For 2017
I'm very excited to introduce a new segment on Cupcakes and Coasters: Cupcakes
and Coasters meets, a series of interviews with people of interest within the
themed attractions community! Kicking this exciting series off, I caught up
with Mark Lofthouse, a themed attraction designer turned events manager once
involved in creating the UK's Sickest Attraction! I caught up with Mark to get
his take on how events at themed attractions are shaping the industry in 2017
and what we can expect in the future.
You’ve recently taken on an exciting new role as an Events
Manager, can you tell us about your intentions for this role?
I sure have, I was successful in several interviews to gain the role of Events
Manager for a big North-West based attraction - I can't say at this moment
exactly where (damn!). I'm so excited to start and get my teeth sunk into the
role - the role is brand new and hasn't been at the park before, so it means
I'm going to sculpt the events for the future and in some respects going to go
down in history as the first ever events manager of... (Oops! nearly...) which
is really exciting, and terrifying in the same breath. My intentions are to
develop exciting and interactive events and experiences throughout the whole
year to cater for the family market (and potentially thrill-seekers at
Halloween, but that's for another time!) Really exciting stuff!
Events are increasingly becoming a key aspect of the theme park experience;
why do you think this is?
Events truly are becoming increasingly popular for theme parks and attractions
and to me, this is why: you need to stand out from the crowd! The UK
specifically really isn't a large place and there's loads of tourist
attractions from museums and arcades right through to safari parks and theme parks. With such a saturated industry and only a relatively small amount
of public to visit them all, you have to make sure what you're offering is
different to the park down the road. You have to give guests a reason to come
to you over your competition and most large-scale events are run in times that
the usual visitor numbers are lower, an 'off-season' so to speak and so it just
makes sense to add something a little extra to entice guests to spend their
well-earned cash at your venture.
In the same vein, it's also about making
guests perceive that they're gaining more for their money (more bang for their
buck if you're on the other side of the Atlantic), it's a really clever sales
tactic to have!
How do you realise a concept? What’s the process?
I'd love to say that it's a really fun and exciting process, but in reality it's really drawn out and tiring work (and a little bit of fun!). So for me, it all starts with a feasibility study to see if an event or attraction is worth adding, if it'll generate income (or populate the park in quieter times) before any of the fun concept begins, Once the paper work is out of the way, it's on to the fun stuff! I find that for me it's about a seed concept or idea. This can be a phrase, a photo, a sound, ANYTHING that makes you envisage a starting point. This phase is also known as 'Blue Sky Imagineering', in which any idea is possible. From this point it's about furthering the story (narrative), backstory, characters, what the experience will be (the form of the experience), is it interactive or passive?
There's so much that goes into each step and along the way you add so much, and take a lot away at the same time. I like to imagine it as constructing a human body (gross, I know!), you start with the bare bones (Blue Sky Imagineering), you then start to add the muscles (feasibility studies, operations documents, marketing, etc.), adding the flesh (the cool creative things like proposals, artwork, scripts, full storylines, etc.) before finishing with the skin, hair etc. (lighting, sound, scent, atmospherics, graphics, theming etc.) This is the part that the guests see!
What is your favourite event not designed by you?
I'm a huge Halloween fan and will always hold Halloween Horror Nights up as one of my favourite events. The form of the haunted houses is completely different to the UK and Europe. Instead of heavy performance based scares and group dispatching, they rely on a conga-line continuous walk through the attractions which for some people doesn't work but for me, the event is about so much more than their haunted houses. The event is just mammoth, you can't describe it to anyone without seeing it in person - the whole park is electric with thousands of thrill-seekers screaming, laughing and drinking (lots of drinking!) together in theatrical lighting and a thick veil of smoke. There really is no other event I've visited that has the same atmosphere as HHN and I can't wait to visit again (with Cupcakes and Coasters!).
Scare attractions seem to be experiencing a bit of a boom here
in the UK. What would you say are the most important aspects of designing an
effective scare?
It's a really tricky question because what scares one person doesn't scare another - so I suppose for me, making an effective scare attraction relies on having fluctuation in the types of scare you provide, ensuring you hit every (or try to) person in the group. For example, when I'm designing an attraction I try to include the following (in no particular order): jump scares, gore scares, revulsion scares, ambush scares, tactile scares and psychological scares.
As a case study, let's look at this fictitious attraction: The guests enter a haunted house and a scare actor leaps from behind the open door (jump scare), he then leads them through a dining room with human remains littering the dining table (gore scare), there's a slumped body at the head of the table that vomits as the guests pass (revulsion scare), following the dining room, guests pass between bookcases where two scare actors attack from either side (ambush scare). Throughout the bookcase tunnel, string hangs from the roof, brushing against the guest's heads to resemble cobwebs (tactile scare), the guests are pursued by a character that then disappears without a trace - or has he? (psychological scare). That's a very crude description of a scare attraction, but you get the idea!
Which attraction would be your dream to design a haunt for?
I'd absolutely love to get involved with a huge theme park, or theme park chain to develop their Halloween attraction and scare attractions. I'm quite lucky that I've touched that water working with a theme park and I absolutely loved every step of it. Aside from themed attractions, I'm a huge theme park fan, too, so to be able to work with parks to develop their attractions would be a dream. I know this might come across as slightly cheesy, but this new role I've got is completely in that vein and after many years of working freelance, to be taken on by a company to work with them and develop their brand is a dream come true!
What kind of events would you like to see more parks tackle here
in the UK?
I'd
love to see some 'out of season' scare offerings. I know I've spoken about
scare a lot so far but I just love the intricacy and interactivity that that
form of attraction has! The likes of Parque de Atracciones in Madrid holds a
'horror fest' throughout the summer months in which they work with large scale
IPs (such as The Conjuring) to create huge scare attractions - in June. It's
incredibly to see something that is primarily seasonal become year-round, and
it would 100% work for a UK market, so fingers crossed!
What is your pet peeve of scare attraction design?
I
have three pet peeves when it comes to scare attractions;
1)
Darkness, for no reason. Yes, some people are scared of the dark, but the
majority of people aren't, so having a really dark attraction for the only
reasoning as to save money on theming and narrative is sheer laziness and
should be stopped, immediately.
2)
"Get out", if I hear this in any attraction, I completely switch off
immediately. It's unbelievably uncreative and cheap.
3)
"Help Me", passive attractions do not work - the type of attraction
in which the guest is merely a spectator and not part of the story, not
involved and not included. UK audiences especially want to be involved, they
want to play a part of the story as that's where the threat and malice is held
- aimed at the guests. When you have an attraction in which all of the threat
and malice is pointed at the scare actors (not going to name names), it breaks
the flow up and the guests become flies on the walls. It's really, really
boring!
Where do you see the future of events such as this?
Scare attractions are becoming more extreme, more in your face
and more interactive and that to me is a fantastic thing. The term 'extreme' is
battered around a lot to any full-contact (touching) attraction or those forms of
brutal survival experiences, when in my mind they're not 'extreme', they're
survival events. Extreme to me is heavy immersion through sight, touch, scent,
hearing and scent - an attraction that hits every single sense in the human
body. It's the most engaging you can be to include guests in the experience.
I've done quite a lot of these attractions and designed a couple of them, the
guest feedback is insane to sit back and watch with no two reactions being the
same. Although, I will admit, they're like marmite to guests, you either love
them or hate them.
I truly think this form of experience will be sticking
around and becoming more popular at commercial ventures across Europe and the
UK, especially with the likes of Walibi producing events. It just makes it that much more
viable for a theme park to 'risk' producing such entertainment... go on, you
know you want to!
Do you think VR could have a part to play in events such as
this?
VR is a really tricky subject for me - I'm not the biggest fan of
the technology as it stands and think it's a bit too soon to put into
attractions as there's so many teething issues and in a lot of cases, the
visuals aren't fully up to scratch. There's a couple of scare attractions and
immersive attractions that have utilised this technology and they've been
massive successes (apart from the one Knott’s Scary Farm produced - you can
research what happened to that yourselves...), but for me, I'd like to keep it
completely separate.
On the flip side of what I'm saying there's an absolutely
incredibly attraction in the USA that's up there as a 'must visit' for me, and
that's The Void. The Void is actually a company that produce interactive VR
attractions with tactile effects - you really have to watch a video to see what
they can do. They utilise water, cobwebs, air and heat changes to mimic
what you're seeing on your VR headset. To me, THIS is how you use VR and use
it well. If more parks or commercial attractions utilised this approach and
used The Void, I'd be all over that and would love to experience it. Time will
tell, but it's certainly an exciting time in the themed attraction and themed
event industries!
That's it for the first ever Cupcakes and Coasters meets
interview! I'd like to thank Mark for taking the time to catch up with me for
this interview and very much hope you've enjoyed reading.
Talk
later xoxo,
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