Friday, November 27, 2020

Fortess Party 2014 Retrospective, Part 1: The Museums of Michigan, The Womb Room, and The Devil Went Up to Michigan



The Museums of Michigan featured a half dozen of costumed dummies along the walls of a dark room. They were supposed to represent the animatronic mannequins that you might find at one of Michigan's many underfunded museums. When guests pushed a shiny red button, the name of a museum would appear on a computer monitor, spotlights would come on on some combination of the the dummies, and they would start talking. 




Sean Murphy rigged the lightning rig to illuminate the correct characters for each short sketch.  The sound all came from speakers on each side of the room, but we panned the voices so the sound would come from the general area of the appropriate mannequins.

The party got pretty loud, so even if you were there, you may have missed some of the subtleties of these great educational audio clips. Here they are now, in their unadulterated grandeur. 



The Gerald Ford Library and Museum







The Michigan Shipwreck Museum







The Soo Locks Visitor's Center









The Quincy Mine Museum





The Womb Room was one of the least labor-intensive rooms to build, but by far the most relaxing. It was a small room made of red and pink sheets, with a giant red beanbag chair (not shown) in it, to represent the placenta.


Near the room of the room, there were two Fallopian tubes moving off to the sides. If you looked into these tubes, you would see a repository of eggs (ball-pit balls) suspended in the distance. The soundtrack of this room consisted of a loud heartbeat and constant splashing sounds. I thought about uploading that here, too, but it's a 20 minute recording, and nothing actually happens. 

The Devil Went Up to Michigan was based on the Charlie Daniels song, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."




But in this case, the fiddler who bets his soul was not Johnny, the hero of the song...  


But Ann Arbor's own Violin Monster. I actually reached out the real Violin Monster to see if I could hire him to play that night, but he had already left Ann Arbor for the winter to busk in warmer climes. (The next year, I saw him in New Orleans in February. True story!) Anyway, we built this lookalike.


I am including this second picture with the flash on to showcase the infamous prize of the contest, the Fiddle of Gold, which hovered and spun about a miniature spotlight. Beneath it was a bottle of Arbor Brewing Company's Violin Monster beer, which we bought for the occasion as an Easter egg for careful Fortress explorers.



The other difference from the song is that the Devil is not actually a fiddler, but a drummer. He and the Violin Monster took turns playing all night. For the Devil, we used recordings of heavy metal drum solos. For the fiddle, we used actual recordings of the Violin Monster that I found on YouTube. 


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