Disney Defectors : Entertainment: Former employees have founded companies of their own to cash in on the growing demand for theme parks and special effects.

On an industrial back street near the Burbank Airport, Iwerks Entertainment is busy preparing specialized theater systems for Expo 92 in Seville, Spain. A few blocks away in Sun Valley, Technifex Inc. is working on a pirate ride for Gardaland, Italy’s oldest theme park. And down the street in Glendale, HinesLab is fine-tuning a three-dimensional film device.

These companies are a few of more than a dozen theme park contracting firms that were founded by people who earned their stripes at Walt Disney Co.

Ranging from one-man workshops to outfits with 100 or more employees, these companies specialize in everything from robotics to optical illusions to high-tech fountains. And they are cashing in on the growing worldwide demand for Disney-style theme parks, sophisticated special effects and alternative forms of entertainment.

Working at Disney, former employees say, was like earning an MBA in themed entertainment.

“They really were a breeding ground,” said Technifex co-founder Monty Lunde, a former special-effects designer for Disney’s renowned Imagineering division, which designs theme parks. Lunde’s partner, Rock Hall, is also an Imagineering graduate.

“At the time we were working there, they really set the standard,” Lunde said. “There was nobody that was building theme parks that could touch them because they had all the talent in-house.”

But within the past several years, much of that talent has left Disney to form other ventures. Among the biggest of the Disney offshoots are Landmark Entertainment in North Hollywood, said to be the world’s largest independent theme park developer; Bob Rogers & Co., a Burbank company that’s designing a $70-million visitors center next to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and Sequoia Creative, a Sun Valley theme park contractor.

Other local companies founded by former Disney employees include Art & Technology and Wet Enterprises, both in Burbank; Applied Holographics in Oxnard, and Valencia-based AVG Inc.

Ironically, it was Disney that gave many of its employees the impetus to start their own businesses.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, what is now the Imagineering division grew to more than 2,000 workers as the building of Epcot Center in Florida, Tokyo Disneyland and a new Fantasyland at Disneyland was in full swing. Disney recruited from universities, planetariums and theaters--anywhere the company could find raw talent.

Technifex’s Lunde was recruited by Disney in 1981 as he was graduating from Stanford University with a degree in design. Hall joined Disney from the University of Utah’s theater department. At Disney, Lunde and Hall learned animation techniques, worked with new materials such as fiber-optics and were taught to design equipment to last for 20 years with a minimum of maintenance.

But by late 1983, Epcot Center had opened, no other projects were under way and Disney began laying off its theme park designers. “When we got laid off, it was like the kick in the butt we needed” to start their own company, Hall said.

The pair’s first big break came in 1984, when Six Flags Corp. hired them to do the special effects for a power plant in Baltimore that was being converted into a theme park.

Since then, Technifex has created mechanized scenery, interactive video displays and specialized lighting systems for theme parks worldwide, and has tapped into a growing market for special effects at trade shows. One of the company’s biggest-selling items is a patented special effect called Techniscan, a computer-controlled film and video system that creates moving 3-D images without any visible screens or mirrors.

Technifex’s clients have included Universal Studios, Tokyo Disneyland, Lotte World in South Korea, AT&T; and Lockheed. Lunde and Hall now have about 20 employees and expect to take in $4 million to $5 million in revenues in the fiscal year ending next June.

Like Lunde and Hall, HinesLab’s Steve Hines was recruited by Disney in the early 1980s, leaving his job at Eastman Kodak Co.’s research lab to work on Disney theme parks. While at Disney, Hines developed a dual-camera rig that was used to film Disneyland’s 3-D Captain EO attraction featuring Michael Jackson.

But by 1983, Disney’s theme park work had ground to a halt, and Hines saw an opportunity to fulfill his dream of starting a one-man “inventor’s workshop.”

Hines initially paid the bills by doing consulting work on optical systems for such corporations as Toyota and Kodak. He also developed products for the Department of Defense, including flight simulators and a stereo video helmet that’s used to help guide a vehicle from a remote location.

But his biggest achievement to date, Hines believes, is an advanced version of the 3-D camera rig he originally built for Disney that allows the camera operator to quickly make adjustments for depth and position. Previously, such changes would require shooting to stop while tools were used to realign the cameras.

Hines spent about five years developing the rig, at one point selling his house to pay for it. He now rents it out to 3-D filmmakers and it has become his largest revenue generator. He is now working on a 3-D viewfinder that would allow the scene being filmed to be displayed simultaneously on a remote monitor.

The ups and downs of Disney’s theme park work also played a role in the founding of Iwerks Entertainment in 1986.

Iwerks Chairman Don Iwerks, a 35-year Disney veteran whose father, Ubbe Iwerks, was a famed animator and one of Disney’s first employees, was manager of technical engineering and manufacturing at Disney. Iwerks oversaw many theme park projects and “wanted to find a way to sustain a core group of people through the highs and lows of the workload, perhaps by doing work for others.”

But Disney was cool to Iwerks’ suggestion to contract out to other theme park operators. So he and Stan Kinsey, then vice president of operations and finance at Disney Studios, decided to leave and pursue their idea of creating “the future of the movie theater,” said Kinsey, now Iwerks’ chief executive.

For such clients as the U.S. Navy, Universal Studios Florida, and expositions and theme parks worldwide, Iwerks designs specialized theater systems that include screens up to six times the size of normal movie screens, sophisticated sound systems, 360-degree screens and seats that rock and sway in concert with the film. The company has about 60 employees and expects the value of its contracts for the fiscal year ending June 30 to total about $15 million.

Iwerks is also moving ahead with plans to build Cinetropolis entertainment centers--sort of a cross between a movie theater and a theme park, with big-screen theaters, nightclubs and shops. The first Cinetropolis is scheduled to open at San Francisco’s Pier 39 in the spring.

Iwerks said that with his busy workload, he has little time to ponder any regrets that he might have had about leaving Disney. His Disney years were “a wonderful time for me, sort of like a Camelot.”

But “I know my Dad and Walt took risks,” Iwerks said. “Now we feel we’ve got a vision of something that can happen, and it’s just real fun going for it.”