This hot dog was fine. I had to get one in before the end of Hot Daugust.
Hello blog. This past weekend I went to Knott's Berry Farm to check out Ghost Town Alive!, their annual summer event. It's sort of a light larp, it's sort of improvisational site-specific theater, it's extremely delightful! Todd Martens's LA Times column covered it a few months ago and describes the whole thing better than I can. I was there by myself and wasn't sure what to expect, so I didn't opt in to any of the interactive stuff, but I hooted and hollered through the variety show and observed a couple of the games and even ended up chatting a little with some of the townsfolk. Then I ate a hot dog while people gathered to vote for the fate of the town after some recent local news upset the status quo. It was dramatic!
This hot dog was fine. I had to get one in before the end of Hot Daugust.
The events culminated around 4pm, after which I took a walk through the rest of the park. Bear-y Tales was open and I rode that for the first time—every other time I've visited the park, it was down for repairs. Indeed it went down this time too, just as I took a seat in a ride vehicle, and I had to wait another fifteen minutes or so by the exit before it was operational again. When I finally sat down again, I saw this lol:
Luckily I was alone in the vehicle so I just used the blaster next to it. (I really hate when dark rides incorporate blasters. I find it so annoying. A topic for another time.)
The next day was the third installment of the Immersive Producers series which was all about playtesting. For the second half of the day we were split up into groups and asked to run a low-fidelity escape room-esque puzzle for other members of the workshop, then tweak it based on their experiences for another group to try. It was thrilling! The puzzles amounted to paper printouts and household items, and effects were just explained out loud (i.e. "wow, a cabinet just opened over here!" and then presenting another sheet of paper). It was all extremely effective and made it really easy for us to adjust things on the fly when they weren't working or weren't as clear as we hoped they would be. Lots of overlap with TTRPGs, lots of overlap with UX user testing and paper prototypes, lots of making my brain light up in all sorts of fascinating and novel patterns.. I've never thought too deeply about designing an escape room but this process really got me pondering…
On Sunday night, some friends came over and I showed them how my Halloween construction is going. I fetched the characters I've been building from the garage and referred to them as "my babies." Everyone agreed that that sucked (including me) and unfortunately I haven't been able to stop calling them that.
You might remember that I posed my babies in front of a placeholder backdrop last week. You might also remember that at the time, I hadn't decided what I wanted them to look like. So I took the photo I shared and started painting over it in Procreate. That got me here:
Kind of interesting? Smoothing out all the visible joints helped the figures read as animals, and giving them furry bodies with different textures and styles of hair was fun. I also think it's cute that they're all wearing boots. I sat with this version of the painting for a day or so and then gave it another pass:
Yeah! More cohesive, now they all feel like the same species. I had forgotten about ears, so now they have ears. I also spaced them out a little from where they were placed in the original photo and put some more time into thinking about the places they're standing. With this blueish color scheme and some textures in mind, I took a trip to Remainders in Pasadena.
I love Remainders so much. It's like a thrift store that exclusively sells scraps and offcuts and leftovers for crafting, all kinds of yarn and fabric and buttons and ribbons and rubber stamps and bottles of glue and stencils and crayons and it's all so cheap! I grabbed basically whatever looked interesting and spent less than $10 on all of it:
I also found these little bells (pictured in the center of the stash) which look so cute and might work better than a triangle. They also sound really nice, so I might try to use a real thing striking a real bell in place of a bell-like sound coming out of a speaker.
Anyway, lots of placing and cutting and gluing and trimming and painting later and we've got this! Look at my babies!!!!
I used the paintings I made as a loose reference but didn't worry about following them too closely. Instead I just let the materials guide me and made lots of decisions on the fly. I've still got plenty of adjustments to make and areas where paint or fabric need to be touched up, but these are more than finished enough to just let them be like this for a while and see how I feel about them over time.
Here are some close-ups of each character:
The craft foam ears give them so much personality, and I'm very pleased with the level of detail I was able to achieve on the faces. That's thanks to a very cheap set of acrylic markers, which as you might be able to guess are acrylic paint in felt-tip markers. I am way better with a marker than with a brush. This is my first time using them and it opens up a lot of options for the future!
I still have to finish their instruments and build the environment around them, but the next biggest thing is to give them some motion, so that's what I will work on this week! I also want to revisit the toucan; setting it aside allowed me to figure out a better way to go about motorizing it.
We leave for London next Wednesday so I gotta maximize my hands-on baby time until then. God that phrasing really sucks. Should I stop calling them babies? Sound off in the comments below.