[thebiz]

(Note: This is a long and rambly thread..I like to read my own thoughts and theres just not enough long rambly threads to read these days..Im just sayin)

I do love me a good haunted house round about Hallows Eve. I like the thrills, and the cheese, and the dark, and the sweaty vice handgrip of whoever you bring with you, and the peeled grapes and strung up hot dogs that are supposed to represent body parts, and the blood splatter in the dark (that is really just warm water), and the shrieks and howls and rattles, and bad acting by 16 year olds and community theater thespians, and the BOOs, and the laughing, and the fun.

Well, here comes Halloween and I think I will try to make a Haunted House walk through using Iclone this year. Not so much a movie, just a fun little experiment. Ive got 6 weeks and Im starting from scratch. Im not positive that I will succeed or finish this (and I have no idea if it will be any good if I do finish it, and lets face it, it probably wont be scary..but thats not really the point) but if I do I'll try to submit it too Chris' Halloween Extravaganza. Anywho, this thread will serve as my design diary. As its not really a movie, I dont mind spilling the beans on whatever is in store and If you, fellow reader, are interested, I'd love to hear your suggestions and input wherever you deem to put them. And if you wanted to make your own haunted house walkthroughs then that would be way too groovy (and competitive as well!).

So first off lets design a haunted house.

Question #1: Should there be a theme? An abandoned jail or hospital theme is always quite nice. However, after some time pondering this issue, Ive decided to go with a grabbag set of features with no theme other than spooky halloween stuff. So cohesion be damned.

Question #2: What kind of thrills and chills will be included?

• Well, it should be dark and there should be some Boo moments.
  
• The tilting spinning bridge is a pretty solid standby found in many a spookhouse and wont be too hard to pull off (will probably feature a post about this in the future).
  
• The ending should let the participant think all is over and there is the exit door only to hear the whir of a chainsaw and turn around to see leatherface running at them. Again this is a standby that I've seen used in two separate houses. Very effective stuff Mayhaps I'll try a variation or perhaps I'll just go for the blatant ripoff.
  
• Doctors in bloody clothes make for good guides to point the patron in the proper direction
  
• I'm feeling a black room with dayglow graffitti (self illuminated wall should do the trick) decorated with creepy pictures. Perhaps one of the pictures comes alive and reaches out to grab you? Maybe yes...Maybe no.
  
• Heres an original one that Ive been dreaming up in my head...guy walks into a very large room. Ceiling is say 30-50 feet high. The room is very sparsely decorated as if its under contruction (probably just a ladder, some paint cans and a platform full of boxes). Walls should glow lightly perhaps of a light purple color. The guy looks up and sees several bodies hanging (noose) from the rafters. Suddenly, one of the bodies falls with a thud behind the pile of boxes. Slowly the body stand up and begins walking towards the guy who hightails it out the exit.
  
• One of the scarier skits Ive seen had a group walking up to a window and looking inside to see a girl sleeping in a bed. Suddenly a guy comes up from behind the group, pushed some members of the group out of the way and crawls in the window and slides under the bed. A minute passes and suddenly a hand reaches up and grabs the girls and pulls her under the bed as we all watch. She breaks free, jumps out the window and starts screaming at the group to run and follow her as the guy starts lumbering towards the window after her. Very effective. Home invasion is scary indeed. - Now I probably wont do this one exactly, its worth thinking about with the possibility of someone escaping from some bad situation and running in front of the hauintedhouse participant perhaps only to be caught and shown in dire straights at a later point. Ok, I'm rambling and this one sounds difficult.
  

So with some of these features in mind, I got to work in sketchup trying to design the layout. Heres my first draft below.

Its just a first draft and the red path denotes my thinking and the path of our protagonist. After getting home and exporting this model into Iclone I realized a couple of things. Chief among them is that the ceiling will have to be removable so I can direct the characters in tight spaces and it would be great to wait for Iclone4 where I could very easily create the desired path. Cest la vie. Haunted House walk throughs wait for no man (even if it was released, I don't have the dinero).

I attached a camera to the front of my characters head and set him off. POV looks pretty solid but bobs around a lot using this technique. Need to look into the camera smoothing technique to see if I can back this off a touch. Anyway, added a couple of lights and heres a picture of the main corridor that uses some basic sketchup textures. Looks pretty cool except for the dramatic lighting dropoff there in the distance. More work to do there.

So at this point, Im still working out the proof of concept. I like what I see so far. More posts as progress is (hopefully) made.

After a bit of searching I ran upon this very cool Haunted House Supply Store so you can see just how much it will cost you to buy that 13' Zombie Kong animatronic doll that will hang off your rooftop ($3,000 and change). Pretty nifty.

[thebiz]

Progress report #1: I cloneboned a skeleton. Half necro half animator. Took me about 2 hours to go from a 3d Warehouse model to animated character. Here he is in sporty position:

The process involves breaking up the model into many little pieces (head, upper and lower torso, upper and lower arms, hands, upper and lower legs and feet. I could have broken up the fingers into 15 pieces but I'm not sadist.), exporting the pieces as props in 3d exchange and then attaching them to a stick figure (as accessories) and making the stick figure invisible. Its my second time using the clone bone process and its a pretty cool feature though I don't know how hard it will be to make a figure that shouldn't have seams between his joints. But as an aside I might one day make a lego feature as theres about 1000 lego models on 3d Warehouse waiting to be boned (if you know what I mean).

I have also been spending my commute time continuing to further my house design. I'll try to sketch up the first room design a little later in the day (though don't expect anything on par with George Locust's scribbles...jeez, did you see his dead animal hat sketches? Skillz.). I added a little something this morning on the subway that should be kinda cool and make good use of bicycle animation I've been working on (think "and your little dog too!").

p.s. Ive noticed the images dont show up when Im not logged in so not everyone will see all my snazzy shots. Might have to change my image upload method in the future.

[Nukester]

Very interesting indeed Biz! you've got a cool layout for this experiment and I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out

[Jase180]

This is just to cool for school...love the idea

[Dulci]

This is exciting!!!!

[ubernewbie]

Which super model is it?

[thebiz]

Room #1 Walkthrough Ideas (like all this thread, this is my rambly thoughts, longwinded and existing as part of my thought process..just so you know. As an aside, just writing up this post has caused me to already make a big change to the room 1 layout so huzzah!)

Originally I envisioned this having a group of people (3 or more) visiting the Haunted House so that whenever the first person POV turns around there would be his group of friends. However, aside from this being difficult to do (moving all 3 through the rooms) and the resources it would take (the more people in my Iclone scene the slower it goes) it would also call for additional voice overs that Im just not going to have time for so I have decided on a single person exploring the house through 1st person POV.

So our hero enters the House. I may or may not have an exterior shot of him buying a ticket. I have a groovy building model I want to use but I already have a boatload on my plate and hard core time constraints so probably not.

First up he sees the Meat and Greeter. Not completely sold on who this character is. Could be the bloody doctor. Perhaps something else. This character will show up every time our guy enters the main corridor to direct him to the proper doorway. I might also use yellow glowing arrows to mark the way through the house (going for realistic here).

So the meet and greeter points our hero through the first doorway and into the first room. A diagram of the draft room layout has been attached to this thread.

Its cut into 4 sections. The first section ("Living Pictures and moving furniture") will likely be a study with books, a rug, perhaps a fireplace and many disturbing pictures on the wall. 2 or 3 of these pictures will have "living" people within them. I will play around with making the width of the person very small to see how that looks (flat). Not positive about the pictures yet. Was thinking the scream and mona lisa but jeez I think Ive used those in at least two of my older flicks. Perhaps some new blood (ooh have to remember that line for the meat and greeter) would be nice. Research needed. Aside from the pictures various pieces of furniture will float, spin and move about. Think Disney's Haunted Mansion on a $5 budget and you should get the idea.

The next section is small wooden room with a window covered by a shutter. Shutter might have some kind of sign spray painted on it (Look Closer). Shutter raises showing a window. Out the window is a midwest farm backdrop and a twister. Into view rides the wicked witch on a bike who screams her obligiatory lines (I'll get you my pretty!") and then rides off screen. Shutter slams shut. The witch stuff will be greenscreened. Not so scary but should be fun (for me anyway).

The next section is an empty room. In the corner is a man standing facing the corner. He does not move (except perhaps the idle breathing animation). Simple and hopefully creepy.

The last section of the room will be a Meat Locker/Butcher room. Use your imagination as Im still working on the details. However I did find a nice slab of meat in the working heros collection of 3d Warehouse.

Speaking of 3d Warehouse, heres a couple of models that amused me today in my searching:

Haunted Outhouse

Burning Pyramid about to fall on a bunch of people

Penguin Demon admonishing Penguin Minion (my favorite of the bunch)

Vampire Aliens abducting a dog

[thebiz]

Progress has been made this eve as the Which Room is ready for action. Yes, here our hero enters, takes a quick look around (at the candle on the table) and then faces the window shutter. Shutter will raise and The Wicked Witch of the West (or was it east) shall ride by. Im still working on her scene but I got the character and the bike riding animations all done.


Of note Im using one of those Iclone wind affected props (ummm) to similate those plastic strips that cover doors in kangaroo farms (sorry, its the only example I could think of at the moment) to keep the kangeroos from escaping. It blows a little in the wind. And the room will be denoted by a sign that says "No Place". Cute eh....get it? get it?

Heres the screenies of my work...

Ive also been immersed in research of late concerning Fransisco Goya's Black Paintings. Creepy stuff. Expect a badly taught lesson in art appreciation 101 to follow.

[thebiz]

Made some nice progress this weekend. Filmed a test sequence of the which/witch room complete with the green-screened wicked witch of the west material. Its looking pretty damn solid if I do say so myself (which I just did). Also worked on the man standing in the corner room (easy peasy, breezy, simple) and started work on the haunted mansion room last night. Very happy with the overall look so far. Kinda a stone castle with wall torches and piano type of thing.

Also making some nice little adjustments as I go. Substituted the blaze particle effect as a much superior candle effect to the "small torch" effect (which was used in the screeny below). Making the slits in the door covers smaller to hide more of the next room. Working on my lighting effects.

Schedule-wise I'm hoping to have all the sets, lighting and test runs (perhaps actual usable footage as well) done for the first four sections by the end of the month. Then there will probably be 3 more sections (graveyard, spinning tunnel, man hanging from the ceiling room) as well as the main corridor and all the meet and greeter scenes and possibly the chainsaw maniac ending. Whew. That sounds pretty ambitious now that I look at it. Well, we shall see.

Anywho, as promised heres a couple of thoughts on my haunted house artwork. The Haunted Mansion scene is in need of some artwork so I went looking for bizarre and dark painting on the interweb. Ended up seeing a lot of Fransisco Goya's work in my search and ended up reading a bit about Goya's Black Paintings. Apparently Goya had suffered through two near fatal diseases that had left him deaf and (some say) depressed. During this late portion of his life he ended up painting 14 pictures directly on the walls of the house where he lived. Goya's work is pretty dark and bizarre but these include some real whoppers of creepiness (though not all of the 14 are overtly disturbing). Ive attached four of them below. To see the higher res shots check out http://www.theartwolf.com/goya_black_paintings.htm. This site also inlcudes the layout of the pics in Goya's home.

There's something fascinating about this to me. Almost like some ritualistic Feng Shui and I have considered including all 14 images in the Mansion Room in their appropriate spots. You have to admit its a kinda creepy idea. I probably wont do it in this project but its an idea that will stay with me for a while.

Ok, so further reading leads to this article in the times where an expert in the area has come to the conclusion that the black paintings are not actually the work of Goya but more likely by his son. Now often, stories of forgery or misappropriation of credit are more interesting than the art itself (El Myr comes to mind...plus it was a great burrito and margarita shack in Atlanta back in the day...just saying) but here that is not the case. Theres also some interesting counterpoints to the statements made by the expert such as the fact that the paintings were changed and repainted a bit in the restoration process and a fairly interesting take on furniture linguistics.

The Times story brings up some interesting points about how people are enthralled by even the smallest scrawls of what might be considered a master but will often fail to notice or even willingly ignore lesser known works because of a lack of name recognition, or the stigma of being of a particular school of art (the student being far inferior to the master). Definitely an interesting discussion and one I might want to explore in the future (anyone recall the History Fixers discussion from way back?).

Well, enough to bore you for now. I'll try to include some production screens next time.

[Dulci]

One of the best production threads - I'm enjoying following your thought process.