Creative teams facing difficult challenges often engage in blue-sky thinking, where every idea — no matter how outlandish or impractical — is entertained as part of a process seeking to arrive at a creative solution. By eliminating boundaries and limitations, blue-sky thinking allows the imagination to soar and innovative concepts to emerge.
Emmy-award-winning creator Lee Romaire and his team at Los Angeles-based Romaire Studios, Inc. leverage blue-sky thinking to bring to life some of the most creative animatronic projects ever attempted. In fact, Romaire’s Studio has developed a reputation as the place where next-level creativity and imagination allow the impossible to become possible.
“The clients we work for, including many of the world’s top entertainment companies, often provide us with only a brief of what they want and a timeframe,” Romaire shares. “From there, it’s a purely inspirational process that focuses on coming up with different ways to achieve the desired effect. When theme park companies and movie studies need advanced research and development, they come to us because they understand our commitment to the process.”
The results Romaire delivers are not only amazing but also award-winning. Working with Universal Studios, for example, Romaire played a critical role in the company receiving a prestigious Themed Entertainment Award for the “The Secret Life of Pets: Off the Leash” attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood in 2021. A project Romaire contributed to for Disney helped the company to receive a similar award for the “Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser” Hotel at Walt Disney World in 2022.
Today, both awards are proudly displayed in the conference room at Romaire Studios.
While blue-sky thinking helps Romaire to find creative direction, it is just the start of his studio’s process. Romaire cites tenacity as another key ingredient that has allowed his studio to become one of the foremost providers of animatronics.
“After the blue-sky part of the process wraps up, the hard work starts,” Romaire shares. “When we start building out the ideas we’ve developed, we always run into obstacles that must be overcome. If we go down a path that isn’t working, we take a step back, try another path, and, eventually, we arrive at where we want to be. Sometimes, the end looks a bit different than what we imagined, but it’s always a workable solution for the client.”
Romaire’s unfaltering commitment to finding a solution has allowed him to succeed on projects that came to his team after other experts admitted defeat. One animatronic prop idea brought to Romaire Studios involved a hand-held object that had to extend and retract while glowing. He and his team were told other design companies had sought a solution for decades with no success. Applying its trademark creativity and tenancy, Romaire Studios developed a solution and got its name included on the patent for the technology.
“We are innovation leaders who succeed where others fail because we are tenacious,” Romaire explains. “We have a firm belief that there is always a way to overcome whatever challenge we are handed.”
Romaire Studios’ projects can be aptly described as artistic masterpieces. The gallery of photos documenting past projects displayed on the studio’s website reveals his team’s passion for artistry. Whether they include startlingly realistic dogs or violin-playing frogs, every project incorporates deep artistic sensibility and proficiency.
However, Romaire realized early on that art alone, no matter how impressive, was not enough to capture audiences’ imaginations as they engaged with animatronics. So, he took steps to develop art engineered for performance.
“As I delved deeper into the world of animatronics, I recognized the need for a cinematic approach that would deliver a higher level of believability,” Romaire says. “It inspired me to branch out into new areas. The studio transitioned from providing only skins and sculptures used in animatronics, which were focused on artistry, to producing full characters and engineering their movements, which incorporated believability. Now, we do it all, creating extremely complex animated effects that are used in theme parks around the world.”
To ensure his creations are technically and artistically excellent, Romaire has gathered a team of industry-leading experts in all of the skills required for animatronic development. Specialists in a variety of engineering fields, including animatronic electromechanical designers, support each project.
“Trying to create an internal animatronic framework for realistic movements while also knowing you need to pack the necessary wiring, motors, and other technology components into a small package takes a tremendous amount of creativity,” Romaire shares. “My team has come up with a number of remarkable technical innovations — many of which we have since patented — that contribute to the engineering our projects are built upon.”
Over a decade ago, Romaire Studios set an aesthetic standard for the theme park industry by providing movie-quality realism to theme park animatronics. Today, Romaire and his team continue to raise the bar in animatronics by leveraging unparalleled creativity and tenacity to bring impossible projects to life.