ScareWalkthrough

Tech Notes: Skulls, vaccuumforming, and stone

The guardian skulls don't DO anything, they just sit there looking lumpy. They were created in two steps: First I took one of my (many) skulls laying around the garage (what, you don't have skulls laying around? You should do something about that!) and made a bunch of copies of it via vacuum-forming.

Vacuum forming a model not designed for it is tricky; each pass I adjusted my timing and temperature, and also went in with clay and filled undercuts and problem areas until I got near-perfect reproductions of the skull face.

After cutting off the flashing with heavy scissors, we daubed the skulls with Great Stuff. Normally, Great Stuff leaves large smooth "worms" of material (see the Sony room, later) that is very distinctively... Great Stuff. However, if you pat it down into a thin smear of material, it will puff up into a more interesting texture. Variations in texture can be made by changing the thickness and uniformity of the smear of material, as well as how late in the setting process you do the pat-down.

The stone walls shown here, and throughout about half the haunt, are the real triumph of 2008. Each room has its own style and look for the stone, and our artists (Manda, Karen, Teresa, and others) did an amazing job of making the more important walls look awesome.

The basic stone process was simple, though painful when iterated about 100 times. First, half-inch sheets of styrofoam (expanded polystyrene foam, or EPS) were glued onto the flats using Liquid Nails. Then we went over them and drew the style of stones we wanted onto the foam (using templates that helped some, given the random selection of volunteers we had doing the work).

Once stones were drawn on, an army (well, a half-dozen or so at a time, who worked like an army) of volunteers took loop sculpting tools and lifted the EPS out of the grout-lines between the stones. This gave the grout depth and texture and made the next step easier.

After the grout was carved down, we took small curved rasps (normally used for woodworking or drywall work) and rounded the edges of the stones, and in some cases, dug the grout or dirt spaces between the stones down even further.

Styrofoam is weak, flammable, and has a distinctive texture. To fix all of these attributes in one go, we covered the stones and, to a lesser degree, the spaces between them, with a special "faux stone" mixture. In tests before the build, I found that plaster bandage makes a wonderful stone covering -- two or three layers of plaster bandage can be worked to create a smooth, strong, durable, and easily painted shell. But plaster bandages are expensive, and there was no way we could afford to cover nearly 3,000 square feet of wall with them!

Our styrofoam coat, then, was a special mixture of 1 quart water, 1 quart latex paint, and six pounds of vinyl/concrete grout mixture, making roughly one gallon of thick, gritty, yet flexible grout; enough for about one wall (each wall is standard 4' x 8' flat). We blobbed all of the stones with handfuls of this mixture and then used brushes to push it down into the grout. Finally, using our hands, we smoothed the stone face in different patterns and directions to give them the right character.

Painting the walls, after the coating had dried, was simple enough. A base color was created for each area, and then highlight and shadow tints were created from that base. The stones were painted with the base, and then a highlight was stippled in from the stone edges a bit. The shadow color was then stippled at the outer edge of the stone and down into the grout a bit. This gave the edges a dark, receding color, that ridged up to the highlight, and then settled down into the base color. The random variations in stippling and artistic vision gave the stones a lot of variety.

The grout was then, in a separate pass, given a black wash using black paint thinned with equal parts water.

Finally, for the most important rooms and walls, skilled artists (as opposed to our talented and hardworking, but generally not artistic, volunteers) went through and did additional painting on the stones, giving them even more depth and character.

This, by the way, was a LOT of WORK, and the volunteers may perhaps forgive me someday.

Tech Notes: Pepper's ghost

Pepper's Ghost, which is just a piece of glass with controlled lighting, is a really marginal effect. Yeah, you can make stuff appear and disappear, but it never looks right, at least with just glass.

We've done it with a half-silvered mirror before (using silver window tinting), and it looks better, but still... shiny. Or ghostly.

So, if you want to represent GHOSTS, fine, use it. But for "real" objects? No, it's not very good.

Tech Notes: Red and green, gore gun, and pisser

Note that we had three kinds of groups this year: Normal groups got a basic, scary, but less aggressive show. "Green" groups got the granny/small-kid show, very tame if still very very scary (we lost a number of green groups, even, because it was too much for them). "Red" groups got full-contact, full-slime, soaked-in-blood entertainment. And survived. Barely.

The Gore Gun, a popular item used by Hawgfly at Maker Faire and other venues, as well as in their professional work, is a simple device and very effective. It's even mostly safe if done right!

My gore gun is different from Hawgfly's, mostly due to my different environment and use for it. I use two irrigation valves, one on each side of a pressure chamber, and a long barrel that is much narrower than the pressure chamber. The valves are put, one on each side, of an XOR switch (a 3-way light switch), so only one at a time is active.

A ball-valve is teed-in to the base of the exhaust barrel. This is used to fill the gun, breach-loader style, rather than muzzle-loader.

When the ARM switch is on, one of the valves is activated at all times. When the control switch (downstream of ARM) is set to FILL, air (no more than 60PSI) fills the chamber. Flipping the control to FIRE turns off the fill valve and opens the exhaust valve, blowing the contents of the barrel all over the target zone.

Siwa, who ran the gun, had so much fun with it that she is now in a 12-step recovery program, trying to gather up again the tattered remnants of her dignity.

The pisser is a very simple one-chamber device filled with water (which is added via a cleanout fitting on the pipe). Pressurized to about 30PSI, a water irrigation valve controls the outlet tube (which is at the bottom of the chamber, so it's always wet). The outlet tube is fitted with a drip-irrigation sprinkler head and aimed for best effect.

A 3/8" clear hose is attached to barb fittings screwed into the top and bottom of the chamber, providing a visual indicator of the water level. Hose clamps are necessary to keep this hose from blowing off the chamber when pressurized, a fun event that I experienced several times before my few functioning neurons reminded me that I had clamps.

Tech Notes: timbers and cobwebs

More stonework! The timbers and doors, not shown here, were painted by Karen Horan with a purplish-brown paint. She proved to have a great skill for such things.

The cobwebs are done using a basic hot-glue cobweb gun, like the one I describe in Make Magazine's 2007 Halloween issue. Except that I'm using a 400-watt industrial-strength glue gun, heavy duty, so I can make a lot of webs in a short span of time.

I love my new cobweb gun.

Tech Notes: Super duper

Once I do some FX work for Lord Vile, aka Citizen Gray, aka Alex, I can put on my resume work for both a super-hero (Scare's own Defuser) and a super-villain (Vile). That will be fun!

Tech Notes: Slime and poo

The banana-scented Monkey Poo is just a heavy PVA slime. The basic slime recipe is very simple.

First, create a 4% mixture of PVA (weight over weight, so for 1 gallon of water which weighs about 3,787 grams, add about 152 grams of PVA powder and then heat and stir until it is dissolved, but no hotter than about 195ºF). Create a 1% mixture of methylcellulose (38 grams to a gallon). Create a 4% mixture of Borax.

Now, for normal slime I use 20 parts PVA with 20 parts methylcellulose. The PVA gives it body, the cellulose gives it better flow and stringing characteristics, and some stickyness. To this, I add about 1 part of the borax solution.

For the monkey poo, I doubled the concentration of the PVA and cellulose, and added the borax until it was as hard as I wanted it to be (but I didn't keep track how much). Note that the borax solution continues to tighten the slime for about an hour, and more still when the slime is handled.

If you want your slime to be really slippery, make a 1% solution of xanthan gum (easier said than done), and then use 20 parts PVA, 10 parts methylcellulose, and 10 parts xanthan, plus 1 part or so borax to tie it all together.

All of these components (except xanthan gum) can be purchased at The Chemistry Store at reasonable prices. Xanthan gum can be found at grocery or health stores.

Tech Notes: Blood slime and Dave

However good this room looks in these stills, it was amazing with a light fog and dark dramatic lighting. Dave Bessenhofferheimerhimmerwhatever, who created and acted the lead in this room, did an amazing job, quickly, and with stuff readily on hand. His energy level as an actor was incredible, and his room was exciting, consistent, and dramatic. Yay Dave!

We also gave this room some slime and thick blood (blood mixed with slime, to give it body) to help decorate both the room and the Red Groups.

Tech Notes: Stylistic variations

Sony did a great job of decorating their room, mostly with case after case of Great Stuff. Expensive! Perhaps the most expensive room we have ever built -- but then, they paid for the supplies (and then some) so it's all good. While you can TELL that it is made with Great Stuff (note the characteristic texture) it is still a pretty room, and done differently than what you see in most haunts.

My primary objection to Great Stuff is that it always looks like what it is... and all the haunts use it. Likewise, I don't like to use anything store bought (nowhere local, and even nothing from catalogs) unless it is heavily modified... I want our guests to have a UNIQUE experience, not a "oh, I recognize that" experience.

One thing their team did that was interesting was... wait for the Great Stuff to mostly harden, and then pull it out into strands of polyurethane, like tendons. It's very cool, and a new way to disguise Great Stuff.

Tech Notes: Awesomeness

Joetta, who normally acted in this room with great energy and enthusiasm, traded off for another fine actress on Halloween day. That day, Joetta was in the zombie wars room with her guy, Dave; they built it and, for this one night, they worked it together.

Joetta was a zombie. Which is a lot like being a roller girl, which was her previous engagement. She not only chewed the scenery with great enthusiasm, but the guests and an occasional guide too I think.

We are SO KEEPING Dave and Joetta. They rock!

Tech Notes: Ludicrous slide of doom

We were going to build a slide here, ourselves, out of completely insufficiently appropriate materials (in true haunt fashion) when a benefactor (who I don't know if I dare name here) stepped forward in response to some internet trolling I had done.

He had tube slide parts. And the tools and people to assemble them. And beams to support them. After we convinced him we weren't completely bogus, he agreed to fill our desperate need for a dangerous slide.

Tube slides are awesome! But, if you ever get the chance to use one, do NOT use an S-Curve in the middle, because it's brutally hard on the rider. Make it one continuous curve, with maybe a long flat straight spot for slowdown in the middle.

Tech Notes: Abyssal organ

The abyssal organ was my big toy at Maker Faire 2008. It is a very cool device, consisting of two principles merged together into one unit.

First, a long pipe is made to resonate with an elastic driver. This driver is based on the technology used in air horns and in some types of organ pipes. Mostly. I create an air chamber at one end of the pipe (using a PVC adapter) and extend the pipe through it so it protrudes out the end. I then stretch a latex disk across the chamber, so the edges are clamped and sealed at the edges of the chamber and the central pipe presses against the latex, sealing that as well.

I then pump air into the chamber, which pressurizes and eventually forces the latex to flex, whereupon all of the pressure in the chamber is dumped into the pipe, creating a pulse of sound.

This repeats, making a note that depends on the length of the pipe.

The second principle is that of the beat frequency. To use this, I put a SECOND driver on the pipe, in such a way that its effective pipe length is different than that of the first driver. This creates a wonderful thrumming noise, or perhaps, a moose call.

By changing the airflow balance between the two drivers, a range of effects can be created.

Tech Notes: Slime gun and infinite batteries

I hate batteries. They are expensive, have a limited lifetime, if they are rechargeable they still fade over time, they are hard to dispose of... yeah, they suck. For the lasers in the grid, I replaced the batteries with a hacked-up assemblage of vinyl and polyethylene hose, copper pipe, a few wires, and a variable power supply (wall-wart).

Except on the slime gun, and a few wimpy Red lasers -- those I tore apart and tapped into the circuit board. Rawr!

The slime gun is the same as the gore gun, above, but smaller and used to shoot wads of plain slime at guests. Fun!

Tech Notes: Power and sparks

The power station sounds were done with two abyssal organ pipes, each tuned to a different note but running about as deep a beat as I could get out of the 4.5" diameter PVC pipes I had.

Diameter counts for a lot when it comes to volume at the desired frequency; the lower your target, the fatter the pipe you need to make it work.

The electric arc was off of my small Tesla coil, and the pipe Dunstan was holding was plastic and painted to look metal. The trigger switch was hidden on the pipe itself, so it was nearly impossible to trigger the effect when not in the correct position.

Oh, and we added a Jacob's ladder to the primary power midway in the run, too, using a basic neon sign transformer (NST). This was also controlled, as were several effects in the room, by the console that Dunstan was standing at. The switch the guests flipped actually did power down the primary sound, but the lights switching to dark then red, plus the backup power sound, was run by a tech outside the room.

The electrified switch was a pulsing electric fence tied to a variac to lower its sting. ALICE, later, also has electric fingernails attached to a continuous-duty electric fence, on a different variac. I now have three variacs -- one on the Tesla, one from the power room, and one I used for an Abyssal Organ variant that drove sound in the crawl tunnels. Andy's variac ran the Vortex Tunnel, and Lord Vile's variac ran ALICE's tingler.

Tech Notes: Vortex hack

Paul broke a bunch of rules on his vortex tunnel, but he broke a complementary set of rules so that the individual failings merged together into a fabulous, rickety, and functional result.

The eleven-foot diameter metal rings were not quite flat or round. They weren't even balanced, with three ten-foot poles plus a four foot pole filler making up the circumference causing the axial bars to not be distributed evenly around the tunnel.

This off-balance, rickety tube was then balanced on top of six bicycle wheels -- that were just wide enough and just deep enough to hold the pipes in their rims just so long as the moon was aligned correctly. These supports should have been deeper and better fitting, but that would have cost money!

The wheels themselves were attached to flimsy metal supports, which were bolted onto wood bases, which were in turn strung together and spaced apart by more wood (of an insufficient rigidity). This entire assembly of wheels, metal, and wooden framework flexed and bent with an alarming creaking sound as the tunnel spun. It was, however, the flex and give of this platform that allowed the tunnel itself to be so completely out of true.

The drive wheel was fitted with a basic bicycle gear, which was driven by another geared wheel, which was driven by an old dryer motor. We used a toothed belt (expensive and hard to find) on this since a solid V-belt was too rigid and tended to jump out of the motor's pulley. All of the teeth were powdered away during the run, though the backup belt was never used.

The motor speed itself was controlled by a variac (a variable auto-transformer) that controlled the voltage to the motor. Definitely not the good way to control speed, and I should know, what with my robotics background!

But it worked. It creaked, rattled, groaned, got blown apart by wind, and had to be re-tensioned and re-adjusted a couple times a night, but I think every single group had a working vortex to walk through.

It was amazing!

Categories: Props | Halloween | SCARE for a Cure