Forest of Mystery from reedamimation and Vimeo.
A dark ride is an indoor amusement park ride in which visitors ride vehicles past animated scenes.
Well known dark rides include Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and the Pirates of the Caribbean.
The roots of the dark ride can be traced back to the early 1800s but it was at the turn of the last century, when amusement parks became popular in the United States, that dark rides began to develop into what we see today.
Inspired by classic examples of dark ride design students in advanced art set about creating models of their very own dark rides.These models would then be animated to show what the ride experience would be like.
Students first decided on themes for the two rides they would design: one would be a dark forest of mystery while the other would take shape as a sugary candy land.
With themes in place students started generating concept art to get a feel for the directions they wanted to take visually.
As the ideas took shape construction began as students built the elements that would make up the attraction.
With construction complete the next step would be filming.
To give viewers an idea of what the final ride experience would be like students used the stop-motion animation process to show their dark ride in action.
Project Update: April 26, 2007
Well, it certainly took us long enough, but we’ve finally
begun animating our dark ride. The process of stop-motion animation is time
consuming and we were lucky to get about 23 seconds of footage done this week.
To see what we’ve done check out this preview footage… the soundtrack is placeholder at the moment:
Project Update: Dec. 1, 2006
Construction wrapped up late last week and it’s crunch time now… we only have three weeks till the end of the semester and we need to animate the rides! It looks like that portion of the project will have to wait until we come back from vacation in March.
Until then check out this piece of test footage showing a ride vehicle passing an animated element from the Forest of Mystery ride:
Project Update: Nov. 1, 2006
Pre-production has pretty well been wraped up and we are now constructing set pieces and other elements. Below are some photos of various bushes for the forest ride.
...and then here are the ride vehicles in various stages of construction:
...click the link below to see our dark ride shell under construction:
Project Update: Sept. 13, 2006
Pre-production work on this project has begun. Mr. Rogers is putting out a general request for concept art and ‘gag’ ideas for our haunted dark ride. Remember: for now, we are thinking in terms of a.) a general purpose haunted house, b.) a haunted castle, or, c.) a haunted forest. Our inspiration for this is Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, but we, of course, will be doing our own thing.
Concepts and ‘gags’ will be organized in a prep packet due Friday, Sept. 22. We will have presentation sessions Wednesday the 20th and Thursday the 21st.
Make sure to check out this link to a fan made site dedicated to the Haunted mansion featuring tons of information and articles: doombuggies.com
Concepts & ‘Gags’ Checklist:
1. Newsprint (4)
2. Newsprint (2)
3. Newsprint (1)
4. Pencil Shading on manilla
5. Pen & Ink on manilla
6. Pen & Ink, Colored Pencil
7. Watercolor
