Welcome back Ghouls! OK I couldn't resist. The garage is not exactly open for haunting yet, but I believe this year it will be soon. Hope everyone survived without halloween to this point. Of course the holidays are a diversion, but once you get into Spring we start eagerly planning. For this post after months of reflection we review those things that we need to improve on and give some clues about what we have planned this year.
1) Obviously the 'vortex' is going to be a yearly thing as we mentioned. The winter was very bad in New England and we did get some water leaks down into the basement but thankfully all of the wood components have survived. We will move the vortex location to the other side of the garage so people trying to get to the haunt entrance will not be running into folks exiting. We will create ramps this year going into and out of the tunnel and do a better job of eliminating the white areas inside the canopy esp the exit so we can create complete darkness.
2) Lighting was a big problem last year. I understand darkness is your friend but I think we went a little too far on that. We actually had a wall go down because people couldn't see an exit from one of the rooms. Plus we shot ourselves in the foot in the entrance hall as no one saw the really amazing crypt panels after all that! We will use those again in a different capacity. I found this source for LEDs that looks very interesting.
3) Actors- what actors? I bet a lot of you are in the same boat. You're in the community. Everyone thinks we're crazy and no one really gets into this like we do. The neighbors are gracious enough to come by and help, esp during the work week (which btw halloween falls on a Monday this year!)but let's face it, after several years of this they don't even dress up any more. Can't ask them to be obsessed with this like we are. It is what it is. I did have one high school kid who was terrific, but he is in the high school drama program! So hopefully we will get him back, but honestly I am going to have to accept more responsibility for remote scaring. It just cannot work to have people show up at the last minute and expect things to work in the haunt. I did use 'operators' to deploy certain things behind the scenes. That can still work. I have one of my sons and his friends handle that. They are definitely into it there! Bottom line is I bought a 3rd night vision camera to help me with this situation! They had a 25% off sale.
4) Doors- the coffin gate was verry cool but cumbersome and difficult to operate. The sliding doors are a great concept but as I recall in 2009 we had problems back then, and last year as you recall the door going into the 'bee room' totally failed so we had to leave it open. That killed the whole effect. This year we are designing the sliding doors based on a suspensory system (wheels on top as opposed to the bottom)and we will need them to work perfectly because there will be a lot more of them!
5)Crowd management- it broke down when our signaling system failed. We will need some fullproof signaling method to let people in line know when to enter.
We will also want to finish with plenty of time to test all features of the haunt out. Last year we really couldn't do that.
Every year is great but we're always looking to improve and I think last year we were so focused on getting the 'vortex' to work that we kind of lost the edge on the rest of the haunt. This year we will be able to spend more time on the haunt. We plan to do only 3-4 zones and really spend a lot of time on the details in each one. All I can say is that it is the most ambitious haunt yet! Of course! Because of that we will probably be starting verrry soon, so stay tuned!
