Week 4: Writing and Lobby Design Team

Welcome to Hell Week!

This week has been considerably hectic considering it was the final week before the physical build of the room needed to be complete. Members from all teams have been pitching in to help spackle and paint the walls. While helping tame the chaos of the IMGD grad lounge, the Writing Team has managed not only to produce material for the appropriate puzzles, but also to write two full scripts and shoot (as well as edit together) one video. (Thank you to the run crew for supplying us with your theatrical talent.)

Oh Heck! Puzzles need writing?

We already knew that the answer to this question was yes. I just thought it would be a catchy heading for this section... Where, you know, I talk about the documents that we wrote for the puzzles. Last week Nick briefly mentioned that there were two puzzles which needed writing; the diary puzzle and the binder puzzle. It turns out that there were actually two additional puzzles which needed writing; the game/video puzzle and the riddle puzzle. When writing for these puzzles our goal was to contextualize the puzzle in the story and also ensure that its physical location within the room made sense. For example, the binder puzzle contains a variety of documents, some specifically about Entity 2006, others vaguely about shape shifting creatures through fabricated newspaper articles or movie reviews. All of these documents are ripped to appear destroyed by the entity itself.

All writing for all four puzzles was completed; Rob wrote the script for Joe's puzzle and the diary entries for the diary puzzle, Nick wrote the riddle puzzle, and I wrote all the documents for the binder puzzle. The only unfortunate thing about all of the writing produced is that we realized the script written for Joe's video puzzle (in which a Foundation scientist is talking to a camera and saying words that could be interpreted as numbers) was too long. We figured that players might need to re-watch the video around five times in order to solve the puzzle. If the escape room is only thirty minutes long, a two minute video translates to 1/3 the allotted time when re-watched. So we cut the script way, way down to be a maximum of thirty seconds.

Steven Spielberg who? There's a new director in town.

Easily the best part of this week was filming the ridiculous employee orientation video for The Foundation. The purpose of this video is to play on a loop in the lobby while our players wait to get into the room. Its script uses absurdist humor and plays up the abuse that some employees of The Foundation may endure. It contains three separate segments which are focused on general entity information, employee obedience, and injury respectively. The final cut ended up being a little over five minutes in length. The information that's revealed in this video is absolutely not vital for our players to understand the story of the escape room. However, it does exist for those who want a little more lore or just want to laugh.

For this filming session we used two separate cameras, one for a wide shot and one for a head shot. When editing the footage, we used cuts between the angles for comedic emphasis. We will also be cutting the video into its individual sections for the Marketing team to put onto the website. This session taught us a lot about how to use or equipment and how to essentially direct actors to get takes that aren't a nightmare to edit later. We'll apply this knowledge when we shoot the video for Joe's puzzle.

Here is the most recent cut of the lobby video for your viewing pleasure.

-Leo Bunyea, your friendly neighborhood goof