Our family's Halloween page. All about our props, costumes, special effects, and the lights and music which go into our haunted house display. Pics and explanations and short video clips showing the actions.
Finalized our builds for this year's haunt, now we can start acquiring the materials and building a little at a time. The project list looks like:
Hard-wiring all the LEDs for the candles
Building a free-standing mausoleum
Building a free-standing entrance to our crypt
Building a crypt inside the garage
Creating a burial vault for the other garage door
Creating a free-standing tomb in the garage
Creating dried-out corpses
The basic plans for the structures are below:
The crypt entrance
The mausoleum
The basic ideas:
This would be perfect for the New Orleans-themed section.
Image courtesy of the Vatican
Image courtesy of National Geographic
Once the structures are built, they'll be extensively weathered and detailed. The crypt entrance will (ideally) have two wooden doors (foam really) or two wrought-iron (PVC) gates, and a broken section of wall on the side. The trick-or-treaters will enter the front gate, pass through the gap in the wall, and make their way to the front porch. They'll be able to look inside the garage to see the crypt scene, which will be lit with a blue spotlight above (a "moonlight" effect) and candelabras/candles for accent lighting. Inside the crypt entrance is still up in the air. I haven't decided what, if anything, to put in there. I'm debating either a "stained glass" window effect or just a painting on the unbroken wall, with more accent lighting.
The mausoleum for the New Orleans side will have Spanish Moss draped everywhere and maybe some flat tombstones on the driveway to give it a crowded look common in cemetaries in that area. Maybe we'll do a firefly lighting effect, and we'll probably have a static blacklit ghost in the mausoleum itself. Potentially may try a Pepper's Ghost effect in the crypt, we'll see how much time we end up with.
Welcome to 2014!
SpiderWitch, Drac Jr, and your gracious host had a most enjoyable holiday. And now that the Christmas ornaments are put away and everything is back to normal (more or less), it's time to start thinking about Halloween.
If we learned anything from last year, it's that we need more time to accommodate the last-minute projects and the stuff which doesn't work the way we envisioned. So we'll be starting in July. Which means we need to determine the project list, well, now if we're going to be ready to start.
SpiderWitch wants to do a New Orleans-themed vignette on the side of the house opposite the front door. Spanish moss, urns with flowers and candles in front of above-ground crypts, maybe some lightning bugs darting lazily among the trees. If we could open the crypt, perhaps a ghoul inside with a fluorescent light.
In front of the garage, we plan to put up a canopy and build some walls to represent a crypt entrance- wrought iron doors on rusty hinges will open up to a dark enclosed space; the garage door will be up, but blocked off by another wrought iron gate opening up on a crypt with skeletons resting on niches in the walls, and a central sarcophagus. Maybe a Pepper's Ghost type illusion in here.
Exiting through a hole in the "wall", the guests will make their way to the porch, where the front door will have been replaced by Drac's coffin lid. Maybe- this might be too scary, and honestly I'm still on the fence about it.
We're trying to figure out where to put "the girls"- our Weeping Angels. We plan to put at least one of them on a turntable and have her move in response to guests.
We're going to try to use social media to do a "dress rehearsal" where the kids can come out in costume and take pictures ahead of the big day.
Stay tuned, we'll be updating the blog with more projects...
Halloween 2013 is over. Months of prep, research, building, painting, testing- all down to one night. Blood, sweat, fortunately no tears. But a fair amount of blood. All for about 3 hours of trick or treating. Is it worth it?
Absolutely.
So many kids said "thank you for doing this for us." They thanked us for the time we spent making it, thanked us for putting in the effort, thanked us for making it special. "Thanks for giving us something to talk about tomorrow," one pair of teens offered.
Most of the kids made a point of telling us how much they liked the decorations. Parents too, but it's the kids we're doing this for. Today's trick or treater will be tomorrow's haunter, and we're giving them some great memories to draw upon. Thirty years from now, the kid who told me how great my house looked will be listening to another kid tell HIM how great his house looks.
Even better, there were many more houses with foggers, music, lights, and so forth. The trend in our neighborhood is for more decorations, and I have hopes that the next few years will see a golden age of haunted houses.
There were still the jerky kids who show up with little/no costume and barely mumbled trick or treat- but they were the minority and most of them came around. I can be...persuasive.
The fog machines put out too much fog- at one point we had zero visibility, and for much of the night the fog was actually covering about half the block- I turned it off as it was a traffic hazard.
It was a lot of work, and at the end of the evening I was completely beat- but riding a wave of euphoria from the great response.
The angels proved to be a big hit, and surprisingly scary. Quite a few kids (and adults) didn't want to come up to the house because of them. I made several trips down to the sidewalk to deliver candy to little ones too frightened to come up.
Can't wait for next year!
Drac, Drac Jr., and the SpiderWitch pose for a family photo.
The fog begins to creep across the yard
Drac Jr. prepares to venture in search of candy
About 6pm, foggers haven't really chilled the vapor yet- that's why it's billowing up instead of across the grass. Still, makes a nice, eerie effect and if you're already expecting something to jump at you, the fog intensifies that fear- so many kids completely freaked themselves out without me doing a thing!
From the front porch looking out. The music is "Translyvania" from Nox Arcana. GREAT music, well worth what I paid for it.
This is a pretty representative video of the evening. There are the kids who only want the candy, the kids who like the decorations, and the kids who are REALLY impressed.
Still limping along with the boot of shame, so nothing new to report on outdoor prep. Been planning to do a test with the fog machines to see how much coverage we get, how dense it is, and so forth. Went out tonight to turn off the LED tea lights and votives, and saw that Nature had jumped the gun with a fog display of her own:
Looking out the front door. Cool moonlight on the graveyard.
View from the street.
The "girls" are lurking in the mist.
The house as seen from across the street.
The fog is much thicker than it appears through the lens- visibility is about 50 feet, with details washing out around 20 feet or so. Looking out the front door, there's a heavy mist along the walkway which bounces the light from the floods around and scatters it, creating some eerie shadow effects as you walk.
Despite the broken leg, I got up on the ladder and hung the background lights up- I think that gives enough ambient lighting for the porch, and the amber color complements the glow from the LEDs.
Some pics with the camera, a bit less blurry now that the shutter doesn't have to stay open so long:
The view looking up from the street. The blue spot hits the tombstones, the front walk, and the Weeping Angels by the garage, casting deep shadows.
I think the blue is an improvement on the red light from last year- the shadows are cooler, giving it more of a moon-glow feeling.
Closeup of the tombstone area. This is always a hit with the families- they have their kids pose in the graveyard and take photos. Very satisfying to see how much they enjoy the atmosphere.
The Weeping Angels- not as good as the BBC version, but they still look creepy at night. They need a better home- we'll work on that next Halloween.
The front porch. It's not really this bright, but the exposure makes it look that way. There's enough light to safely get up and down if you're wearing a costume, but not much more. The LEDs work well with the candles, blending in with the yellows and oranges.
The skull table. Not much to say here- it's a good way to display the candles since we don't have any more fixtures to place them on.
You can sort of see the detail of the "wax" dripping down the sides- hot glue makes a suitable substitute. The paint was antique white, which gave a nice ivory color to the PVC and glue.
The left side of the porch, showing the wrought iron stands and the table. It also shows off the Scene Setter background SpiderWitch found- very nice!
Right side of the porch, candelabra and taper candles with C7 flicker bulbs. Next year we're going to make all the candelabras and candles hardwired to a plug- running up and downstairs to turn everything on/off is tedious. Painful with a broken ankle.
I thought I had sprained it- ran for the bus and landed wrong on my right foot- and it was just taking a long time to heal, but I finally went to the doc and they showed it broken in two places. So now I'm wearing the "boot of shame" for the next three weeks.
Meanwhile, no climbing on ladders and no prolonged standing- so no work on projects. Good news is we're mostly done. I should be able to fix the rest of it up this coming week.
After a four-day marathon of activity, 3 hours after work Thursday and Friday and 9 hours Saturday and Sunday, we're "done"...
The to-do list consists of building the fog chillers, wiring the Angels to their final resting places, and taping the last scene setter to the garage door(s). I've got one more project which SpiderWitch added today (!!), but that won't take more than an hour. So for all intents and purposes, we're finished with our build.
Here's the front entrance:
At 6:30 pm you can barely make out the lights
At 7:15, it's fully lit. Much dimmer than it appears here, though
SpiderWitch wanted to do a "New Orleans" style cemetery, with the burial urns and lots of candles:
Cauldron Mk 2, now water resistant!
Grave flowers? Check. Lots of candles? Check.
Someone got up too early. Or is it late?
The twinkle lights and flicker candles look great!
And some random pics around the haunt:
View from the street.
Not a great shot, but this is the "test" ghost. It looks blue, but that's actually from the blacklight. I think it'll look better away from the blue floodlight.
Don't Blink!
Everyone who walked by asked where the Angels were. So I gave in to the crowd and added one. It looked REALLY creepy with the blue light throwing the deep shadow on the garage, and if I didn't know better, I'd SWEAR it moved...
The skull surrounded by candles- classic horror!
And finally, some videos. Picture doesn't show the color, but you can see the flicker effects.
