What's up guys!? As you know, Halloween is slowly approaching and the fall season is really setting in. So in honor of the spookiness of the holiday, and Brett's awesome presentation about robotics engineering, I thought it would be cool to take a behind-the-scenes look on some of the high tech features of the famous Disney World Attraction: THE HAUNTED MANSION!!
As all of the Disney fanatics may know, the Haunted Mansion is Walt Disney World's premier "haunted" attraction. Guests walk through a graveyard while waiting in line and enter the mansion. Inside, the 999 happy-haunts of the attraction (including the stretching gallery, ghost ballroom, and creepy witch seance) send visitors running scared.
So what's the big deal with this? Well, throughout the ride through the mansion, guests see animatronic-like ghosts appear, disappear, and re-appear again. As a kid, I always wondered how the Imagineers at Disney dreamed up this one. It turns out that they use some of the oldest tricks in the book that make the ride "alive".
Here's the deal: the Imagineers at Disney were pretty clever with this one. Turns out that they use the concept of "Pepper's Ghost" to create the illusion of ghost like figures. This technique was developed in 19th century theaters to create images of specters during play productions: When an object is lit and reflected on a large glass sheet, and those objects are viewed from that same side of the glass, the reflections appear to be transparent and one may see the room in which the ghost is "projected into". This effect is used multiple times throughout the ride, most notable in the ballroom and graveyard scenes.
During the actual ride, the guests ride through a ballroom. There are dancing ghosts, an organ player, and a long table where ghosts celebrate a birthday party. There are even some ghosts hanging from the chandelier and popping out of portrait frames. There is a large pane of glass between riders and the ballroom below. The dancing ghosts are actually located above and below the track that the doom buggy rides on (so the animatronics are hidden out of sight while their reflections are what we see in the ride). The audio-animatronics are lit up with light bulbs that fade on and off above them, thus creating the illusion that they appear and disappear. (Check out the first 2 minutes of the video. It explains how everything works and displays live footage of the illusion in action!)
There is also another engineering "illusion" during the graveyard scene of the ride. Guests ride past singing busts (head sculptures) that sing the theme song of the mansion: "Grim Grinning Ghosts". So how does this one work? The busts are simply head sculptures with actors faces that are projected onto them. A short color movie is projected onto these sculptures (or white mannequin heads) from below the front of the head. This allows the heads to look “alive.” The image below is a studio shot of the movie image projected on the sculptures. (In the ride, one of the heads is broken off and on the ground, but it still has a projection on it)
At the end of the day, it is important to note that the technology and special effects in the Haunted Mansion are really a big engineering feat. The actual development for the layout and design of setting up the Pepper's Ghost illusion goes back to the 1960's when the first mansion opened up in Disney Land in California. It proves to be a high point in the robotics/animatronics field and special effects field. As the technology of today's world develops at a faster rate, we can hope to see a haunted mansion with special effects seeming so legitimate that it makes us think that there are real people/ghosts among us.
(For full article, check out https://www.wdwhints.com/2012/07/special-effects-used-within-the-haunted-mansion/ and pay a visit to Gracey Manor in Liberty Square of Disney World's Magic Kingdom)
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