The Haunt: Finale!

     Okay, dear readers, the Haunted Library is finally over! So, as promised, I'm doing one more post about it, looking back on what I would (and likely will) do differently next year. Now, you may have heard the phrase "pics, or it didn't happen," as it turns out, none of us remembered this, so we have no proof that we ever performed this haunt. I have a few phone pictures of a few props being built, which I will put on a page HERE with the maze, but without pictures of everything installed in the library, I'll excuse your skepticism. As for the video I mentioned, It exists, but is really just five minutes of black with occasional flickers of faces and light. it's pretty lousy, so I've decided not to put it up.
     Now for the good news. On Friday, we put the haunted house up starting at about ten am, and finishing at about 5:10 pm. With a total of four actors in the haunt, we managed to scare the daylights out of a total of 378 guests, and earned as many dollars for the library to buy books with! Or, in other words, the Haunt was a huge success! While we didn't manage to get everything working that we wanted to, we put together enough of a haunt that people were going through more than once, and had a fantastic time.

Room #5: The Pumpkin Patch

As the Guests exit the forest, they make a hard left turn into the pumpkin patch, but not before a Giant's Shadow pounces across a wall to their right, standing ten feet tall, and chasing them into the pumpkin patch.
First, the guests pass through a gate, fashioned to look like a large jack-o-lantern, and as they walk through it's mouth, they find themselves in a graveyard, overgrown with pumpkins. There's a stone wall running along one side, with small pumpkins resting on top. And a scarecrow waits at the end of the path with a bowl of candy for the guests.

This room, obviously, is where the giant pumpkin from my earlier post will be living, with a giant candle inside of it. all made out of cardboard. This room is much brighter and more playful than the others, mostly orange and green throughout the room.
The scarecrow will be an actor, who can decide to scare children if he wants to. The biggest isssue of this room is building pumpkins. See, with our budget of approximately $1, buying a bunch of pumpkins and carving them into jack-o-lanterns is out of the question. So, we've made a few pumpkins  in three dimensions out of cardboard,and we're in the process of creating a few groups of pumpkins in two-dimensions. The tombstones are made out of foam I already had, and have cut into stones.
It's a simple room, with a lot of building to create a well-dressed scene. A lot of this has to be built in the space, which makes this room a bit of a challenge, since we have about four hours (Hopefully we'll get more time) in the space to set up.
Now that I've filled you in on how everything should look, I'll be filling you in on how some of it is being built, and hopefully, I'll end with a video walk-through on Saturday.

Room #4: The Forest.

Okay, readers, let me level with you, this post took so long to get to you because two days ago, I almost changed this room. Let me tell you why. This room is a big u-turn shape designed to look like a haunted forest. A large group of trees encircle the guests, and arch their branches high overhead, where an owl looms, and several crows grumble, caw, and crack-wise. Meanwhile, guests are hit with a mysterious gust of wind, and something lurks just beyond the trees.
As you can see on the MAP the forest is one of the larger areas in the haunt. The downside of that is, that room will require a lot of scenery, and I honestly (still) have concerns about us getting enough trees in there to make it spooky. Originally, we were going to make the trees out of butcher paper, and create faces on them, like the trees from the "Wizard of Oz". Here's the issue with that: Each of those trees would need some sort of solid structure running from toe to tip, and to be honest, I'm on too tight of a budget to purchase lumber to brace the insides. So, I decided to cut the entire scene from the haunt, and asked my family for other suggestions. Then my old man decided that he had found the plan to build the forest, and help himself out as well, the old coot. So, we tore down old branches from our mulberry tree in the back yard, and he's taken it on himself to turn those branches into trees. Hopefully, he knows what he's doing.
Meanwhile, I've got to make sure that the rest of this forest is spooky!
There will be at least one person in the forest to do some old-fashioned scaring, and to try some other tricks as well. Firstly, I've modified an Airzooka to sit on a solid base, and be fired remotely with a cord. Which means I can hide the airzooka in a bush somewhere, and not let guests know where the gust of wind has come from.
Meanwhile, overhead, a pair of crows are sitting in some branches, cawing and making a few jokes. It's a simple matter of a couple of cardboard silhouettes and some decent sound design, which is being handled by y brother.
Then, they turn the corner, under a spooky moon  and and actor either lurks in the forest, or leaps out at the guests, depending on the age and bravado of the guests. In all likelihood, this is probably me in a simple costume. Then, they turn one last corner into the last room of the haunt.

Room # 3: The Cave

Not a photograph of MY cave, but how cool would that be, right?

    So, after our intrepid adventurers are spewed out of  a magical vortex, they find themselves inside a dark and intimidating cavern. The first chamber of the cavern plays with their imagination, as something tickles across their faces, and something else pops beneath their feet. Is this cave filled with bugs?
 Actually, both of these are pretty classic haunted house tricks. The first portion of the cave uses darkness to convince the guests that something more is happening, when really, they're walking on a bit of bubble wrap, and string  is tickling their face. Classic.

The Second Chamber of the cavern is a mysterious room filled with mirrors. the room will have four mirrors arranged in an array, lit only with blacklight. On each mirror will be a different ghost, which glows under the blacklight. Everything in the room will be covered in heavy cobwebs, hinting at what's to come.
The inside of the cave itself will mostly be black plastic, forming an uncomfortably low ceiling. Kids will be fine, but parents my have to duck, creating discomfort. I know that sounds like a bad thing, but creating unpleasant atmosphere is half of what a haunted house is about. A building full of people jumping out is startling, but it isn't scary. To create fear, there needs to be buildup, and claustrophobia is a simple fear to play off of.

The third chamber of the cavern is through a black curtain. the ceiling opens up here, but only to make room for a giant black widow, standing across the top of the pathway! The spider stands above the guests, rocking back and forth above their heads, as it's children hang from the walls.
The spider itself is going to be made primarily from chicken wire on a frame,, and wrapped with paper mache. (my goodness, I am using so much paper mache!) The real trick of the spider is that the guests are walking at that time between two bookshelves that are already in the library. Each bookcase is about four feet high, and will serve as a resting place for four of the spider's legs, so that the spider stands directly above the path. The lurching motion of the spider is created by a modification of the "Flying Crank Ghost". This link doesn't go to a how-to, unfortunately, they're harder to find than I remember. Leave A comment If you'd like a more in-depth explanation, and I'll write a post about it
 I'm using the same mechanism, but modifying it to  use only two points, and rocking the body back and forth. I may also attach the spider's front two legs to the crank, to add more motion to the scene.
One concern I have with this spider is that it may be actually too scary. for example, I am horrified by giant spiders The movie "Eight Legged Freaks" is technically a comedy, but if i watch that movie, I don't sleep. Maybe I'm just a wiener, but I am pretty nervous about scarring children. We'll see.

Room #2: The Vortex!

After guests are greeted by our friend the gypsy, and threatened by the ghostly statue, they are transported through a magical vortex, and catapulted into a spooky adventure!

The vortex is the simplest and most complicated portion of the haunt. It's simple because based on the original concept, we already have all the materials we need. Unfortunately, the more we think on it, the more we realize that it's not as simple as I had hoped.
 Here's the deal, The librarian, (okay, who am I kidding, it's my mum.) Asked my to make a vortex tunnel like this, But without spending any money. Oh good, I love a good challenge. Basically, the idea was to create that same sort of disorienting effects, without all of the big equipment. So, the Idea I came up with was using a projector to shoot a swirling pattern on the inside of a tube, to create the illusion of swirling movement. I own a cyc, (Aka, big damn piece of fabric) that I could use for the walls, by folding it in half and shining the projector on it, everything should work out okay. However, as you can see on the MAP in yellow, the vortex portion is very narrow, and very long, which is not ideal for projection.
If a patron puts their hand in the wrong spot, they could potentially block out a large portion of the vortex effect, and leave themselves in a long boring room. That, of course is simply no fun. So, our current plan is to try to find a second projector, and divide the vortex into two portions, one end per projector, and project coordinated pictures across both sheets from above.
As for what we'll be projecting, I used Gamemaker  to create a randomly generated spiraling monstrosity. It swirls a bunch of green particles outward around a central point. Hopefully, this will create the unbalance we're looking for. If not, at the very least, it should look pretty cool, and dazzle those little turds anyway ;)

The Seance

Okay, I mentioned that I would be doing more in-depth walkthroughs of each room, and talk about some of the effects and techniques I am planning on using in each. Here, dear readers, is the first.

---------------------------------------------->Spoiler Alert<----------------------------------------------

(I realize very few people reading will actually be visiting the haunted house, but spoilers matter!)

First of all, there is the line. We're doing a rope leading to a large, stone entryway made out of Styrofoam and fabric. The reason for that is to lock out any light, and to allow "Lurch" to gather tickets from guests. One of the problems with our space is that we only have access through one door. Because of this, people will have to criss-cross through the seance room, and out the door. The entryway allows us to hold groups back while other groups exit. The seance allowed us a nice excuse for them, plot-wise to be returning through a room, something you normally don't do in a haunted house. In the seance room, guests will encounter a gypsy woman (played by my sister, Rian) who is swirling around a crystal ball. Overhead, a chandelier swings ominously, and there are pillar candles all around. The room (hopefully) is hung with rich tapestries, and feels heavy with magic.

The candles, obviously, can't be holding a real flame, and I sure as heck don't have the budget to purchase led candles for the amount I am looking for. So, sacrificing a candle-like flicker, I designed a little trick to make lots of pillar candle clusters for pretty cheap. The idea is to use cardboard tubes to fake the body of the candles, glue them into bundles, and hollow out the bottom of the bundle, and place a single low-voltage lightbulb in there. the light glows up through the now-disguised tube, and nobody's the wiser!

Since the seance doesn't have much spooking going along with it, I thought I'd pair it with the next area, the Ghost's Warning! This room comes from another awkwardness about the room. the third area, the vortex, is set up to be a straight shot down to the back of the room, so that guests work their way forward after that. But to get to the starting point of the vortex, they first had to travel behind the librarian's desk, a short hallway, without much room to manuver. It left us without much space to do any tricks, except on top of the desk, which had to be isolated, to keep them from messing with things. What My brother came up with was spooky warning from a ghost, behind a wall of white plastic. There's a plastic available that's semi-transparent, almost milky, that should work well for this. We're planning on doing a Pepper's Ghost Using the library computer and a pane of glass to project an effect in front of a life cast of my brother's face to create the illusion that the face is on fire, and murmuring warnings to turn back. 

Overhead, we're putting a our-foot fluorescent light with a shade on it. The shade will be punctured a billion or so times to scatter small dots of light across the area, without really brightening it much.

Those are the first two areas of the haunted house, visible on the MAP in red and orange. Tune in soon for a glimpse at room number three, The VORTEX! Dun Dun DUNNN!

Pumpkin Rising!

     So! Haunted House Update! The design for the haunted house has been through about a hundred re-drafts, but we've settled on a design, and I've gotten started on a few Props. Included In those props, in case you hadn't noticed, is a giant pumpkin, which I managed to make for the cost of glue. It's hard to get scale out of that picture, but it's about five feet tall, and made entirely out of cardboard from a dumpster next door. Anyway, I've gotten sidetracked, I decided that now that all the design is done, I'd talk with you lot about the challenges specific to this haunt, and how I'm working to handle them.

     First of all, a lot of haunted houses depend on gore to scare people. It's hit or miss, usually, since some people are completely grossed out by the blood, but a lot of people are desensitized to gore. Either way, it's not applicable here, because my haunted house is taking place on an elementary school campus. I'd never do blood with elementary kids, that's just wrong, and the principal of the school asked for us to avoid it anyway. I took that, and added a few more rules for myself:
1: No blood
2: Don't show any scenes of violence, that is, nothing in the haunt should involve humans hurting humans.
3: Spooky, not Scary

Those are the rules. As it turns out, those nix a LOT of classic haunted house gags. the problem I face is that I have an audience ranging in ages from five to ten. Anything I could do that would be genuinely scary to the fifth graders could permanently scar the kindergartners. Trust me, I had that happen to me at a fair. I still don't like using chainsaws... TANGENT! sorry. Because I'm aimed at a young group I had to go for spooky, in the style of Disney's Haunted Mansion ride. There will still be scares, but i'm making sure that none of the scares are outside of human judgement. Any time a big scare will happen, it'll be a classic jump out and yell "BOO!" That way, we can make sure not to scare any first-graders so bad that they wet themselves.

     So, with those rules In mind, I'm going to drop a room list on you all, and I'll go into greater depth on them over the next few days.

First, a seance, where a gypsy will greet our guests, and forsee a dangerous adventure in their future!

Secondly, a Warning from a mysterious ghost, the classic "Turn Back!"

Third, a swirling vortex, as visitors are thrown into a dangerous otherworld

fourth, a mysterious cave, where they will face haunted mirrors, and a Giant Black Widow

Fifth, a Haunted forest, with skeletal trees, talking crows, and something lurking in the distance...

sixth, a spooky pumpkin patch, complete with gravestones, and a scarecrow handing out candy.

then they are cast back into the seance room, where the gypsy congratulates them on their survival, and gives them the boot.

That's the narrative for the haunted house, nothing too scary, but there's more depth to it than there seems, and I'll be getting into that in a few upcoming posts.

A poem.... er... paragraph?

     So, readers I am working hard on the haunted house, and have a meeting coming up for the Christmas play I am putting up. But for now, no interesting developments on those yet.

Instead, I'm going to share a pinch of fiction I just whipped up.

I read a prompt on Google+ from Lee Shelly Allen, suggesting that I write a poem based on five elements of a T.S. Elliot Play. Those Elements were: 

The Burial of the Dead
A Game of Chess
The Fire Sermon
Death by Water
What the Thunder Said

I completely forgot that a poem was the goal, and accidentally wrote a pair of paragraphs instead. So, here they are!

     The young man clenched the cold rail of the balcony, sliding side to side, and watching the patterns left in the drops of water there. The rain pressed down on him, heavy as the decisions ahead of him. The clouds flashed above him, casting his shadow straight down. the roar of the thunder started him out of his thoughts. He took a moment to view his surroundings. He was a quarter of a mile above the street, looking over the city he now ruled. Another burst of thunder, this time from over the bridge, reminded him of how it had all happened. The bridge was still smoking, dripping rubble and steel from the terrorist bomb that had killed hundreds, including the old mayor. Like so many others, she had died trapped in her car, after the bridge had collapsed, sunken in the river. The young man swirled the water on the rail again, and it made him feel ill.

     He was pulled from his thoughts by a shout from an advisor, calling him inside from the glass door of the balcony. The young man put on a strong face, and walked inside, his suit clinging to his skeleton. He was shuffled into a tall chair by a fireplace, and several advisors began to talk to him, planning the memorial. He tried to listen, tried to show his best side, but he was lost in his head. The flames held his eyes, whispering, “you’re not ready, boy.” They were right, of course, he knew he was too young for what was coming to him. Then the thunder roared again, as if to cry out “nonsense! You are greatness!” He didn’t know what to believe. This job was supposed to be an opportunity, but suddenly, he felt like he was trapped, with crushing pressure around him. The pressure pushed through the windshield, and his lungs filled with water. The fire popped, and he was back in the meeting.

Hopefully you enjoyed that. Also, feel free to follow me on Google Plus!