Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Concept Brainstorming (aka rambling) part one

What imagery, setting, mood, and feel do I want the guest to experience for the 7-10 minutes they're in my ride vehicle? That's really all the time you have in most dark rides, so you can't tell War and Peace. What do I want to be the key moments that stick in the guests heads and keep replaying, maybe enough to get them to wait in the queue again? I kinda think these are important questions, even before picking an actual concept or property for the ride to be based on. I don't know that they need to be answered beforehand necessarily, but they should be in mind as I work through possibilities.

Broad categories to consider: Fantasy, Historical, Scifi/ futuristic, educational/ issue based, horror.

I kinda want to put horror last right from the get-go for two reasons, both stemming from the fact that, in the US at least, horror attractions are done to death every October. Every county gets at least one haunted cornfield tractor ride here in Indiana it seems. There are dozens of permanent haunted house attractions you can find with a simple youtube search, and gods know how many temporary ones each year. This creates two problems. First is that anything I could come up with is likely to have been done before by someone else and seem derivative, and second is that the category is heavily associated with cheesy bad theming, cheap scares, and over the top gore. And I say that still holding the Haunted Mansion, a horror/ comedy themed ride as the gold standard. I will definitely look at horror rides for ideas when I research, i just don't want to wade in that crowded pool.

Educational and issue based attractions are trickier. EPCOT center leaps to mind as an example of how to do educational and issue based attractions awesomely. Spaceship Earth especially, in the first three versions*, was a breathtaking and majestic ride about the history of communication technology. Listen to the Land was a damn cool little boat ride showing some really cool tricks with plants and this is when I had zero interest in gardening. World of Motion, like Spaceship Earth, was really well done, funny throughout and beautifully presented. The downside though, and all three examples suffer from it, is a tendency to have one single tone to them. That isn't to say boring, but everything is presented as humorous, or inspiring, or didactic, etc.

Sci-fi and futuristic- lots of potential here it seems to me, though not as many real world example rides as I expected. I wonder if it's a cost issue or a fear of getting zeerust** setting in as the ride ages. The Jurassic Park ride at Universal looks cool as hell, with the giant popup T. Rex head near the end. Dinosaur aged pretty well, despite the removal of some of it's theming in it's last major refurbishment.

Historical I tend to define as Adventureland/ Frontierland type attractions- mostly realistic with some soft fantasy/ sci-fi elements sometimes. This one I like pretty well. There are some classic dark rides in this category, specifically Pirates of the Carribbean, Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye. Anchoring the theming and story in the real world could add verisimilitude to a real ride I imagine.

Fantasy sounds great on first pass, but would an average park attendee have the proper steeping in fantasy tropes to really get what's going on in a 7-10 minute story that isn't connected to a mass-market property? Still, its the category that lets you really go wild with what you can do with the imagery.

Thinking I want to narrow it down to sci-fi, historical, or Fantasy right off the bat. those three feel like they'd be good for mood and lots of good imagery. Next step is to compile a list of more specific concepts in those categories.



*Sorry, Dame Judi, but your version was ruined for me by painting the entire last 2-3 minutes of once gorgeous theming black so the guest can watch a tiny little touchscreen in the omnimover with them for "rahrah Siemens." Bad form, says Capt. Hook.

** http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust

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