Saturday, March 30, 2013

Backstory or Legend?


I heard Revanant from Hauntcast talking once about the importance of creating a backstory for your haunt. It was a very interesting piece as most of his haunt lectures are. Admittedly I gave it some thought, but couldn't come up with anything unique,  and I moved on to other matters of interest and it never got further attention.  Such is the frustrating limits to my imagination at times...

Recently I was looking at some You Tube videos and came across the videos posted by Brad Goodspeed for his "The  Butcher of Provincetown" haunt, and the topic of backstory importance resurfaced. 

Mr. Goodspeed has taken the art of creating a backstory to a whole new level. Using social media he managed to create and publicize a backstory that was based on so much historical fact and familiar geography that the majority of his visitors believed it was the telling of a real legend of the area. I'm thinking to myself, how much scarier is your garage or yard haunt when the people believe it was built around an existing legend, when in fact the story was made up just to enhance the haunt?

If you watch his You Tube videos it's not hard to recognize that Mr. Goodspeed's occupation is a graphic designer and he is very familiar with Adobe After Effects software, but aside from that, his ideas of using your local historical society for photos and factual data, coupling it with social media to develop a "legend" instead of a backstory, is really quite good.  Even his haunt characters get a backstory and people follow them on Facebook for the purpose of helping to make their characters come to life and believability. 

Check out Brad Goodspeeds videos if you think a backstory is important to your haunt. I don't think you'll be disappointed. It's still a "thinking" time of year for us, no prop building yet, creating a "legend" is certainly something that deserves more time than we have given to it though.






Sunday, March 10, 2013

"skeletons" by House of Marrow

Was trying to do a bit of catch up on my blog reading this morning and came across a post from House of Marrow that I'm sharing for those of you that may not follow him.
 Marrow is a young man of 15 or 16 from New Zealand with a passion for prop building who decided to branch off with his own movie production. I was very impressed by this short video he wrote, directed and produced. The story was excellent. If you haven't seen "skeletons", please visit his blog, "The House of Marrow" and enjoy his short video.