Joseph M. Neumeyer, Founder

Growing up in Los Angeles, Joseph visited Disneyland every summer with his family. He looked forward to each new attraction and admired the people whose job was to create and improve “The Happiest Place on Earth.”

Known to his grade school classmates as “The Artist”, Joseph tried to capture his view of the world in every kind of artwork, even building rides of his own in his parents’ backyard. When “2001: A Space Odyssey” premiered at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, he was so taken by its visual impact that he recreated it in paintings and backyard miniature dioramas.

His most impressive pieces were two paintings reproducing the film’s most popular movie posters. Years later he showed them to Robert McCall, the illustrator who painted the originals. McCall was impressed by the detail and the faithful reproduction of his technique, and asked Joseph to assist on a large mural he had been commissioned to produce.

In 1977 Joseph was an industrial design model maker at a firm in Beverly Hills when “Star Wars” was released. He and a colleague concluded they had the training, tools and skills to attempt motion picture miniature effects.

Soon he was building miniatures for “BattleStar Galactica”, “Raise The Titanic” and “Buck Rogers in the 21st Century”, then full scale sets and props for Universal Studios and Walt Disney Productions. Building show components for Disney’s EPCOT Center and Disney Tokyo, he first saw how major attractions are fabricated and how they are conceived and presented to corporate sponsors.

In the summer of 1979 Joseph read about Walt Disney’s good friend Ward Kimball, the Academy Award winning animation director who created Jiminy Cricket for “Pinocchio” (1940). After a steam locomotive exhibition in Chicago, Walt Disney said Kimball was the man he “had the most fun with in his life.” With Walt’s death in 1966, Kimball was the closest link to Walt’s creative spirit that Joseph could hope to meet.

Sharing a love of live steam model trains, Joseph arranged a visit and showed Kimball a small portfolio of his train dioramas and cartoon art. After touring Kimball’s “backyard”, with full-scale railroad tracks, steam engines and the station house from “Chattanooga Choo Choo” donated by Walt Disney himself, Kimball urged Joseph to become a “show designer” for the theme park division. Walt once called Kimball “the one man who works for me that I’m willing to call a genius.”

Joseph later said: “It was like being dubbed a knight by a king! As if a creative piton had been passed from a great master of an older generation to a potential of the next.”

Joseph began developing ideas and hiring commercial illustrators to envision new Disneyland attractions. To show a wide range, he developed storyboard art for three attractions from three different periods, using artists with different styles. His view was that a ride’s presentation art should carry the storytelling qualities of that ride, so he focused on concepts and storylines rather than doing the artwork himself.

The term “Imagineering” combines imagination and engineering. The theme park industry also needed “Solutioneering”: imagineering that delivers entertainment solutions to specific marketing goals.

Of his three portfolio presentations, “The Pyramid Beyond” best showed this idea. Guests take part in a group computer game whose final score decides the ending, so the ride has several endings and rewards repeat play, including practice on a home version. It addresses a persistent industry problem, attracting repeat visitors, by upgrading ride software instead of building new facilities every two or three years, potentially saving tens of millions. Joseph explored this in his Studio Art Honors thesis at Arizona State University, “Mass Flow Interactive Attractions as a Solution to the Dilemma of Theme Park Repeat Visitation.”

The other two presentations were “The Gangster Coaster”, a 1920s Chicago thrill ride that pairs speed with story-immersing queue entertainment and interactive “shooting galleries on wheels”, and “To Go A Viking”, a medieval Viking long ship adventure.

Disney executives could not review the portfolio at the time, so Joseph presented it to other companies in the industry. Before long he was assisting on theme parks and attractions around the world.

One assignment was “Lusolandia”, proposed for Lisbon to present Portugal’s 15th and 16th century Golden Era of exploration. Joseph produced the finished renderings for the whole facility, creating ride concepts for each country explored, selecting illustrators and art-directing the process.

“Conquistadores” represents the culmination of his theme park design career. It was one of four rides he conceived for “Magical Journeys”, a proposed $2 billion theme park for Kobe, Japan. In the early 1990s, as part of a larger design team, he created, orchestrated and presented his own original ride concepts to the developers.

For over a decade Joseph worked in creative design and coordination with theme park design firms on projects worldwide, collaborating with artists, architects, designers, writers and engineers. That team spirit made it possible to produce the commercial art for this assignment in very limited time.

As leading companies shifted from theme attractions to thrill rides, chances to design classic “Pirates of the Caribbean” style attractions became rare. Joseph shifted his priorities too, and founded Joseph Neumeyer’s Dynamic Dioramas in 1998, responding to requests from private collectors, museums and theme parks for his miniature recreations.

A ride mock-up pulls the “story in pictures” together in three dimensions, finalizing the attraction’s exterior and interior show components before scaling up to full size. A well designed diorama works the same way, with characters, vignettes, composition and lighting combined into a storytelling tableau. A show designer who masters miniature dioramas can present creative ability in both fields, and that mastery is why Joseph started the company.

He is skilled in both industrial design model making and motion picture special effects miniatures, and added night courses at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 1995 he earned a Magna Cum Laude BA in Studio Art from the University Honors College of Arizona State University.

Late in his last year of college he worked in the culinary department of a four star hotel, producing decorative “garde manger” sculpture for banquets from tallow, salt-dough and baking-clay. Back in Los Angeles, he showed photos to the model makers hiring for “Titanic”. When they learned the materials, they hired him, saying: “If he can build those out of tallow and salt-dough, he can build anything!”

After his miniatures for “Titanic” he worked on “Starship Troopers”, “Godzilla” and the attraction “Star Trek, The Experience” in Las Vegas. “Titanic” and “Starship Troopers” were both nominated for the 1997 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and “Titanic” won.

Joseph has won national and international recognition in model-making competitions: the Popular Best Of Show trophy at the 1998 I.P.M.S. National Convention, voted on by fellow competitors and visitors; the Best Creative Entry trophy in the Master Modeler’s Division at Tamiya/Con ’98, awarded by Mr. Tamiya, Sr.; a gold medal at the SCAHMS (Southern California Area Historic Modelers Society) competition; and an international medal for “To Go A Viking” at the World Expo 2005 in Boston.