Given the renewed interest in all things Scooby Doo, the park has launched a new dark ride - the Scooby-Doo Spooky Coaster - a $13 million indoor rollercoaster inspired by the feature film which was shot at Warner’s Movie World Studios.
Coaster cars carefully replicated from the film launch visitors on a hair-raising journey, complete with laser, lighting and sound effects, animatronics and a kaleidoscope of colour, depth, height and trickery of dimension.
One of the central players in the ride’s design was Australian laser specialist Laservision Macro-Media. The installation required a complete reversal of laser display rules: whilst discreet laser effects have previously been employed to embellish dark rides, the Scooby-Doo concept required that the effects create the entire illusion, maintain it throughout the experience and simultaneously perform for multiple audiences moving through three-dimensional space at speed. For Simon McCartney, Laservision’s director of attraction development, the fact that this was something untried before, only served to stimulate the company’s interest.
Once on site, Laservision realized just how different their approach would have to be: the people in the cars are continuously altering direction, velocity, elevation and trajectory. This unfamiliar circumstance presented Laservision’s creative team with a novel set of design and programming parameters. To preview each element, the production team had to ride the coaster day and night for almost three weeks. "Even though I have seen it on hundreds of occasions it is still a rush for me," added Lloyd Weir, Laservision’s art director. "I think I’ve become a coaster junkie!"
Other than the coaster itself, the building’s almost 900,000 cubic feet (25,350m3) interior contains nothing except smoke and mirrors. The entire 3D environment is created when illuminated with purpose-built Laservision projection technology. To maintain the ride’s ‘spooky’ theme, Laservision’s Stella-Ray projectors were selected for their intense emerald green light and colour contrast. "The effects can only be created with laser’s coherent light properties," explained McCartney. "Traditional incoherent lamps, however well focused, will illuminate the environment, thus destroying the illusion."
The Stella-Rays are complemented by a Laservision Mini-Ray system which creates separate effects as the cars pass through an area christened ‘The Ring of Fire’. The design integrates no less than seven strategically-located scanning projector heads, fed via optical fibre distribution from two powerful (40W) YAG Laser systems. The system is triggered by track sensors and driven by the company’s own Sinodial-Series show control technology, utilizing two Digital Data-Pumps and associated macro-media hardware, linked via a fibre optic data communications network. Approximately 100 mirrors are mounted in the building on different planes to enhance the illusion of infinite interior space, while mirrored floor sections adjacent to the vertical illuminations accentuate the notion of depth still further.
