THEME PARK 101 - Quarantine Edition - Designing a Dark Ride

hello my name is Don Carson I'm a concept artist designer and art director in the themed entertainment design business I've been doing this for over thirty years primarily in the theme park business but I've also worked in the computer game design and also theater set design so I've got this strange eclectic resume of various things that I do over the years and one of the things that I've done is for years I've had a online blog called theme park 101 where I have a sort of it's a place for essays and conversations and articles about the various strange aspects of theme park design and one of the projects that I've always secretly wanted to do is I wanted to to actually go through the entire process of designing an attraction or a dark ride mainly for the purpose of describing each step of the way through concept and I never really had time one of the sort of silver linings of the krona viruses and we're all forced to stay home and I all of a sudden find myself having a lot more time than I used to have and at least I perceived it was an opportunity for me to to work on this project so about a little over a month ago I started posting on Instagram the various steps to designing a dark ride the industry that I work in is unique in that I do a lot of my work under NDA so I have a career that lives primarily in drawers and hard drives that I'm not necessarily allowed to show anybody when lucky some of this work gets out in the form of a finished attraction or a show or a game but more often than not sometimes those ideas just sort of disappear so this is an opportunity to just show the process that I go through and designers like myself go through and it is based on a couple of principles concept design is sort of a strange art form in the sort of my definition of it is it's art and service of commune Caty designed to the principal the disciplines tasked with making it a reality this means that rather than it being art for art's sake it has a job to do which is to describe to those people you're working with how the thing looks what it's supposed to look were that supposed to work and to help the conversation along another sort of personal philosophy of my own is that in concept design you can use whatever tools do the best job of communicating your design to those people responsible for building it so even though I graduated from art school in the early 80s where I was mostly trained trained with physical mediums like watercolor pen and ink markers acrylics now we have so many more tools and the tools I use are really based on what's going to do the best job of communicating the design and sort of my overarching philosophy of all these projects over the years has been to love the process because often that's the thing you own the most and also often you don't know whether or not what you're working on is necessarily going to be finished or built or if once it is built it has that initial spark of the designs that you put into it so if you're constantly loving the work that you're doing then you'll have a very fulfilled career and I've been extremely happy over these years so jumping in is starting to work on my sort of fake little dark ride project I think that probably all designers I know have sort of a secret list of those projects that you hope one day you'd be asked to work on but probably won't be and so for this being a little project and especially one that I'd be doing on my own I thought what if I took something really tiny and I've always thought it would be fun to design one of those carnival dark rides that go from town to town during the summer and work within the limitations of something that has to arrive be erected work you know run for a couple of weeks and then be torn down and moved to the next town and got that process through it again I personally am NOT a huge fan of sort of jump-scare rubber snakes and gore although I have many many friends that love love that with that but when I think of something like this and I think of Halloween I kind of love to go to those early German depictions of Halloween sort of from the 20s and 30s for me it it has kind of a Fleischer studio feel about them there's something both whimsical and funny and still a little bit sinister about them these sort of grinning paper mache faces so I went through the process of doing the Google image search and collecting all these images and wondering whether or not I could build an attraction based upon sort of the aesthetic of this world and one of the things I do is I'll have a little sketchbook just sitting on my desk and I'll give it a theme in this case the rules of this sketchbook is that I could draw people but all the people needed to be made out of pumpkins or squash so this just sits on my desk and when I'm in a meeting or I have time to do a little I'll just start scribbling in the sketchbook and so these are me trying out various ways that people could be made out of squash as you get further and further into the sketchbook you realize that you starting to run out of ideas so you start really pushing yourself you know what do they look like where do they live what kind of clothing would they wear and so this is an example of that just doodling for the enjoyment and pushing the boundaries of the limitations you gave yourself by giving the sketchbook a theme you can see I'm starting to get into sort of the abominations section of these pumpkin people trying to figure out ways that I haven't explored I think my favorite is this turban squash guy no and what do they do without arms what up there there are multiple pumpkins so anyway so that's that was one of the genesis of this whole idea and then I started to ask my okay so what kind of clothing would these people wear and how would they move around and and how would they relate to each other and and what do young guns of these people look like and what kind of buildings would they potentially live in you know what you know how would they interact and what would their jobs be and what kind of music do they listen to and this all sort of culminated in this sketch which is much more ambitious than my little sort of traveling show could have this is more on that sort of small world extravaganza finale moment but it it sets an idea and tone for this idea that these people made of pumpkins could conceivably live together and also I liked the idea that having a more musical through-line as opposed to having a linear storyline each scene was just sort of a joyous song that they were singing an earworm that you would be humming when you left and all based on this idea of a community made out of pumpkin people so diving into what my limitations are I'm using Sketchup which is kind of my to go to software for roughing in 3d stuff I went to the Sketchup 3d warehouse and I found some some freight trailers for semi trucks and there's not a whole lot of information as far as how to design these so a lot of this is just educated guesses on my part so I don't know whether or not it would take two or three or four trucks to do this but in my imagination I have two trucks trailers the idea being that the sides of the one facing us would flap out so that you would have a room room or an area where you would load and then load then you would move into the space between the two trucks the back truck being the back of the attraction and then between them sort of a bridge of other scenes that are all supported by these these platform scaffolds I've also included an ad a ramp which is important not sure if I'll get death naming that but I wanted to make sure that it was in there and also I have uploaded this model to the 3d warehouse if you look for carnival dark ride you'll find it and you're more than welcome to make your own ride based on it so now that I've got a model I now have something to scale that I can chart finding out what are my limitations as far as space and what can I fit into this space and so I built a little ride track and started to break up the rooms I knew that I wanted there to be at least two big rooms and of course big is relative when you're talking about a ride that moves from town to town in this end a couple of trucks so that mean that meant that I have a sort of a mini little room into a larger room and then I've got this really strange long corridor in the back before I go into what would be the finale room and then kind of a an exit room before you you end up coming off of the ride figuring out the ride track was determined by a combination of things one is the blue circle indicates the turning radius of the vehicle the red circle is the reach distance of somebody who's sitting in the vehicle so I don't anybody to be able to grab or interact with the sets of the characters there's a little lap bar so that should keep it restrained and also I know that if any for any reason it breaks down if there's any emergency you should be able to get out of the vehicle and get to an exit fairly quickly now I'm not wearing a whole bunch about capacity which for a real attraction that would be one of the first things I'd have to think about was how many people I can get through during an hour and also something else I'm not thinking a lot about or at least I'm not representing but wouldn't need to on a real project is how many exits there are the exit signs that would appear in the attraction my guess is probably there'd be a big double door exit along that back corridor and maybe two others just so that if there's any problem you needed to get out quickly or people need to be getting quickly that you could do so but you know from my little project I'm gonna just not benefit a lot of attention on that and mainly on the concept of stuff so the next phase is a bubble diagram there are called bubble diagrams because usually they're just circles where you try to figure out the pacing and the size of various scenes and beats within the story you're trying to tell since I already had this model where I've squeezed a track and I just color-coded the rooms so I've got a load area and then I've got a first scene which I'm calling sort of the holocene where you arrive and there's a character welcoming you the first sort of scene full of lots of characters is the sort of outside outskirts of town it's the rural area before you get into the main town then I've got that strange long corridor to go down so I had that being sort of a little bit of a spooky forest that you'd go down before you enter the scene fora which is sort of downtown metropolis pumpkin town with lots of singing characters and then finally scene five is sort of a goodbye scene before you you exit again both the holocene the goodbye scenes are also a little bit of a light barrier my thought is that this would be a dark ride it will allow for a lot more detail to be in the paint as opposed to necessarily be built out in the sets but there is potential of like leaks so these two smaller scenes are a way to make sure that when you get into the bulk of the attraction it's not too bright from outside so the first thing I did is start to play with the marquee I want to make sure that when people are visiting the fair or see this from a distance they're getting an idea of what is happening inside knowing that it's probably a little bit more kid-friendly and silly and I've also I wanted to be kind of like a big flat pop-up billboard but I also wanted it to have a back end so that it had multiple layers so I brought this into the Sketchup model and you can see what that would conceivably look like as a marquee for this attraction I'm not going to the moment worry too much about how I phim the outside of the trucks I'll probably do that once I've gone through the process of designing the entire interior but for now this is good and the same with the da da ramps I may or may not be theming that most of the focus is going to be on the inside and how the the various scenes lay out so the next thing is now I've already got this model in the computer so I could start designing it in the computer and that's certainly something that could be done but from my past experience I've found that one of the absolute fastest way to get a concept figured out is to build a really really simple foam core model so this is a black foam core I've indicated the track just with a white you know prismacolor pencil I've got lots of hot glue and I'm using pins to sort pins being pinning things together it's a half inch to the foot it's sitting on my work table in my studio and then for the next couple of well next week really I'm gonna just start filling it I'm gonna start at the front and I'm gonna start drawing on sort of heavy cardstock white pieces of paper and using pencil and then a felt marker I'm going to just start scribbling each scene and the characters in the attraction the goal is not to come up with something finished it's to see how these pieces work together so once you get it in there you get an idea of the scale it is measurable since it is to scale and you can understand how the walls are being covered this is a really fast way and I'm not really worried about how beautiful the drawings are they're just indications so far so once I start getting in from scene to scene I'll put in a blank piece of paper I'll start trying to figure out the eyeline you know what you're seeing is you're turning corners and I'll start to rough it in and pencil and then I'll start to ink it and for those multiple planes and layers I'll start cutting those out and start adding those to the model as well so over time you end up with a little physical model that has paper representations of the sets the characters and then these wraparound murals that are sort of hiding the corners of your rooms now in the past sort of the the old school way of doing of working with this we would if we could get or borrow or rent time on we would get what we called ellipse kits tip camera which was a small little camera that was attached to a thick cable that attached to a VCR and we could take that little camera and we could snake it through an attraction and get an idea of what it's like to to be the size of the vehicle moving through the scenes and that would come out in the form of a shaky a VHS tape or some really really low res prints but we have thought it was a miracle and we went out live in the 21st century and we all carry around in our pockets something that's even better much higher resolution and allows us to take shots from inside of the attraction what's especially great is that you very really quickly get to feel what it's like to move through the space you get to see how each scene sort of presents itself as you move from one to the next and you get that sort of first-person view very quickly to help you understand how all the many layers of your attraction are starting to lay out and again it's an iterative process so I'm constantly drawing gluing sticking it in there checking it drawing again making changes things like scale you know if I feel a character is a little too big or a little too small I can always change that later but right now I'm just getting an idea of how the layers work together so this is that long corridor scene I don't have a lot to work with there's not a lot of balls that I can cover but I can create sort of a tunnel multi-plane tunnel that you're moving through and I've got characters that would probably backlight painted maybe slightly sculpted and animated so that they're singing at you to sort of draw your attention to away from the fact that not a whole lot going on in here and then at the very end I've got some characters that I would spend a little bit more time and animation and money on that would draw you to the end so you didn't feel like you were just stuck in a long hallway so the process I use is super simple the red pencil is something we picked up from the Disney animators they were across the street from us at Imagineering during the late 80s and early 90s and the advantage to the red pencil is that you can be as loose as you want and after you you scan it you can bring it into Photoshop and just choose the red channel and turn it off and you're left with just the black and white line there's nothing fancy about this is just sort of freeform sketching and then I'll come in with the felt marker and loosely sort of inked in some of the lines I know that I'm gonna get it more than enough chance later on to get all detailed but for now this is more than enough to get a feel for what this is going to look like when it's all together in the model so here's that finale scene with some of the characters in it you can see that wrapped around backdrop that's set behind them all the characters are just cut out and in place temporarily they're literally just pinned in and I can start getting an idea of how to fill this scene initially my idea is just a packet full of you know people that are singing at you so I'm not so worried later on I can figure out scale and and what you should look at from one thing to the other but mostly I just wanted to feel like there's so much stuff in there that you couldn't possibly see everything and then I had these sort of fun acrobat characters at the very end and they're in that gabbai scene where they're saying goodbye to you so here's a short little video with me talking about the model and now that it's pretty much done well I did it I'd finished the model it's good to remember this is only just sort of a rough sketch but boy doing stuff in paper and with foam core and hot glue really is a wonderful way to really quickly see how scenes can lay out and give you an idea of what you really can or cannot fit inside a show box I highly recommend if you're planning on doing a similar project that you consider doing this as a first pass it's quick it's enjoyable and it really helps you understand what your limitations are you can always tighten up later but it's amazing how many of those early ideas end up in the finished project so that's the model by the time I got to this point I thought I'd pretty much covered all the surfaces that I thought needed covering one of the things you can do in dark rides is that if there's something that you don't want people to pay attention to you can just leave it black you know just leave it in the shadows in this particular case most of the services are covered but things like the walls of the back corridor I left as black assuming that the the blackness would be enough and your focus would be on those arches so that was great but we now you know we live in the 21st century so the easiest way to share this with other people apart from that little video that I did was to get this into a digital form and so to do that now that I have all the scenes and I have them to scale I'll you know place all the pieces and characters on a flatbed scanner with a scale to make sure that I'm making sure that they're all so the right size and then I'll scan them in this image the red area would actually be to completely transfer in a PNG so that I could cut the characters out loosely it also means that later if I make changes to the character I don't have to worry about staying within the bounds of the size that I've determined I can change it here in this file the PNG and then we export it to the model to make those changes so it took about several days full weekend but I was able to turn what was but only a physical model into a virtual model by bringing all these set pieces these rough drawings into my Sketchup model the advantage that now that I have it in a sketchup form is that I can share this with the rest of the team I can email it to people but best of all is now that it's in a digital form I can actually get inside of it and I can wander around I'm using a program that is an extension for Sketchup that's really changed a lot of the way that I work it's called enscape I highly recommend you try it it allows you to get inside the model it's a real-time renderer which means that very much like a video game you don't have to wait four hours for the three day software to render it actually renders real-time so things like 360 wrap arounds which we can look at in a VR headset or or using your phone with you know like a Google cardboard attached to it can very quickly get you inside the ride to see how things are working the other thing that it lets you do too is you can start to do right through videos so this is me just running a camera along the track that I've laid out and this is the first time I'm getting to chance to actually ride around in that paper model that I I spent time on what's amazing about this process is that not only do you really get to see what you see where you move through a space and the timing and how long and get to see it but you immediately start seeing where the holes are those areas that you thought were not important start to feel a little bear and those areas that feel like they need more attention you can start making changes to so I had a list of about 50 things almost immediately that I wanted to alter and fix once I did this initial ride through I think it's worth mentioning that that it was only like a week and a half that this was just an idea and Here I am actually riding around inside my design this is a kind of a new thing these tools are fairly new they've been around for a little bit but the accessibility and the quality of your renders is so superior now that there's no reason why even at this super rough phase of the project that I I couldn't start riding around in something that was at this early phase in the concept design so I'm constantly going back to re-render and revisit an attraction as I'm adding things this is also an opportunity for me to start to figure out more detail on these characters so starting with a really really rough drawing that I did in the model I'll bring it into procreate which is a wonderful program on the iPad pro and just sitting you know on my couch in the evening or used to be in airplanes I would do a rough drawing just to tighten it up and then do the finished ink drawing then I would fill them with color and then use that sort of as a mask and I could color in the the characters these would also be cut out very much like the scenery in my my paper model and brought into Sketchup so I can swap out these characters with those rough characters in the mall so you can see what they look like really quickly in the scale so I'm starting to just sort of pick characters to try to figure out the color and the mood of what these characters might look like and how they might be lit as and as far as lighting is concerned since it would be backlight I don't have to worry about well really I I can make lighting decisions in the paint itself rather than worrying about how the light will hit them in the attraction so the other wonderful benefit to having a 3d model is that now I can actually experience this ride virtually through virtuality goggles I use the oculus rift I've also used the HTC vive headset both are excellent at it and I'm using enscape again it's a plug-and-play while and Sketch up I can just put it on press a button and I'm inside the model so here's a short little video of one of my early walkthroughs of the attraction okay I'm in VR right now and I wanted to give you an idea of what it's like to wander around inside your model in virtual reality forgive me if I move my head around too much and it causes a little emotion sickness I'll try not to do it too much I'm going to first just drop myself here into the load area and one of the things that VR allows you to do is completely relate to the model even in this rough stage I can move around and just you know look everywhere I immediately I met a walking height so I can feel what it's like to like wander around inside this attraction during a maintenance check get a feel for what it's like to be near the figures what their scale is whether or not doorways are too low or too high see what it looks like behind scenery see whether or not there's stuff that's visible that you know really shouldn't be and some things that have attention has been lavished on that you know maybe are unnecessary the videos are really nice but being able to just wander around in here is especially good you get a real feel immediately for what it's like to to be in the space also in the videos we tend to focus on what everybody we want everybody to see but also I can turn around and just have a look at what the scenery's doing behind me as well so I just highly recommend if you have an opportunity to experience your designs in virtual reality it's just the way to go and I think it's also worth mentioning that I started working on this project at the end of March and already I'm able to wander around inside of my concept model even with my sort of quick Sharpie characters sitting in as placeholders like I said before one of the advantages to virtual reality is that when you wander around in here within the first 10 seconds you get a really good idea what doesn't work in your design and what does work often I'll jump in and out of VR and make tweaks then jump back in again jump out again make more tweaks and really get a feel for what it's like to be inside the attraction so this is what it looks like so far lots more work to do thanks for following along so I will constantly jump into the art to check on new things that I've changed see what's not working make alterations and go back into VR again just to make sure that it's that it's fixing the problems another advantage to is because I went through the process of scanning those rough drawings from the paper model I have these texture files that then I can do more final artwork more tighter line work some color and then just by replacing the file the color file in the Sketchup model I'm able to immediately just replace the scenery in my model so it's it's a little bit like Christmas every time you do it you get this little gift of being able to see the attraction get better and better and more detailed as you continue so you can see the contrast between the the tighter colored pieces and set pieces and characters and then still the early marker sketches from the model another thing that you can start thinking about is the themes treatment of the ride vehicle because you have a model of it you can start throwing textures on it and see what works and what doesn't work since this is a carnival dark ride I'm not going to worry about in the labret that's got lots of fiberglass pieces on it this is really just a sort of a vinyl print that would be applied to each vehicle ultimately I'd love each vehicle to have a different face so that there's something unique about your vehicle compared to another vehicle but then I can quickly get it into the model and have a look at what that looks like in context with the the scenery that is going in one of the thing too that the computer allows us is the ability to do what we call a first article which is I have this idea about how I want the characters to look and enact and I could draw them but it's just as easy for me to build a quick model and animate it so in this particular case I've got really a pumpkin with some jack-o'-lantern with holes for the mouth and the eyes and I have an animated texture that I built in After Effects and I'm just a texture to the mouth and eyes so you get an idea of what it might look like if it was a dimensional character my guess is that rather than rear projected it would be some LED panels that would be sliced nose placed behind those openings so you could you could could have a lot of animation and movement in the mouth and the eyes and it would also be much easier to sync the mouth up with the soundtrack so that if all the characters are singing the same song their mouth movements are are the same so I have a feeling since I've got this little carnival dark right I'm not going to end up with fully dimensional characters probably something more bar relief I know that because I'm going to be working in black light I could conceivably have them be flats because but we're moving laterally through the space because of parallax I think even in the dark you're going to be able to tell that these characters are flat so I probably end up going with something with a bar relief or a little bit dimension since this is just a pretend bride I could probably do whatever I want but I thought I would test it I had that after effects file of the eyes and the mouth so I took and I made a black foam core cut out of a jack-o'-lantern cut out the eyes in the mouth and I just laid it over my iPad to see whether or not I could get an interesting effect and even if the attraction went completely flat I think it would be a nice and relatively inexpensive way to get a lot of life and animation into these characters without having to have them be fully animatronic and speaking of animation trying to figure out what the movements are for your ear character is important because the estimator will be joining the project and they're going to have to figure out the cost of these characters based upon the amount of functions that they have so in the case of this this pumpkin pie seller guide he's probably going to be one of the key characters so he'll have a lot more functions and maybe another one that might only have a little bit of a head movement or a head movement so I'm not an engineer so I would be working with the team member who was but my guess is it probably would have an armature similar to what's depicted here so you could show the movement you know his arms are both attached to each other and then you have a leg and the other leg of sitting there's on the ground is static and then that teetering pies on the top is not necessarily being animated but just responding to the movement of the head in the neck also to help communicate this idea that these characters aren't necessarily fully sculpted but or bar relief or maybe even open in the back I did this sort of diagram that describes how they could conceivably be constructed so that I can have a conversation with those people who will eventually be fabric to see whether or not we can come up with something that is not completely flat but has some dimension to it another real advantage to having friends in this industry is to the ability to bounce ideas off of fellow designers my friend Jonah Cicero who I've worked with off and on for years he is a master of character staging and so I sent him the first ride through video and has for his comments and he gave me a list of potential changes to the the personalities of the characters to help them be a little bit more dynamic dynamic so I'm looking forward to bringing those changes into the ride one of them was to have the character that's in the PI booth be a little upset with the other person for being so careless as to balancing all those pies so it adds a nice sort of dynamic between the characters so then all of them are singing and dancing there are some of them that are a little bit concerned about how impractical the choices in our are of the fellow characters another wonderful advantage to having very talented friends is that my friend Cullen Vance who is an incredible musician and animator and storyteller and you name it he was graciously willing to start trying to figure out what kind of music would happen in this attraction and we had a similar idea of just how reminiscent it was of those early sort of cartoons and honky-tonk feel so here's a couple of loops the first one is the loop for the load area all of these loops would be going continuously and he's designing them so that no matter when you transition from one scene to the next you can the transition will be relatively smooth from one theme to the next so here's the load area [Music] [Music] [Music] so that would play as you're getting in the vehicles and once you turn the corner and you started heading into that rural part of pumpkin town then this loop would kick in [Music] [Music] [Music] so that's the loop and I highly recommend you check out Cullen's Spotify page he has several albums and also look for him on YouTube and Instagram he does wonderful stop-motion animations and just an incredibly talented friend of mine now that we have the music files we can start using inscape to start placing the speakers that would emit the sound effects as you are moving through it and inscape works very similarly to how an audio engineer would work with the music not necessarily filling a space but following the track so as you're moving along you're moving from one speaker to the next I'm not an audio engineer so there would be a lot of more science that would go into this but for the purpose of just this concept I can place Cullens files as speakers in the model and then I can render off another ride through to help you feel what it's like to move from one scene to the next this is currently where the model is and the music only goes about half way cuz we're still working on the music for the rest of the attraction but you'll also see a lot of the upgrades that went into the each of the scenes especially as colors starting to come in as I said I wasn't planning on doing all color but so far as the stay-at-home order persists I keep working on it so you never know so here we go here's a ride through with the music and then where the color is so far [Music] so that's where the music would transition to something a little bit spooky er as it made its way to the Downton finale but you can see I've added a lot more stuff on the side not to focus but just to give you a sense of place and then you turn into the finale scene full of all like the animated characters and the street scenes so this is where the attraction is at the moment still evolving as I move from scene to scene and the ultimate goal is to have music throughout [Music] so that's it so far it's come a lot further than I initially had intended it to but there's more to do if you're interested you can follow the progress on my Instagram page I keep posting updates there it's been wonderful to do it's been really nice to be able to show off the various steps that we go through when we're doing an attraction each attraction is different so this is a really silly little musical ride and has limitations that may be a larger attraction doesn't necessarily have but it gives you an idea of the various tools that might be used in the process and I highly recommend you you check them out in the end I think I would like to take the entire attraction into unity so that I can export a build that allows you to actually sit in the vehicle and ride around in VR and look around on your own that'll come later and we'll see whether or not I have enough stamina to cover the rest of the modelling but thanks so much for listening and checking it out and we'll see what happens on the other end of this interesting times we live in thanks a lot

Channel: Don Carson

Views: 7,828

Keywords: theme park design, imagineering, concept design, virtual reality, vr, don carson, design, sketchup, enscape, theme park, concept

Id: tztpkgDLNAU

Length: 43min 22sec (2602 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 25 2020