Had a very productive meeting with Elia today. There’s so much going on that my head is spinning. …
My “real” job is getting very busy, and the good news is my new assistant is doing a fantastic job of stepping up and letting me do what I do best.

Anyhow ,

I’m retooling my plan ( as I always seem to be) and selling all of my old Showbiz / rockafire stuff and putting every minute I can spare into the haunted house plan.
Elia is done with most of the story board art and is now working on a fund raising poster I hope to be able to market. keep an eye out on my eBay auctions if you are looking for any old Showbiz or CEI stuff… I’m clearing out the warehouse!

Ok… So I gotta get my ass to bed as this is my weekend on duty.
More to come… Soon!

My favorite Christmas gift every year is from the Department of Agriculture… a renewal notice for the Dark Ride Registration.

My SECOND favorite Christmas gift is when I get the actual registration plate sticker in the mail… and I just got it!

This little sticker is what makes this project “real” to me. Every year is renews my spirit the way Spring makes everyone feel just a little bit more “alive”.

I’ve started to look for a workshop / storage building. My hope is that sometime mid-year I will be finally able to afford a large enough space to keep the ride and start building and testing some of the larger props I need to build. I am about as far as I can go with stuff that will fit in my basement!

It’s been more than a month since my last update…

As I said before – a change with a key employee required me to drop everything and make me focus on my “real” job! The good news is that while I was away – the project kept moving forward thanks for the hard work of my art-director Elia.

 I finally got a chance to have a quick meeting with him on Friday… and the storyboard art is coming along nicely! Below is just a quick snapshot of the pictures… In a couple of weeks, he will have the pictures done and I will share more with everyone.

Anyone that knows me also knows how much I HATE it when someone sees my robots and says: “wow, that’s just like Chuck E Cheese!”
The problem isn’t the robots, it’s the programming. Most of the robots at CEC are in fact the same robots I have, but if you are old enough to remember Showbiz Pizza Place…. You know that the same robots did amazing things with proper programming years ago.

So, here’s the reason I am posting this, and the story behind it:

The division of CEC that programs the shows for the stores is called “Department 18.” and apparently the one programmer didn’t like the production value of the shows he was being asked to program.
One night, he stayed and programmed a show that he could be proud of with a song he liked…

The video made it to the Internet and CEC forced it to be pulled due to copyright issues, but not before someone saw it and landed the programmer a job at Disney.

So, here’s the video: cec_3st_treetops

While I was not a big fan of the song, it grows on you and at the very least shows what good choreography and programming combined can do for these robots that are 30 years old.
Notice how the well the hands move on the dog playing guitar and how the piano player’s hands move up and down in “tune” with the song.
No special lights…. No video playing to accompany the show… Just good programming.

This is the stuff that turns me on.