Saturday, October 15, 2011

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 ;)

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