Single-Day Series: Madame (April 24th)

Single-Day Series: Madame (April 24th)

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The séance circle might be one of the best known scenes of any Haunted Mansion attraction in a Disney Park. Madame Leota hovers above the Necronomicon: Book of the Dead, opened to pages 1312 and 1313 with a spell aimed at summoning the spirits back from limbo. She's trying to populate the Mansion for your entertainment as you glide into the remainder of the attraction. 

Leota is famously one of the most convincing illusions in the Haunted Mansion. Her voice and appearance were actually provided by two separate women. She's voiced by Eleanor Audley, the same person who voiced both Cinderella's Lady Tremaine and Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent. Her face, though, is that of WED model builder Leota Toombs. (Talk about a perfect name...) As Jason Surrell explains in his book, The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic [affiliate link], which is loaded with interesting facts about the attraction, Imagineers shot footage of Leota performing the audio tracks and then combined them with Audley's voice to conjur up the apparitions with whom we'll spend the rest of our Doom Buggy ride. To this day, Imagineers call this the "Leota Effect".

Settings for this shot were insane–this is cropped but at the time I was shooting the whole room and my camera was just drinking up every ounce of available light. 50mm and cropped tight, f/1.2, 1/50 seconds, and ISO at an eye-watering 40000. God bless post-processing noise reduction.

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