Complementing our latest special exhibition, Mary Blair: Mid-Century Magic, enjoy the inspirational story of Mary’s life and unique artistic style in a special screening of Mary Blair’s Pigments of Imagination (2025). The new featurette, produced and edited in-house at The Walt Disney Family Museum...
Complementing our latest special exhibition, Mary Blair: Mid-Century Magic, enjoy the inspirational story of Mary’s life and unique artistic style in a special screening of Mary Blair’s Pigments of Imagination (2025). The new featurette, produced and edited in-house at The Walt Disney Family Museum...
As employees of The Walt Disney Family Museum, we strive to achieve and perpetuate the values that Walt held important in his work and his life. We believe that to achieve the level of quality associated with Walt Disney, each person, as an individual and as part of a cohesive team, contributes toward delivering a memorable experience to every visitor to The Walt Disney Family Museum.
In celebration of our newest special exhibition, Happiest Place on Earth: The Disneyland Story, we are pleased to host an exclusive Member Preview Night. Experience Happiest Place on Earth: The Disneyland Story before it opens to the public and toast to the special exhibition’s opening with bubbles...
Thank you for your intent to make a future gift to The Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio of San Francisco, California. Your legacy gift will help ensure the museum can continue to share the life and legacy of Walt Disney, remain accessible to our community, and foster the next generations of creative talent.
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Follow the butterflies’ migration this Fall and their presence within the world of animation! This special workshop will take a whimsical behind-the-scenes look of how tiny (yet mighty) creatures like butterflies have fluttered in different animated pieces from Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942) to Disney’s...
In this workshop, students will learn the history of Audio-Animatronics® technology during the early 1960s. This hands-on activity will challenge students to collaboratively work in teams to navigate a Sphero SPRK robot through trial and error, using math-based calculations and computer block programming.
Create fun and unique art pieces with a painting technique involving small dots, patterns, and colored paints. Students will learn about impressionism and gain a basic understanding of color filling, shading, and tints to create a cohesive art piece.
Benefitting from embedded digital media content, this walk-through the museum brings Walt’s inspirational message to life. Classes learn about his early failures, the art of animation, storytelling principles, and the technological innovations that made classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) possible.
The Ink and Paint Department was an invaluable part of the animation process, especially with the addition of color to animated films. In this School Experience, students will learn about the relationship between colors, and how color theory utilizes both art and science in color mixing to achieve a particular visual effect.
Animators often start their journey with a piece of paper, a pencil, and their own imagination. We will explore the traditional practices and principles of hand-drawn animation. With a few simple techniques, students will bring their drawings to life in the same way that animators in the 1930s did.
Walt Disney knew that at the heart of every animated film is a well-told story. Join us on this School Experience as we investigate the basics of narrative structure, establishing interesting and dynamic plots, and creating internal and external challenges that can impact a character’s journey. Students will then develop their own short story.
The Walt Disney Studios pioneered storyboarding—an innovative way to convey an artist’s vision and the film’s story for those around them. Join us in this School Experience as we delve into timing, camera angles, camera shots, and how to plan out a visual project in a sequential and visual form. Students will then take on the role of a storyboard artist as they envision their own version of a scene from a script.
Background design is an important part of the storytelling process as it helps give context to the narrative by showing the world in which the characters live. Although not the main focus, backgrounds can amplify and fully immerse an audience. We will discuss industry-standard practices as students delve into perspective fundamentals. Students gain an understanding of overlap, depth, and atmospheric perspective, then apply these concepts to design a layered background.
Before the use of cels, paper cut-out figures were a common form of animation. Join us as we create paper creations with simple shapes and designs using construction paper and glue, then animate our creations to make our own silent stop-motion short films.
When creating theme parks, designers and architects apply their creative minds and technical ingenuity to design ambitious projects. Students will plan their own innovative theme parks using creative thinking, problem solving, and teamwork. They will create their theme park’s rides, shows, food options, and more all within their provided budget, and see if they can run a successful park!
How we travel around the world—in trains, cars, planes, and rockets—has evolved exponentially over the past century as new innovations have been developed. Join us as we explore various modes of transportation, and use colors and shapes to create and design our own scenes with two-dimensional trains and railcars.
Discover how Walt Disney encouraged his staff to experiment with special effects technology to make animation more compelling and realistic, and how the resulting advancements inspired the industry as a whole. Students will experiment with a miniature multiplane set up—focusing on design elements that will explore how depth is created in animation—then animate their own characters and props to create a silent stop-motion short film.
Walt Disney was a storyteller whose characters captivated audiences through their unique personalities and distinct designs. Students will learn the fundamentals of character design through the use of shape language, silhouette, and personality traits, and uncover the creative process towards developing unique and memorable characters.
Students will learn and reflect on the tasks of Imagineers, who worked under Walt at WED Enterprises during the 1950s and 60s to imagine, research, design, and build some of Disney’s most iconic and revolutionary projects and park attractions. In this hands-on workshop, students will apply these concepts to collaboratively build a prototype ride, and creatively problem-solve challenges that may arise.