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Haunts: 2000 Planning and Set-up: Planning We did a lot of planning for our 2000 haunt - or at least it sure seemed like it. Nearly every day during the months prior to Halloween, we discussed possible effects and decorations and wildly fantisized about ways to scare people. These discussions, while entertaining, where astoundingly useless. Never once did we worry ourselves with trivial details such as where we would build our haunt or how we could set up our walkthrough. Eric, who had volunteered to have the haunt at his house from the beginning, must not have been clear as to what we were planning. He informed us less than two weeks before Halloween that his garage could not be used for the haunt. After moving the project to Victor's garage, Eric, for his own reasons, decided to separate himself from our efforts, taking with him our entire cemetery, fog machine, and assorted decorations. It became apparent at this point that we had some serious planning ahead of us. I drew up a quick sketch, showing all the effects that we planned to include. and after several seconds of brainstorming, we determined we would (I pause here for effect) DUCT TAPE fabric to the ceiling to make our walls. (A quick note about fabric: Good fabric costs between $2-$3 per yard. The cheapest fabric you'll be able to find at a retail store goes for about $1 per yard. This can make for an extremely expensive haunt. In our haunt, I would estimate that we used somewhere between $200-$300 worth of fabric. If we had not had a large quantity of fabric at our disposal and had to buy our own material, we most likely would have used a cheaper material, such as plastic garbage bags.) Halloween morning came, and Shawn, Victor, and I met. With a box-full of props, a reem of black fabric, six rolls of duct tape, a wildly innacurate and disproportional hand-drawn plan, and twenty Arby's roast beef sandwiches for lunch, we were ready to set up. I will take this moment to say that no matter how many props or ideas you may have, when you put them all in a box in the middle of an empty garage, it does not look like much. That first moment (Which, consequently, lasted for about an hour and a half) after we arrived at Victor's house was one of the most discouraging moments in my life. For over an hour, we pretty much just stood there, looking at our pitiful pile of skulls and duct tape trying to figure out what to do. When we were all about half a breath from abandoning the whole thing, one of us decided to lay tape on the floor to signal where to place the walls and certain props. This small step gave us the direction we needed, and we enthusiastically began to *cough* duct tape *cough* the fabric to the ceiling. 
It took us until the next morning (When we discovered that our entire haunt had collapsed overnight) to realize that duct taping large sheets of fabric to the ceiling was not an ideal method for creating walls in a haunt. It was late Sunday morning, leaving us just three days before Halloween, and we (having no means with which to support our walls) were even less optimistic than during our first disheartening moment on Saturday morning. This was not a happy time. We were all fully aware of the fact that we had just worked about 18 hours the day before to tape up this great mass of fabric that was now lying on the floor. In fact, this invested time was one of the only things motivating us to continue with the haunt. Not wanting 18 hours of our lives to have been spent in vain, we were determined to find a way to secure the walls. Working under the restriction of not being able to nail or staple anything into the walls or ceiling, this was not an easy task.
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All original content copyright 2004 Raymond Fero |
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