Day 64 and a half- Vortex update

Meanwhile construction continues on the tunnel. In these images you can see the half-hoops assembled. 3 of them so far. We cannot assemble an entire hoop and get it out of the garage! The plan is to bring out the half hoops and then fully assemble. Each hoop is made of 16 segments overlapping and bolted together. We are running into a glitch trying to find a suitable bike wheel rim that will fit the hoop's edge. Apparently there are no reliable specs on bike wheels in general in terms of true diameter and channel width. The first wheel we tried was supposedly 1 1/8 inch wide and 20" diameter and actual measurements where .8 inch and 17 wide! I am working with the bike shop in earnest to find a suitable wheel.

Day 64- Gate and Control Room

Just over 2 months to go! We decided to put a gate between zone 4, pepper ghost room, and 5, prison room. Once the actor comes out of the pepper's ghost fx box area in zone 4 (see post from July 31) to scare the guests, they will be trapped behind the gate for a second or 2 until the haunt master sitting in the control room opens the gate into the prison room. There will be a mat sensor just in front of the gate which will trigger the gate opening sound (my que!) We also set up the control room which has 2 monitors and will also have pulleys to operate the prop drops in zone 1 and 2. The gate is easily constructed out of 2x2's hinged to the central wood frame. The 'latch' is made out of 3/8 inch drill rod ($4) press fit into a 2x2 handle (after drilling a hole slightly under 3/8 then tapping the rod into it). The rod passes through short 2x2 segments to keep it aligned and into an eye bolt which serves as the latch. If you look at the 3rd image down from the top, on the left you can see the drill rod passing through the eye bolt which is bolted onto the central frame. There is a stop screwed into the central frame as well to keep the rod from spearing someone in zone 1! After opening the gate, the hauntmaster then closes the gate when the guests have passed into zone 6. Notice the coffin silhouette design on the gate. I thought that was an interesting touch! The gate construction is illustrated in the images. The short video demonstrates the gate in action (taken with a sound bite from the 'Nightmare Revisited' CD)

Day 72- Entrance hall framing complete!

Well...just about. The very beginning where the red wagon is in the picture (NOT part of the haunt btw!) is where we will have to see about how the exit will work going into the tunnel outside the garage and how much room we will need. But the bulk of the hallway is framed. The end of the hall(closest to the viewer in the image) will have the only 3 vacuform crypt panels in the haunt, due to arrive any day now, one of which will be placed on the door going into zone 2 (again for a description of the 7 zones, see the blog entry for July 4th). Depending on how the panels lay out we might have to add some more 2 x 2's. Now the other image is showing a part of the entrance hall ceiling which for the first 1/2-2/3 of the hall has to be just below the height of the opened garage door, maybe 6 1/2 or so feet. I framed out a square opening through which I will drop a fake bloody hand just as people walk under it. The entrance hall will have a camera monitoring traffic so I will be able to see when exactly I need to 'drop the prop'! The hand will be suspended by a pulley mechanism to be demonstrated later. I'm a big fan of prop drops. They are easy to set up and work very well. The end of the hall will transition to the 10 foot ceiling height.

Day 77- Entrance Hall

We're back! And now onto the grand entrance. What will be essentially a crypt theme, operators will be behind the 2 walls. On one side there will be openings in the wall, the operator will be able to stick his hands through to touch the guests. His hands will either be wet or covered with fake blood. I have been told the blood may not be a good idea because some folks will be upset if their costumes get stained. Kmon now! What do you think? Anyway you see here in the images, there is a 2-way mirror on one wall so anyone standing in the space behind the mirror will be able to see people coming in. This hall will be very dim and foggy. We shield the edge of the mirror with sheeting. No way any guests will be able to tell. Now those haunters out there using glass in their haunt be extra careful. This mirror I had used in a previous haunt. The frame consists of 2x4's routed out to house the mirror. The frame is screwed together. It sits in the wall frame shown here. There are 2 eye bolts on the top of the mirror frame with rope in each looped around a 2x2 at the top of the wall and around a 2x4 at the base. The mirror frame is also screwed into the wall frame. There is no way the mirror can get jarred loose and if it does, it cannot fall. I use a lot of duct tape for knots and securing things to the wood frames.

Day 89- Framing complete for the 1st half

Now 1 month into it, we achieved almost all of our goals to this point. Today we finished framing for the cave or zone 3 and all of the hoop plywood has been waterproofed and will be ready for assembly when I return in 10 days. The images below show the framing details for the cave. Most of this room will have low traffic as the actor stands in the back corner and walks forward to surprise the guests, then they will turn to head down the next hall. Therefore we have just 2x2's framing this section mainly for form. Slight irregularity will enhance the cave effect. The vortex hoop segments are also shown here in the top image coated with Thompson's water seal. That's all we're going to do. There are 16 of these segments to a hoop and they are bolted together in overlapping fashion. The bolt holes have already been machined as you can see in the second image from the top.

Day 91- Pepper's problems

I guess all the haunt experts had warned me ahead of time, but sometimes you just have to discover this stuff for yourself. Plexiglass just will not cut it. Too much distortion. I tried flattening the backdrop, changing the lighting. Did all that and still no good. I had thought that with focused lighting we could limit the defects. Sometimes things like this happen during the process. You try stuff out and maybe it doesn't go as planned. We do have time to fix this and will get it done. Unfortunately we will have to look for a suitable sheet of plate glass. So let's move on. We are also waterproofing the vortex hoops and finishing framing of the first half of the haunt.