We are proud to announce that the Darkvale Labs guest experience is now pretty much up and running. This single scene thematic adventure offers local suburban adventurers a chance to spend a few minutes soaking up the steam and thunder of our Research and Development wing, and maybe even to score some free candy as befitting the upcoming holiday. Safety goggles and boots are not required, but those of weaker constitutions should be advised that some of our machinery has a tendency to loudly purge itself of surplus voltage with little to no warning. In other words, some things go bang; kindly don't pee on our floor. We look forward to hosting intrepid strangers, friends, and vaguely unsettling acquaintances, and hope to see you there. We will be open at intermittent periods during the weekends of the 18th and 25th, but expect us to be running strong during Halloween weekend, with costumes, lab assistants and questionable accents. Feel free to message us in the comments or on our FaceBook page, and we will be happy to set up private appointments. For those who are unavailable to attend, we will be posting elaborate film and photo documentation here on the site, and if you put in good quality earbuds and press your face against the monitor or tablet, it's as good as being there, and may even buy you some elbow room at the workplace lunch table. We at DarkVale Laboratories look forward to meeting our distinguishing clientele, both past and future. So long for now.
Infernal Machines - Clearly the Best Kind of Machines...
As we open our mysterious crates and plug in our newly delivered devious contraptions, we would like to take a moment to reflect on what brought us to this beautifully strange place. Halloween 2014 finds us at a unique juncture, where friendships and creative lessons from years past crash headlong into future endeavors, possibly bringing bold new dreams to life. That, and we find it really fun to build crazy poop that freaks out the straights. By the weekend of October 10th, we will be ready to demonstrate the capabilities of Darkvale Laboratories to the hopefully easily amused masses. Boilers and generators, cables and hoses, gears, pistons, and cheap Halloween store foggers will be chugging away to create an entirely new experience for the suburbs of Southwest Orlando, and we look forward to the stunned expressions of the residents of a generally quiet and well behaved neighborhood. The HOA will give us no end of hell about this.
Darkvale's shop dresses up for Halloween...
Darkvale Studios' production shop, which to the untrained eye may look like a common two car garage in the heart of suburbia, has hosted some colorful projects in years past. Props for film and television, theme park and haunted house projects, even a human powered flying(ish) machine have passed through its doors and under the puzzled gazes of concerned neighbors. But this Halloween, the shop itself will get to participate in the Hallow's Eve hijinks as it transforms into a single scene mad science lab experience for the local trick or treaters, their parents, and even smug neighborhood teenagers to enjoy. Our humble shop will come alive with bubbling lab equipment, flying sparks, humming Tesla coils (okay, just one Tesla coil, but it's a big one), and even a 24" tall Van de Graaf generator (Google it. Makes your hair go all Jackson Five if you use it right). Film and pics will be made available here as it all comes together, and for those in Southwestern Orlando during October weekends, it will become available for visitation in the next couple of weeks. Here at Darkvale Studios, we pull out all the stops for Halloween, but make no mistake, we plan to totally phone it in for Christmas.
Darkvale Laboratories, where Mad Science lets off steam....
This Halloween, Darkvale Laboratories will be opening its doors to the public for a brief couple of nights, in order to showcase their sense of showmanship and their accumulation of really neat gadgetry. While building haunt props and environment pieces for our affiliates around central Florida, we were happy this year to be able to carve out some time to build a little thematic showcase of our own, and we will be posting pictures and films of it as it comes to life in the next couple of weeks. We hope some of you will be able to drop by, before the inevitable rush of angry torch wielding villagers force us into pouting seclusion once again. Stupid villagers ruin everything.
Plight of the Phoenix - part one
This time last year, I was caught up in a project that was strange even by my standards. Hopped up on overhyped energy drink and a dash of mid life crisis fervor, a few friends and I entered a flying machine contest to see how badly we could endanger our dignity, bank accounts, and physical health. One of the mini-challenges along the way was to produce a short comedic film about our team's efforts, which I am proud to say won the film competition. The one minute film below took several hours to produce, was filmed on two separate days in two distant locations, and caused a certain amount of trauma to a family of local ducks. On the upside, you get to watch me dress in trash and land on my face in a lake.
Enjoy.
Arty Facts
Here at Darkvale Studios, we bring together artists, inventors, and world travellers under one roof to create products and artwork that speak to the adventurer in everyone. Between climbing jungle pyramids in the Yucatan, being paid to spend an evening in a coffin as dinner party entertainment, sipping champagne atop the Eiffel tower, peering into the empty eyesockets of Irish peat bog mummies, or piloting a homemade flying machine into the Atlantic ocean in front of ninety thousand spectators*, we have risked our necks and dignity time and again to accumulate a unique creative background to draw from. We try to bring a welcome touch of happy madness to all our projects, and a touch of distance and destiny to our artwork. Failing that, we just try to make pretty things, and maybe people will buy them if we distract them with enough genital and flatulence based humor. Mahalo.
* while exaggeration does happen a lot on these blogs, all of the items listed here are true, and just a tiny whiff of a lifetime of unbridled wierdness. Seriously, building robotics for giant mutant bugs is among the more normal stuff I do.
Still alive....
After a brief technological hiatus, Darkvale Studios is putting on its spiky goth boots and reentering the mosh pit of social media. The clouds of sawdust and unpleasant music still fill the air in our production shop, and the strange projects are growing ever stranger, but it feels good to leave the shop floor to fire up the computer and check back in on the modern world with all its Beibers and Kardashians and HuffPos. We will soon be entering the worlds of Twitter, Instagram, and Etsy, as well as a few other silly words the marketing department rattled off at me before I outran them. I did successfully load some images into Pinterest, so feel free to look us up when you wish to take a break from whimsical baby and kitten pictures, and feel free to follow us on Facebook and share us with your friends, enemies, acquaintances, awkward romantic partners, unbearable coworkers, etc. Stay tuned for more news and more uncomfortable humor in weeks ahead.
So long for now...
Full steam ahead....
As Orlando summer begins to rear its fiery head, the Darkvale production shop is going full steam as we build and gather inventory for the Emporium. A certain amount of creative clutter is inevitable in these circumstances, but tools and tempers are being lost in the shuffle, and unsavory language is beginning to fill the air. Rest assured, however; we plan to open our online Emporium doors in just a few short weeks, and we look forward to making all manner of strangeness available to those who wish to adorn their homes or offices with adventurous whimsy from mysterious corners of the globe, some of which we may have made up. Expect to be impressed, or at the very least puzzled and maybe slightly amused. Our next frontier is just around the corner and beyond this cloud of sawdust.
So long for now.
We've suffered for our art, now it's your turn...
Here at Darkvale, we endeavor to create high quality work. Occasionally, this means we must purge the creative valves and turn out something truly wretched. Perhaps it is best that we subject you now with no further warning to one of the worst poems we could string together without actually injuring ourselves. Our apologies.
My soul is an overstuffed burrito
Bursting with the refried beans of angry virtue.
I wield my chainsaw of righteousness
Against the rabid otters of ineptitude
And wrangle the thrashing electric eels of retarded fury
With the rubber gloves of wisdom.
The windswept mountaintop of greatness beckons me
Like some great beckoning thing.
After long fruitless years of searching
Thru the dusty bulk food bins of my soul
At long last my hunt has been rewarded
With the tasty milk dud of oneness.
Now, having exploded my soul burrito
In Nirvana's white hot microwave
I collapse, exhausted.
For that was a hell of a thing.
Again, our apologies for this unwelcome splash of literary sewage. We find that these cathartic exercises help us to clear the path for fine quality creative endeavors. Thank you for riding out this bit of procedural ugliness with us, and we hope to turn out much more pleasant works in the weeks ahead. Namaste.
Darkvale Labs - Where Science meets Art, then maybe explodes.
When Darkvale Studios set out to create a new effects laboratory, we sought out the finest scientific minds Central Florida has to offer. Unfortunately, none of them would return our phone calls (or lavish gift baskets), but we pressed on and built a humble but well-equipped 400 square foot facility, in which we manage to endanger ourselves on a nearly daily basis. While tending towards visual effects for magicians and haunted attractions, our lab also dabbles in pyrotechnics, robotics, and finding what devices are most mind altering for the common house cat. As a result, we have created some striking pieces of automated showmanship, as well as some extremely jaded house cats. Amongst the smoke of electrical fires and the roar of the air compressors, mad dreams are being forged, even as first aid kits are being rapidly depleted. We will also soon be in the market for new and more easily impressed house cats.
Darkvale Emporium Preview
While our new website offers its visitors much to look at, its greatest asset is yet to come: the glorious Darkvale Emporium, an online mercantile of strange and beautiful artifacts from the artisans and adventurers that comprise our staff. We do apologize for the delays that have gone into launching this part of our site. As it turns out, our vendors are more used to trading their goods for illegal pyrotechnics and exotic animals than online credit card payments, so a vigorous learning curve is now underway for all involved. There has been a great deal of profanity and fist shaking, as well as an unexpected ocelot attack, but we believe we will be joining the modern world as a viable marketplace in the very near future. Until our selection of hand-picked goods are available online, I would like to take this opportunity to preview one of our more popularly sold items thus far - human skulls. I assume you realized we wouldn't be selling Hello Kitty backpacks anytime soon.
"Lost Adventurers" - starting at $50
By the very definition of Adventure, not all who partake in it are guaranteed to return. These unlucky devils at least survived intact enough to serve as lovely conversation pieces for your next book club gathering. For a few extra shillings, we'll send you one whose eye sockets still flicker and glow with the embers of eternal madness from some unspeakable curse. Also makes a delightful paperweight.
So, there you have it - more preview samples will be made available in the days and weeks ahead, and we hope to have the Darkvale Emporium online and ready to serve all of your more strange and adventurous shopping tastes by this summer. Stay tuned, spread the word, and so long for now...
Bride of Frankenstein
While we are happy to build nearly anything for nearly anyone, our passions here at Darkvale definitely tend toward the dark and bizarre, so we were greatly honored to participate once again in the It's Alive Project for Mucklebones, LLC. The good folks at Mucklebones are among the finest monster makers in Central Florida (a surprisingly large population), and it is no small salute to be invited to join some very large industry talents as they each come up with their own colorful interpretations of the Bride of Frankenstein to be showcased in the months ahead. For the moment, I cannot divulge much about the concept art or finished piece, but I can release a teaser image or two of the early works in progress. More news will come in the days ahead, but for now, we must return to the shop to put more work into Ms. Lanchester's eccentric tribute.
So long for now....
Tesla coil vs. OSHA
Some years ago, Darkvale Labs acquired a Tesla coil from a Tampa Bay gentleman of questionable motives. This, we find, is the only kind of gentleman that Tampa Bay has to offer, but we made our bargain anyway, and to this day are proud owners of one of the more beautiful and dramatic scientific devices that one can use to destroy themselves instantly in a cloud of screams and smoke. If you wish to endanger all that you love with 4 to 6 foot bolts of intense high voltage electricity, accept no substitutes for Mr. Tesla's magnificent coil.
As it turns out, however, modern American safety standards are somewhat unenthusiastic about the ownership of these devices, and the skittish fellow that OSHA sent to inspect our labs and production floors had very few kind things to say about our dear Sparky Widowmaker. With every new encounter, I find myself less and less impressed with OSHA's sense of adventure, and only by distracting him with our display of Jehovah's Witness traps were we able to quietly smuggle our beloved Tesla coil back into her crate and away from his steely gaze. Thank heavens he didn't stumble onto our combination moonshine still and fission reactor.
Two weeks later....
Sawdust, paint fumes, chicken feathers, and colorful profanity fill the air in the Darkvale production facilities, as we begrudgingly grind our way towards the modern world. Fancy electric lights now replace our firefly jars and uranium rod chandeliers, our employees are being taught the mysterious ways of OSHA, ANSI, and "Better Business", and management even plugged in a stereo system to replace our opera singing shop hobo, claiming that Klaus no longer appealed to our "younger demographic". How chilling - I suspect they disliked his recent forays into seventies disco classics.
At any rate, I was given a nudge here at my wheezing computer and informed that it has been two weeks since my last "blog", and that I need to be more timely with these little digital outbursts unless I wish to "perform duets with Klaus under that overpass from now on." These new business folk do have a flair for dramatic wording, even if I question their musical tastes.
As cameras are being wired into our shop and tomes about "Modern Web Entrepreneurs" are being thrown on top of my dusty desktop clutter, it becomes more and more clear that these changes are permanent and should be embraced, and maybe not sworn at quite as much. And so, dear weary internet voyageur, I suppose that it pleases me greatly to march into this brightly lit utopia of safety and cultural awareness, where Darkvale Studios can proudly take its place in the Modern Digital Marketplace. So help me God, if they ask us to write a mission statement, Klaus will have a whole choir to back him up inside an hour.
It begins....
After years of building nefarious contraptions, the staff of Darkvale Studios realized that we did not have a website. The daunting task of building one was assigned to me, because of my genius with digital gadgetry, and the fact that I was not in the room during this meeting. After finding and blowing the cobwebs off our computer, I wandered onto the internet, eager to look this new digital frontier in the eye. Many hours of whimsical cats, overly bearded duck hunters, and expanding Kardashian posteriors later, I had the knowledge I would need to build the website you now look upon. Welcome, weary internet voyager, to our humble new kingdom of ones and zeroes! Explore, enjoy, and spread the word to those you care about.
In days and weeks ahead, more will be added to this site. We have a lovely emporium under construction, and look forward to selling our trinkets to an eager public, once we have figured out how to remove all those sharp edges that seem to upset the authorities so badly. I have also been informed by management that I shall have to learn the ways of "YouTube", "Twitter", and "FaceBook", if I ever expect these chains to be removed, so look forward to those developments as well. God help me, they even told me to practice my duckface.
Look to this "blog" (which I always thought was a digestive mishap, but have recently been taught otherwise) for regular updates and random bits of whimsy. We here at Darkvale Studios look forward to this bold new era of World Wide Web participation, and hope to become quite wealthy with the right kinds of public relations. I am even trying to get in touch with this Mister Google, who I hear has quite the website of his own. If anyone knows his number, kindly send it my way.
Thank you my friends, and so long for now...