she said no so he built a cave for the train to run underneath the garden.

He also fell in love with miniatures and collected miniatures from all around the world, such as, miniature guns, which can actually shoot, miniature cutlery, furniture and books such as Shakespeare's Macbeth.

During his lifetime he numerous rewards with just under 250 awards in the lobby of the museum but in his lifetime he received over a 1000 with a honorary Oscar award for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which debuted in December 1937 and cost around 25 cents to watch.

We then had a workshop using a miniature version of the Multi-Plane Crane with three different levels:

• foreground

• mid ground

• Background

We used these three levels to create our very own 5 second, short animation.

DropBox

We visited DropBox next, where we were greeted by Joe Wheeler, our host, in the lobby. We were led into a conference room where a panel of employees introduced their roles and experiences to us, and answered any questions we had.

We were introduced to the background of the company, which was founded in 2007, and the company was inspired when the boss was on a bus, on his way to give a presentation to another company but forgot his flash drive and so he was so frustrated that he came up with Dropbox,

which makes it easy for people to share documents.

The company motivated people to buy their product by giving anyone 2GB of free storage and referring friends allows more storage so really quick growth of the company and audience. Their products allows people around the world to connect and share ideas in real time.

The panel was made up of :

• Tuhina, a recruiter manager, who makes their team better and graduated from Berkeley University

• Melody, a finance manager, who is responsible for making sure the payments for Dropbox are successful,

• Joe, who is responsible for volunteers and previously in recruitment, and also was part of the Peace Corp and had a volunteer placement for 2 years as a teacher in Mongolia

• Rod, who was originally from Edinburgh and is an engineer manager, looking over a group of engineers

• Vanessa, who has a masters in psychology and is responsible for recruiting

The volunteering opportunities at the company includes technology teaching, such as, work with technovation and work with schools to promote technology.

The company motivates people to buy Dropbox by:

• The costs of the storage

• Looking at who might buy Dropbox

• Inputting more features, e.g. Charging companies for secure and controlled storage areas

• Working out what people are already doing and finding a simpler solution for it

• Focusing on what makes their apps different from other similar companies

• Focusing on target audience, for example, designers and their images