Wednesday, November 25, 2015
The secret history of the Haunted Mansion's hall of changing paintings
Boing Boing: Disneyland's Haunted Mansion sports a hall of changing paintings in which people and scenes are transformed into sinister versions of themselves. Though these have gained in technical sophistication over the years, transitioning from rear-projection slide-fades to crisp electroluminescent effects synched with the lightning in the opposite windows, the core graphic concepts have been largely invariant since the Mansion first opened its doors.
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The cult-classic mentality surrounding the Haunted Mansion ride intrigues me. My best guess is that it represents the collision between the macabre, the childish, and the technologically-savvy, and that draws an astounding number of people. I've seen halloween costumes of some of the obscure characters in the ride, t-shirts that use the ride's imagery, and even a series of Star Wars-themed portraits based on the ones from the stretching room. Beyond the popular iconography, I think the novel techniques used by the original creators appeal to people because it represents the pinnacle of problem-solving savvy that Disneyworld is known for and built upon. That aside, I think the situation described in the article is an interesting look into the vast "idea graveyard" surrounding so many of the most popular movies, attractions in the entertainment industry in general. Sometimes what the creators decided not to put into the final product tells as much about the project as what they did put in.
I have never been to Disney World, so I am unfamiliar with this, but it sounds pretty cool. My first thought was that at this point they should just be fancy LED screens but I don't think anyone is going to be impressed by something that is clearly a tv screen. It seems from the article that the cool part is that they look like paintings and as you wait for the ride they change. This would actually be a cool idea to incorporate on stage. Imagine that you are doing an abstract play like CMU's Lord of the Flies. Throuhgout the show the stage gets darker, dirtier, ... etc. So what if you added some paintings to the set that started out happy and worked their way to horrifying as the play progressed. Now I really want to see a show use this idea.
I really like the idea behind this concept. Waiting in lines is rarely fun but Disney has found a way to make people want to do it (for this ride at least). It would be really cool to see this idea get applied to more things, be that other rides at amusement parks or something like the line to get into a movie or play. I think it would be a fun challenge to try and make artwork that could be used for this kind of thing that went with whatever it was people where waiting in line for. There would be so many directions that the artist could take things. For example, for a play or movie would they use the artwork to tell a sort of prequel story or would they go through the characters or do something else entirely. Whatever choice they made it could completely change how we get people into shows.
The author is right: it's very ingenious to make waiting in a queue demandable by customers in a theme park. I know my family, friends and I have spent too many an hour waiting in boring lines on our phones, baking in the sun, completely bored and waiting for simply five minutes of an exhilarating ride when we could have been walking around and enjoying the scenery. It really puts the amusement park phenomenon into perspective when you realize that most of your time is not spent riding the rides, but actually waiting for the rides themselves. I don't remember ever going to the Haunted Mansion, but the concept art is ridiculously fantastic. I think I wouldn't want to leave the queue because I would be so fascinated by the many different portraits on the walls. Designing something like this is a set designer's dream -- the level of story and character that you can put into the walls and halls of a pre-amusement park ride are endless.
It's been a while since I've visited Disney World, but the Hainted Mansion (and the Tower of Terror) are the two rides I remember the most. Both rides employ the "make the queue part of the ride" technique. I actually remember the portrait room quite well. When I was there, it seemed like the portraits changed by changing size. For example, there was a girl in a yellow dress and the bottom of the portrait dropped down to expose the fact that she was standing on some crocodiles. Im not sure if this is how it worked since I was so young, but it is facing ting to think about how the ride has evolved. Now to the good stuff. Part of the actual ride incorporates a mirror and a ghost is mysteriously placed in between the two occupants. Apparently this is a Pepper's Ghost effect, which has been used to create "ghosts" in haunted houses since the 1800s. I would love to learn more about how that particular part of the ride has evolved. Optical effects are cool (also, we should do a haunted house at CMU next year).
The way in which the six-part changing paintings shown (such as the tree girl and the dust-bowl house) portray a deeply haunting example of what was terrifying to popular audiences in the age in which Disneyland was first established speaks to the beyond conceptual brilliance of Walt Disney and his team. Disney had a talent for connecting with audiences and fellow dreamers not unlike a brilliant director or designer, and his ingenuity in making waiting in the queue part of the ride is just another example of this. The paintings shown - though not done by Disney himself - are truly (for lack of a better word) haunting, and tell stories which resonate then and now. The detail and the inspiration which went into them are clear and present, and represent a level of thought which can be seen in all of Disneyland's most iconic rides. I have always been fascinated by the theatricality of Disneyland, and adored the completeness of the world which Walt Disney created for his audiences to live in. I think this idea, this completeness, along with Disney's ability to use inspiration for a powerful resonance with viewers are traits which artists of the theatre industry strive for every day. Disneyland is, if nothing else, an example of the power of the faith we have in the stories we love. This faith in stories is why I fell in love with theatre, and why I will forever be appreciative of Disney's purpose in storytelling.
I've never been to the Haunted Mansion, but it seems that it many ways it is an incredible success. First that they were able to turn the queue into a part of the ride is genius: as the article said, it really isn't something that many rides can boast about. I, for one, wouldn't want to miss these paintings after having read the article. Second is in the way that they really worked to keep the paintings looking like paintings. I would have just expected them to be screens, but thinking about it that wouldn't even be close to realistic enough to satisfy Disney. The artistry in the frames and the subtlety in the transformations are very powerful. I especially appreciate the absence of typical horror scenes from this collection: in another article it spoke about how horror is something that should evoke a physical response through scenes of violence and sex: yet these painted scenes (especially those of the nymph and dust bowl) prove that horror can be more intellectual and emotional than that.
I spent a lot of time at Disney World when I was a child, having grown up in Florida with annual passes. The thing that always kept me interested when I went back was the ease with which you could immerse yourself in the individual worlds the rides created. One second you were shooting through space, the next in a Haunted Mansion. Now, I didn't like the actual Haunted Mansion ride a lot when I was a kid, since it went backwards and I was not prepared for such thrills. However, after they revamped the ride, I chose to reembark on the traumatic journey, and was shocked to discover the wealth of technology and effects in front of me. The article explains the different techniques used, and learning that rear projection was such a large part of a ride that I had begun to enjoy so much was an interesting synergy of media design and real world application. The changing portraits are also fascinating, not only for how they convey a transformation from something beautiful to something haunted, but by how real the whole thing seems. You don't go to a theme park to say whether or not you were actually spooked by a mansion, you go and talk about the quality of the experience that was created. The Haunted Mansion is the pinnacle of such an experience.
this conflict between the Imagineers and the designers, and not knowing what was going on, is just one snippet of the madness and years of turmoil that went into opening the Haunted Mansion. I once read an entire history on its drawn out creation. When Walt dreamed it up, he put his finest animators on the job (who then doubled as the original DisneyLand imagineers). So many things went into this ride, that were complex- including this and the ghosts who seem to ride with you, that took so much precision that it took ten years from the concept to go from inception to final creation. It was supposed to be one of the earliest rides at Disney, to open in 1961, but due to many factors, including their involvement in the 1965 world's Fair, and Walt's death in 1966, the ride sort of became an unfinished house "haunting" the backside of disneyland. Then, after his death, the inssurgence to revamp this ride they had had under construction for years was brought back up. They had skilled illusionists help, and the ride has been evolving and is many (including my own) people's favorite Disney attraction.
It is so amazing to see the progress in special effects for live events such as the haunted mansion ride in Disney. I remember riding the haunted mansion so many times as a child and getting so creeped out by the wall of changing portraits. This kind of animation and projection takes great accuracy as described in the article. the illusions created for the audience and riders blow my min, like Jamie said, the part of the ride when you see a ghost sitting next to you in the mirror. Again, alot of accuracy was needed to know how the rider woulld be sitting, how bud they were, and how the reflections would affect the effect.
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