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Canfield grad wins first place at Disney Imagineering
By kalea hall
CANFIELD
A Canfield High School graduate can add a first-place award from the Walt Disney Imagineering competition on her resume.
Christina Brant and her three teammates, Angeline Chen, John Brieger and Matthew Ho, from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh won for their project, “Antipode,” on Friday at a luncheon in Glendale, Calif.
“Looking back on the experience, it will become more real,” Brant said earlier this week before she found out her team won.
The task for this year’s competitors was to design an experience that transformed an urban environment. Brant, an architecture and human-computer-interaction major with a minor in business, was one of 24 students from six different universities who made it to the finals of the competition.
At the end, five teams were selected to go to California to present projects. For its project, the Carnegie Mellon team designed a “two-week-long festival of cultural exchange that simultaneously unfolds in Bangkok, Thailand, and Lima, Peru,” according to a press release issued by Disney. The two cities are on the exact opposite ends of the world.
“They both have a lot of differences [and] also similarities, so that is why they chose the two,” Brant said.
In the project, “whispering trees” are portals between the cities, and memories stored in the tree during the festival are “leaked” into Bangkok and Lima.
Disney uses imaginations to find the “widest possible talent pool,” according to the press release.
The top three teams received cash prizes. First place, Carnegie Mellon, received $3,000 and an additional $1,000 for the sponsoring university. The second-place award went to California Institute of the Arts team, and third place went to the University of California team.
The students who attend the final competition also interview for internships while at Disney Imagineering.
Brant said she just decided to apply with her friends for the competition.
“Everyone on our team is very interested in Disney,” Brant said.
Brant was interested in the arts when she was a student at Canfield High.
“Toward my senior year, I was really interested in designing physical experience,” Brant said. She is expected to graduate from Carnegie Mellon in May.