# Haunt Mapping and Prop Planning



## Grimm Pickins (Nov 4, 2013)

Greetings ghoulies!

As I've mentioned elsewhere, my wife and I are trying to design our first walkthrough. We've been basically 'yard decorators' for the last 10 years, with every year getting a little bit more ambitious. We've dabbled at prop building, with 2014 being the first year that we delved into large static props and facade work. This was supposed to be our first year truly 'haunting' but all sorts of things got in the way, and we started very late with a very windy and rainy October. We found ourselves thinking about 2015 before 2014 even happened...

I've read that a lot of folks seem to design their haunts around the 'scares' - coming up with the prop first and then detailing the set it will go into. For some reason I had a much more difficult time coming up with projects, without a setting or a story. So I started mapping... and scrapping... and mapping again...

My daughter, Rowan, has very defined thoughts on haunting for a seven year old girl. Whereas she is very excited for 'that other holiday', she is very enthusiastic to move forward. Without even knowing it, she set the first year's storyline with her ideas about a time machine. I took the idea of a 'failed' experiment that would collapse 250 years of storyline to a single night in a house that appears and disappears like a ghost itself - the Creepatorium, a place where the collections of the creepy and a menagerie of the macabre would be preserved in a spectral window... or something like that...

We created a family, the Grimms, who would be its founders - based on my old stage name (the one I use here). The land was haunted before they ever stepped their bewitched feet on the land - I hope to work in some Native American legends eventually.

Now, as I sit and look at this, I get a lot of ideas for atmosphere and setting - but the scares/props definitely come slower. I want to incorporate a lot of my love for Pumpkinrot, EC Comics, the B&W Eerie and Creepy mags, Mr. Goodspeed and the Hallowed Haunting Grounds into both the haunt and the family graveyard (not to mention Terra's chromadepth style to achieve that glowing ghostly wall feeling, crossbreeding it with foam accents). Sort of a twisted (super)natural feel with a dark comic book approach. I still want stuff like drop panels and jump scares... (I have several areas mapped where this is totally doable).

The question that I have, especially for those of you with stories, is where and how do you incorporate scares into setting like this? Is it best to be actor driven or stick closer to the atmospheric ones - like flying crank ghosts and Pepper's ghost? Considering I do around 300-350 ToTs on Halloween, would the old school 'scripted rooms' cause flow/throughput issues?

Like all of us, I see tons and tons of ideas here - but I get a bit overwhelmed trying to cram them in (or decide which are best for me, I love them all!). I also realize that I am going a bit big for my maiden voyage into this. I guess the 'maybe next years' caught up with me...

Here's a roughish map of the layout with some flavor text. I used a simple RPG map making program (as I am a geek) and filtered it to look less 8 bit. I set the stuff into Comic Life. Any guidance that will keep me sane, or from going crazier, is definitely appreciated.

Best Witches,

Grimm


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## Lord Homicide (May 11, 2012)

I dig the concept. Spectral window meaning some kind of astral projection? Start with a sketch of each room then draw elements that you have in place and elements you have to make. After that, make a storyboard as if you were walking through it yourself, highlighting jump scares, etc. This will help you map out scares for your haunt and get a build list going. It's a fair amount of work but really helps out. I wish I had sketches from a friend's haunt that we put together to show you. It worked pretty well.

When you have your spaces figured out, you can go as far as modeling the haunt in Sketchup then checking what your spacial limits are.

The key is to utilize anything that you have in place that will fit the theme.


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## Grimm Pickins (Nov 4, 2013)

Lord Homicide said:


> Spectral window meaning some kind of astral projection?


In short, yes :jol:

Both the former denizens and objects that have passed through the halls at various points of history can materialize. It also gives me an out should I want to change the layout, as that would just be an apparition of a different era of the homestead. The house has no rules about where things should be, it simply scoops into the stream of time, favoring points when darkness was present - which, conveniently, seems to occur around Halloween...

I love the storyboard concept! I wish I still had a scanner on my computer, but we replaced our last printer with a simpler model. I tend to work best artistically in 3 dimensions, but I'm hoping that between my wife and I that we can craft some concept art to use. She is much better at sketching stuff, but her motivation is in creating props - leaving much of the setting to me... ("Just tell me what I can build")

Definitely not complaining, because just having a spouse who is into haunting is invaluable.

Grimm


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