Disney Behind the Scenes: Meet Disney Story Artists Art Hernandez and Lawrence Gong #FireAndRescueEvent

Disclosure: This event and trip to LA was an all expense paid journey sponsored by Disney. All thoughts, experiences and Disney character crushes are 100% my own!

My recent trip to LA included a screening of Disney’s soon to be released Planes Fire & Rescue which hits theaters on July 18th!! I will be posting my review soon, but an exciting part of this experience was the time that I was able to spend behind the scenes meeting the people that bring all of this Disney magic together.

Two such people include Art Hernandez (Head of Story Artist) and Lawrence Gong (Story Artist). Clearly they are both very talented, but sitting down to chat with them reveals quite bit more about exactly how they came to be part of such an exciting Disney project.

I actually had the opportunity to meet and interview Art Hernandez once before. You can read that interview here. I was so excited about this opportunity to visit with him again. He can draw these planes in his sleep, I am sure of it!

It was so fun to sit down with these two guys as they talked about bringing this film to life and all of the hours and hours (and hours) of work that goes into bringing an idea onto paper and then onto the big screen! Both Art and Lawrence shared with us how the process begins with them basically “pitching” the scenes to producers and then bit by bit as things are approved, the actual scenes come to life. Details are (of course!) very important, so they both spent quite a bit of time learning about the different fire vehicles: how they run, sound, look, etc. They even spent time visiting with fire fighters and rescue personal to perfect the characters and scenery in this film.

We even had a chance to sketch along with Art as he showed us how to draw Dipper, the darling female plane character from the film. He makes it look SO easy! One thing that I found interesting is that while the planes have eyes and mouths, the artists still try to stay true to the actually movements of a plane. They don’t have arms and legs or “moving parts” that they don’t have in real life, so it takes quite a bit of research to accurately portray the vehicles and to keep things consistent throughout the film.

I absolutely LOVE to draw, so this part of the experience was so fun for me! It is amazing how it all comes together when you have someone with so much talent walking you though the design steps.