Banquet's Curse is a theoretical theme park attraction I have developed to sharpen my skills as an attraction designer and expand my skillsets in VR and Unity. Banquet's Curse throws guests into the supernatural and spooky world of Shakespeare's Macbeth, as a dinner being held in honor of the king goes horribly wrong when the king is murdered and his vengeful spirit descends upon the castle. Guests are ushered to evacuate the castle via wagon but when their carriage is struck by lightening they are instead drawn back into the castle and have to evade witches, tyrants, and ghosts to make their brave escape.
Blue Sky Ideation
Below is a series of sketches and brainstorms for the attraction. Click on each one to enlarge it and hover to read more about each sketch.
Track Layout
After completing blue sky ideation and sketching, I began to plan out how each element of this ride would fit on a track in a building.
The ride is broken down into thirds.
- Guests board their wagons to evacuate the castle but as they are leaving the castle grounds their wagon is struck by lightening. The wagon launches into the forest speeding through the trees on rollercoaster track and having repeated near misses with tree branches and fallen logs. The wagon suddenly stops in a clearing where the three witches greet the riders and warn them of vengeful spirits about to descend on the castle before disappearing into puffs of smoke.
- The wagon lurches ahead through the front doors of the castle and down the foyer. A panic stricken Macbeth (animatronic) looms above the riders on a balcony, desperately reaching out to them as if he is begging them to not carry forward into the horrors ahead. The wagon turns the corner, and guests are in the great hall of the castle. The wagon stops as ghosts ooze from the walls, setting the hall ablaze with toxic purple and green hues and spreading their evil magic. The wagon turns the corner again and looks down into the dining room, where the king was meant to host you as his humble guests. Suddenly, the king's chair begins to float and the torches flicker. The king's ghostly form appears, first sitting in the chair, but he lifts out of it and flies towards the guests arms outstretched as cups and silverware go flying. A cold gust of wind rushes over the guests and the wagon turns to face a dark corner of the castle. The wagon peters on the edge, and then drops into the abyss.
- Guests speed through the darkened castle through surreal tunnels and passageways in a final coaster section. The wagon exits the castle and is now back in the forest. A roar echoes in the distance. As guests turn the corner they come face to face with an enormous demon clawing its way out of the ground. The wagon dives under its gaping maw into darkness, returning to the unload station and back to safety.
Visualizing the Ride
I used a couple of techniques to further help visualize the ride. Some was as simple as using photoshop/illustrator to polish up my sketches. Other techniques were a little more fancy.
Here illustrator and photoshop turned the rough sketch on the left photo to a more formidable foe.
I also used Fusion 360 to render out the aforementioned pepper's ghost effect.
Notice that the ghost here is in a colorful room with deep blue and purplish hues. I want the ghostly apparitions in the castle to be flanked by deep saturated colors to juxtapose the doom and gloom of the environment they haunt. Make the saturation so strong it comes across as poisonous.
And finally, I cracked out the Oculus Rift and began to use Virtual Reality (specifically Tilt Brush) to render out my ride. I wound up creating an Animatic, a digital model of my ride that you can view from the first person. Almost every major ride with a narrative will have an animatic made of it before construction begins, but mine is a little unique. Most animatics are made to culminate the final draft of digital planning for the ride. Every element down to the air ducts and plumbing is included. Mine doesn't have any of that. Rather mine uses VR to rapidly visualize the attraction so that I, the artist, can share my vision early on in the planning process, before theoretically passing it off to an engineering team to round out the logistical side of things. This rapidly visualized animatic allows me to test scene placement, visual effectiveness, and pacing in a matter of hours.
My animatic covers the first two thirds of the full ride. Ride layout was done in Unity. For best viewing, watch this animatic on a phone so you can use your accelerometer to look around. Bonus points if you have a Google Cardboard lying around.
Whew! You made it! Thank you very much for reading! This project's been a long time in the making and it's exciting to put it all together like this. I'm looking forward to further developing it and sharing more updates soon.