Terra's Lair

Welcome to the first of a series of blog posts which are lessons to help make your haunt great. Today's blog post will focus on a post I did a while back on the thread, "To Theme, or Not to Theme." This also is Layer One of Seven Layers of Scare. I suggest you read that blog post first to get a base start: http://www.halloweenforum.com/blogs/terra/528-seven-layers-scare.html

Using Art to Unify your Haunt

At Transworld I went to a seminar called "Over the Top Art Direction" put on by the guys at House of Torment. They said their haunt was good but disconnected. They realized that to bring their haunt to the next level they must use cohesive art direction (theme optional).

Art direction means to have an artistic style to direct the look and mood of the haunt (art stylization). It really helps bring different elements together. So, you don't have to have a 'theme' but cohesive art direction still pulls a disjointed haunt together.

I personally like a theme because a garage haunt can only be so big. So I decided on a theme (post-apocalyptic vampires) and then (using Photoshop) made a theme poster. I can use that poster to focus the design style of the new props and sets I was building. Here's the poster:



You can see I have many design elements that I could use: Stone ruins, broken stained-glass, dark forbidding tone but pops of color (especially red), garbage, mystery, fencing, swords, city ruins, sexy/stylish vampires, tattoos, leather, Japanese influences, silver, piercings, vampire bats.

It helped immensely in keeping the art direction on track if I had the poster near the prop I was designing. Here's the props I made this year:







Even our costumes followed the art style:



I loved the way it made the haunt almost beautiful... It all meshed together in an artistic way.



Hope this helps in designing your haunt to look great!