"The Body Farm - Death Is Only The Beginning" Brainstorming Thread

[BlueFrog]

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Its's 86 days before Halloween and I don't have enough time to finish my builds in time, so what did I decide to do? Create a second one! Details would be boring but trust me, it's not quite as crazy as it sounds.

The problem isn't a lack of ideas, it's a plethora of them. My thoughts are coming scattershot and all over the map, with no one angle being fleshed out enough to actually use without contradicting some other approach. Since this group has always provided such amazing thoughts in the past, I thought I'd open the floor to suggestions for how you'd interpret the theme & tagline. I will then shameless steal these ideas as my own and meld them to all the crazy random stuff spewing out of my brain.

A few parameters:

(1) Although the primary emphasis will be a body farm, any forensic investigations that can flow logically from such a location are fair game. It most certainly does not have to be - and probably shouldn't be - a straight-up accurate representation of a body farm. Feel free to Halloween-ize the scene, such as having the bodies represent attacks by vampires, predation by werewolves, etc.

(2) It's a front yard haunt. I want to take advantage of the outdoor location so that it looks as natural as a Body Farm in the middle of suburbia can. I'm trying to restrain myself from incorporating a full-on autopsy or other procedures better located in a surgical/medical indoor setting. Such restraint is proving difficult, especially with a Dr. Shivers at my disposal, so if you can find a way to logically incorporate such activities into an outdoor setting, bonus points for you!

(3) With rare, inexpensive exceptions, I have to be able to rely on existing props and repurposed household items. This isn't much of a limitation, as I have a large stock of body parts, body bags, organs, zombies, mannequins and such at my disposal. Also lab coats, scrubs, overalls, cameras, clipboards, evidence numbers, flashlights etc. I can and probably will sculpt some pigs or at least pig heads relatively quickly (unlike all the other prop builds which will take forever and thus may get pushed back another year).

Go forth, my creative friends, and share your brilliance!

[Junit]

I really like the idea of a body farm.

If you have a mausoleum or have time to make one you could set up an autopsy room in there with a flapping sheet of cheese cloth covering the door so you can't see exactly whats going on... it could make the whole body farm seem a little bit un-legit. Also in mausoleum bags of mulch, leaves, dirt or whatever else they use to cover bodies for decomp studies.

People could have been attacked by werewolves, vampires, been zombified... The forensic scientist doing a study of how long different creatures take to decompose, or how long their victims take to decompose.

You could have a werewolf bent over a body eating it and a scientist trying to chase it away...

Stakes, or signs to mark other spots in the yard where bodies are buried but not entireley seen, with an arm poking out maybe?

[trentsketch]

Could Dr. Shivers be attending to a body cut open like a slaughtered animal? Just hang the corpse off the edge of a table or from some kind of rope and have a bucket of blood underneath. Toss an apron on the doctor and see if you can wedge a fake knife into his right hand somehow. Then he'll fit right in.

[BlueFrog]

Keep the ideas coming. My creative juices are flowing, and I love some of these suggestions for incorporating an autopsy-ish scene.

One other parameter I forgot to mention: as much as possible I'm looking for ways to draw the viewers' eyes up. So many of these props will be laid along the ground that I want to be sure to have visual interest at multiple levels.

[Forever Haunting]

When you said body farm...I immediately thought of a plant farm with body parts being grown from strange, exotic plants. Another thought would be to have an area where body parts are being fed to man-eating plants (i.e. venus fly trap with a hand sticking out). You could have a bloody table with a cleaver, etc. where the bodies are hacked up and then stored in beakers full of colorful water (back-lit).

[Junit]

Maybe you could use scraps of clothing or intestines hanging from tree branches? I'm always a fan of the Spanish moss. You could put a body in the trees or just some limbs.

[OctoberDream]

I thought of "Motel Hell" where the owner planted people in the ground with just their heads poking out of the ground. The effect looked like rows of lettuce. He put bags over some of them.