October 31, 2005 - HALLOWEEN!
I am exhausted! Since I did not have any time to set up ahead of time,
the entire house needed to be decorated before 5:00 PM when the trick or
treators started showing up...
I did all of the decorating solo this year. Becky had to work, the
girls were at school and all of my friends were stuck at work. With
Halloween hitting on a Monday none of my friends could come over from Eugene to
help set up and then party with us. It was fun, but not quite the same as
when we have 8-10 friends over to play. We did have our friends Zivney,
Becky and their kids stop by for an hour or so and help us scare later in the
evening and that made the evening more fun.
OK, so here's how the day went...
| First things first, I tried to get the things done that were easy.
I started by hanging the ghost motor in the living room window.
Since I planned to use the upstairs window for something new this year,
I moved the ghost downstairs next to the front door.
I found a new head for the ghost and had to re-build the shoulder and
arm assembly out of coat hanger because I lost the PVC pieces I had made
last year... They may have been used on one of the grave jumpers
by mistake. |
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| I wanted to be able to leave the interior house lights
on, so I had to black out the window area so that the black light would
show up nicely. I had a large number of black sheets that I had picked
up a while back on close out, so I put them to good use. |
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| Once the windows were surrounded I finished
decorating the ghost area. The black light was mounted and I used
an oscillating fan to add a bit of extra movement to the design. In
hindsight, I should have spent more time on this prop and made it more
detailed.
Oh well, this is the
last year for the cheesy props, so the ghost will be a thing of the past
<chuckle> |
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| The miniature graveyard turned out nice.
I went back and forth on using the grave jumper assembly from the
video store and ended up deciding to modify the grave jumper for the
toxic waste barrel instead.
The graveyard got one of the stock Bucky skeletons propped up in
front of the grave stone for a little character. |
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| I put a green spotlight on the graveyard so that it
would stand out at night. I really like to play around with different
colors when building my haunts. It makes them interesting and grabs
the attention of people passing by. |
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| It took about 2 hours to modify the grave jumper to work
with the toxic barrel prop. I had to change the height of the body
and the length of the lever arms to make it fit in the barrel and
through the opening in the top. |
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| The final addition to the house was a 5 foot x 6 foot
face in the upstairs window. It's hard to get a feel for the scale
of the face from this picture, it's cut from a king sized sheet and uses
most of the material I made
it from yet another black bed sheet that I picked up on clearance.
Becky thinks I am nuts when I do things like buy 7 sets of black California
King size sheets when they go on clearance for $9.00 each. I have no
idea what I will use them for at the time that I buy them so she thinks
I am nuts... She's probably right <laughing> |
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| The almost finished haunt for 2005. I had most
everything in place and well tested at this point. I added a few
pumpkins and wanted to add spider web and other details to the
graveyard, but the wind was really whipping things around and I didn't
think it would stay put.
The camera was set up and hooked to the TV in the living room so I
could sit on the couch and monitor the front porch and graveyard area. |
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| The final look of the house once all of the lights were
set up. I like the odd contrast of the different lights.
I wish that I had put a bit brighter light on the face in the upstairs
window, but by this point I was out of time - the kids were starting to
show up & Becky was already out with the girls trick or treating, so I
had to get in the house to scare the kids and hand out candy. |
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| A close up of the grave yard. I didn't use my "juicy"
skeleton because Becky and I figured the white one would show up better in the
green light.
I tried to cast a shadow on the side of the house - I would have
liked for the shadow to have been larger, but I didn't have time to go
back and revisit the graveyard. Too many other things to take care
of that were more important. |
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| The ghost in the window was visible from both the
driveway and the tall side window facing the front porch. The ghost
ran flawlessly the entire evening and managed to distract some people
from the suspicious looking toxic waste barrel. <grin> |
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| The toxic barrel pop up was a big hit. We got some
really good screams. A couple of the toddlers scrambled off the
porch and refused to come back - that's a good sign. I got the lighting just right on this
one. The barrel was dimly lit by both a blue light and the spill
over from the ghost's black light. When
activated I hit it with a yellow spotlight mounted very low to the
ground. The result highlighted the face and cast a great shadow on
the side of the house.
Sorry the video is so dark. My camera doesn't pick up the
lighting when in video capture mode. |
(click on image for video) |
All in all a very successful haunt. We didn't have as many visitors as
I would have liked and it was fairly small scale, but we got some great screams
and a lot of nice comments.
I completely forgot to put my sound effects in the graveyard and didn't get
the fog machine set up until Becky returned with the girls. Still,
everyone liked the set up and had a lot of fun. |
