I notice that Disneyland’s newest Star Wars rides—particularly Rise of the Resistance—are only 5-10 minutes long. Yet in that time, I suspect riders are exposed to more than 100,000 person-hours of creative work. That’d be ~75 people full-time for a year (assuming 30 hrs/week for 44 weeks). It’s a remarkable feeling of compression, a level of intentional-detail-per-second in a sensory experience I’ve seen almost nowhere else. What a remarkable ratio—100k hours to 5-10 minutes. Does any other experience in the world have similar numbers?
I think this feeling of compression is part of why I love theater—at an especially elaborate musical or opera, there’s likely also 100,000 person-hours of creative work on display. But it’s spread out over three hours, not 5-10 minutes, so, the effect is not nearly so overwhelming.
Sara suggests: short films (maybe especially labor-intensive ones like claymation)? Could get close, but I suspect it’s quite rare for short films to have that much full-time staff for so long.
Cathedrals? Walking into Sagrada Familia or St. Peter’s certainly produces an overwhelming feeling—the compression of creative human effort. Of course, one is meant to spend much than 5-10 minutes in a cathedral, but the overwhelming awe effect is arguably concentrated in the first few minutes.
Stage magicians and circus performers will sometimes spend many years training to perform a specific trick or act. These are astounding; I think they generate a similar feeling of compression in part because they’re often much briefer. Two people could spend 10k hrs on a 1min routine—same ratio.
In general, you won’t typically get to 100,000 hours of person-time with a small group of individuals. You’d need multiple decades of full-time preparation with <5 people.
Immersive games like Journey and The Witness produce a compression feeling along these lines. These games are likely in the high tens of thousands of person-hours of creative work, but spread out over many hours of play-time. It’s interesting that they manage to produce such a strong feeling of compression, even though their time ratio is 10-100x lower. The explanation might be the efficiency of digital media: the physical environment and autonomous vehicles of the Disney rides likely consume vastly more time-per-detail to execute than a congruent virtual environment.