2012 Day 88- Crypt upgrade plans

I did happen to be at Disneyland earlier this summer and believe me I am taking mental notes every time I have the opportunity to go out there! All of the props and sets are carefully analyzed. I don't mind the lines for that reason. It gives me plenty of time to think about possibilities! This year it was the Indiana Jones ride that showed me the way to making the crypt more tomb-like! Of course Ghouls, the hanging vines! They're everywhere! So while the vacuform panels and the fake stone as well as the corpse are all great, we can definitely ramp things up. The ceiling needs some work. I mistakenly put the shiny gray side of the foam boards facing down so when painted black they were still shiny and we didn't have enough time to do anything about it. Well now we do! We need to repaint the ceiling a neutral earth tone and what I plan to do is go outside in the back of the property and gather up a bunch of twine, which we do have incidentally, then hang that in various areas around the crypt and from the ceiling and paint those as well. That will make a huge difference as well as the webbing created from the gun! I think it will be amazing when it's done!

Current state of the crypt ceiling. Foam boards painted black but way too shiny. Needs some work!

2012 Day 95- Haunted Doors 2.0

Welcome back Ghouls! Last year we introduced the rolling door concept courtesy of my friend James Beach (Garage of Terror). This was a definite breakthrough as in the past we had major issues with doors derailing from floor-based tracks. Very bad! The suspended rolling door eliminates all of this hassle. I presented a way to open and close the doors last year remotely using a pulley mechanism. See this post to review the concept. Now James has a haunt that attracts mostly young visitors from what I understand. The guests for our haunt are much older, high school to adult. I had to make these doors a little more robust. Each door weighs about 25 pounds or so. The cost is around $15-20 per door: a couple dollars each for 2 caster wheels, a 2x2 for framing, 2x4 I beam. 4 brackets each about 99c and hardboard piece about 10 bucks. I present here details on the crypt exit door. This door will be controlled by an operator using a 2x2 handle. He or she can see through the one way window and will know when to open it!

Video demonstration of crypt exit door from outside and then inside the crypt! Notice how the mechanism is quite smooth. I put a 2x2 cube on either end of the track to act as stops. (see image below)

Components of a suspended sliding door 

You can add weight to the bottom if necessary as sometimes the doors will sway if not weighted down. The plastic on the right is there to prevent light leaks from inside the crypt

2x2 handle for opening and closing

Door is unmounted here showing the caster wheels bolted to 2 brackets which sit on either side of the 2x4 I beam (when mounted of course). You might have to drill an extra hole in the bracket on the bottom to secure the bottom portion. These brackets are very thin and easy to drill through

This is the inside of the same door as seen from within the crypt. I used a vacuform panel surrounded by pieces of foam from an old hot tub cover which when painted black look like old stone slabs!

Day 37- Live map room!

At last some signs of functionality! We installed camera 3 in the map room and tested it out. Works great! Now Ghouls, for those of you interested in night vision cameras these are fantastic. This is a Bullet infrared water resistant CCD sold by a company that used to be called PalmVid and now Bigsecurity.com. Camera + cables, adaptors and 5 year warranty for $90. Image quality is excellent. The video in this post does not do it justice as I was shooting the TV monitor with my iphone! One day I will have a real video camera but every cent is going into the haunt right now. But you get the idea. These cameras just plug into the yellow port on your TV and away you go! The images in this post show the camera mounted in the near corner of the map room which was really the only place we could put it. You can also see the 3 monitors in the control room. The one on the far left is the map room monitor.

Day 42- Crypt (map room) exit door

The last of the large rolling doors is finally complete. This is the exit door from the map room. There will be someone behind the wall to the left who can operate the door with a simple 2x2 wooden handle attached to the back of it. Notice the 'stonework' on the door which was the last bit of hot tub cover that was used on the walls before. Now some ghouls ask me "Doc, why do you keep calling this thing 'map room'? Looks like a crypt to me" That's because the plans for this room were inspired by the map room scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I wanted to do Egyptian theme panels but they were too expensive. At any rate we are using sound from that actual movie scene and of course there is the projected snake on the ground as well as the moving wall.

Day 58- Map room ceiling

Yikes! September already! We've fallen behind some , so I am hoping that with the holiday weekend I can 'bring it' and get back on track. This is a start right here with the map room ceiling done. This took a bit of engineering to pull off as there weren't many options to place the ceiling in a way that wouldn't interfere with the crush wall! I used a 2x2 frame with foam board screwed into it. I had to add an additional 2x2 to the crush wall frame so the ceiling struts could be placed just above the top of the crush wall. The second image is the view from above the room ceiling. I think you can see what I mean! I added some strips of sheeting to hide the pulleys and rope. On one end they attach directly to the crush wall and the other end to the opposite wall so that when the wall moves the sheet compresses like an accordion. No one can see the pulley mechanism behind that! You can see the slot in the ceiling where the corpse will move with the wall. The total distance of wall movement is about 3 -4 feet.

Day 80- Map room entry door

Finally the first door is hung- literally! As I mentioned in a previous post, the door mechanics in previous haunts was floor based, basically a sliding mechanism with wheels in a track. This was cumbersome and frequently the doors would derail. It was difficult to balance properly. Door failure is possibly the worst problem because traffic flow is completely disrupted and people aren't forced to stop and experience timed effects that you spend a lot of time developing. I believe this year, having the doors suspended on 2x4 I beams will be the solution and I don't think we will have a failure again! The map room (crypt) entry door is shown suspended using the same brackets and caster wheels we used for the crush wall (see July 6 post- day 117) except obviously the doors are traveling parallel to the I beams as opposed to perpendicular. This makes it much easier to build although you have to first build a frame for the I beam track and it's a lot more construction than a simple wheel based sliding door but I believe this is the way to go if you want doors in your haunt! Now there is some sway at the bottom as the door is a couple inches off the floor, but we added a 2x4 at the bottom and a 2x2 at the top to flatten the hardboard door material (you can get 4' x 8' hardboard for around $7). This greatly minimizes the swaying at the bottom.The tricky thing here was placing the I beam track between the door frame and the crush wall so the wall could slide past the door easily. Looks like both the door and the crush wall will be fine with no impingement either way so far.

Day 87- Completion of crush wall!

I think it's definitely ready for primetime, ghouls! We finished the 'stone work' around the vacuform panels. Not that easy as we had to cut the foam pieces to fill the spaces around the panels. We used glue and also screws from the back of the frame. The foam is quite dense but very light weight. Once the wall details were complete, we tested the mechanism and everything works fine. There is very little additional weight there. In the second image it looks like the crush wall barely gets past the back wall but there is actually plenty of space there. The first image shows the wall from the side after moving it forward with the pulley mechanism about 1-2 feet. It's very smooth motion now.

Day 88- Devil in the Details

..And that's exactly it. This year, fewer events, WAY more details. Here we are seeing the Map Room or crypt room take shape with added wall detail for the crush wall and back wall. We apply some black sheeting to the wooden wall frame basically to minimize the light leaks. Behind this room is the control room. We will have 3 monitors this year! That means lots of light unfortunately that has to be addressed. We can screw the vacuform panels to the wall frame and we also have our 'stone' slabs which basically consist of foam from an old hot tub cover. A little black spray paint and away you go! With the appropriate lighting it really does look like stone! They are trickier to attach to the frame though. I used a strong epoxy as well as screws placed through the back of the frame into the foam.

Day 101- Crush wall details

Progress has been a little slow with the heat wave in full force. The fan is just blowing hot air. Anyway I did get the crypt panels installed onto the crush wall which you can see here. It looks awesome!

This time they will be quite visible and there will be a total of 9, 5-6 of which will be placed in the Map Room! You can also see the corpse prop in front of the wall and yes I did add some old chains we had lying around from our dog's old backyard runner. I aged them a little with some black spray paint. Lot's more to do here. We've got the rest of the Map Room walls, 2 doors, the projector set-up and ceiling. We are also going to start work on the elevator platform this weekend!