Monday, December 06, 2010

In the fall of 2003, to coincide with the release of Imagineer Jason Surrell's book, The Haunted Mansion: From The Magic Kingdom to the Movies,  as well as the distribution of the live action movie based on the attraction, Disney released this "book" which essentially is a collection of pieces to construct a small scale paper model of--not The Haunted Mansion--but a form of haunted mansion based more on the production design of the movie.

The ghostly blue nuts and bolts shown in the blister pack attached to the cover are the fasteners for all of the walls, floor, and partial roof.

The availability of the book was short-lived and now it fetches about three to four times the original cover price on the secondary market for a copy in new condition.

It's really geared more for the much younger as is evident in its overall simplicity and the illustrative style of the graphics. Hard core Mansion fans might collect it just because it is what it is, but once it's put together, the result is largely anti-climatic.

However, I decided to scan all of the pieces and take them into the cg realm for a bit of fun. Until an animated fly-through can be rendered out and composited, here are a few stills:











































(click images for larger view)

The model was massed using SketchUp Pro 7, then imported to 3DS Max 2009 for materials, lighting and rendering. A bit of post was then done in Photoshop CS2.