Starting out

I love dark rides. Ever since I was a kid here in Indiana I remember the summers my parents and grandparents took me and my brother to Kings Island over in Cincinnati. I adored Fantastic Voyage, the Hanna-Barbera themed Dark ride they had. (Side note: Catchiest music evar- was so glad when I found someone had posted it on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxiC46YuQSI) At 16, I finally got to go to Walt Disney World at an age I could appreciate it. (I'd been in 76, but all I recall from that trip was very vague Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, the country bears and Tom Sawyer Island. Too young.) This introduced me to what is, in my mind, the gold standard of dark rides, the Haunted Mansion. From Paul Frees' wonderful voiceover through all the beautiful illusions, I've yet to see another dark ride that quite matches it. Journey into Imagination, the original version, came very very close, though. (At some point I'll probably do detailed ride-throughs of several classic dark rides that I can find footage for to explain why I think they work as storytelling and entertainment devices.)

So, when I was listening to Chris Oatley's ArtCast week before last and he discussed doing a personal project to improve one's artistic horizons with (as opposed to generic resolutions or pledges,) one of the ideas that came to mind was the planning and vizualization of a hypothetical dark ride. It's a big project, but can be chopped into lots of little manageable stages, while still maintaining a sense of progression- something Mr. Oatley suggested as valuable for keeping at it. It's also an intimidating but exiting project, since it's getting pretty far outside my comfort zone. It could be amazingly fun, or an embarrassing faceplant, but I'm nothing if not stubborn.

Knowing relatively little inside about the nuts and bolts of the process, here's my rough list of top level tasks copied from my Deviantart journal:

Step one- Going to roll a fresh blog up to hold the ramblings, notes and art. (that's this page.)
Step two- Pick a concept or property to base the ride on
Step three- initial concept document
step four- research
step five- Gnomes steal underpants. probably lots of ugly ass sketching.
Step six- refinement, probably lots of bad ideas, hopefully some good ones
Step seven- actual production pieces. You know, the pretty ones they put in books
Step eight- final concept presentation

This page is step one, a place to record and show off as I tackle this project. Once I have it set up, I'll start a list of possible concepts and properties to base the ride on.