The Think Tank

Our Halloween Dry Run party was last night and I have to say that it was definitely a success.  However, because I was too busy taking part I did not get any pictures of the event at all.  I am hopeless in this regard.

Anyway, our Halloween preparations are almost complete now.  I had intended to do regular updates on here with pictures and videos showing our progress and highlighting our new projects for this year, but due to a number of issues I did not wind up with enough time to actually make any posts.  As such, I am going to detail everything in one single post.  Read through the bump for all the gory details and some videos of the  new elements.

The Fire Pit

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/16149744[/vimeo]We’ve added several new props to this years haunt, and we improved a couple of existing ones by adding sound.  The fire pit is one the ones that has seen a really big improvement just be adding some crackling fire sounds.  I also mixed in some clinking chains and mournful moans to help set the scene.

The Prisoner

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/16152151[/vimeo]This year mom and I went to Frightfest NW, an event for crazy halloween haunters from all over the NW US and SW Canada.  It was a lot of fun and very informative: there were several seminars where we learned how to build 3 different animated props, all of which I used in this year’s haunt.

One of those props was a rocking mechanism originally intended to be used in a rocking chair prop.  However, our yard does not really have a good spot for a rocking chair, so I modified it slightly to make a prisoner rocking back and forth against some bars.

That of course meant that I had to build a jail cell on the south end of our porch, so that he can do his thing above the kiddies as they walk down the side of the house on their trek to the backyard for their treats.

But what are treats without tricks?  The rocking was nice, but I wanted another surprise for our unsuspecting victims, and I found just the thing I wanted when I saw this talking skull kit online from a company called Cowlacious Designs.

I ordered the kit and ran into some fairly serious problems getting it to work right, but in the end everything came together and now we are the proud owners of a talking – sometimes shouting – skeleton prisoner on the porch.  During the lead up to Halloween we have him facing the front door so he can harass unsuspecting visitors and mailmen, but on Halloween night I will turn him around and he can shout and shake at the kiddies as they go past.

Most of the props in the haunt this year are motion activated, and this one is as well.  As you can see from the video, getting everything calibrated correctly is a little difficult, but it works pretty much flawlessly at this point.

The Coffin Talker

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/16152389[/vimeo]Budget Bucky’s are high quality anatomically correct skeletons that many haunters use in their displays because they are so accurate – however, the “Budget” part of the name is a bit of a misnomer.  Generally speaking, $150 bucks plus shipping is a pretty darn good buy.

I’ve always wanted one in my yard, but I never wanted to pop for one.  This year mom found a fellow selling some Bucky’s on FrightFest NW in Vancouver for $70, so I snatched one up.  I thought about getting a second one, but I did not have a specific plan for it, so I stuck with just the one.

I wound up putting him in the coffin I got several years ago, and he looked great, but I really wanted him to talk.  As I mentioned above, I had some difficulty getting the Prisoner working correctly.   After a couple of days of fiddling with the electronics, I decided that I must have received a bad board from the manufacturer.  I called them up and they rushed me a new board, along with an RMA chip for the board I had received.  When I received the new board, I still had the same problem I’d had originally.  I found a distributor in town where I could get the servo that drives the jaw and tried replacing that, but I still had the same problem.  That led me to believe that clearly this was not a bad board or faulty servo as I had first thought.  As it turned out, the problem wound up being related to the power supply: whenever I used the barrel connector, it produced some nasty feed back which was messing everything up.  Wiring the power connector directly to the board solved the problem completely.

Since I now had an extra board and an extra servo, I contacted Cowlacious and explained that as it turned I had been wrong about the “defective” board, and I paid them for the second one instead.  I took the skull off of my Bucky skeleton, fitted it with the Cowlacious board and servo, recorded/modified some audio clips, and voila!  I had me a fancy, talking skeleton.

I searched the internet and found a vocals-only version of Vincent Price’s “rap” from the iconic Michael Jackson song Thriller, which I thought was just about the perfect thing for the skeleton to recite.  I found several other spooky poems and loaded them all onto an MP3 player that I stuck inside the coffin with a pair of computer speakers and now we have our very own narrator for our haunt.

The video below shows the Coffin Talker reciting one of his other greetings.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/16152291[/vimeo]

The Gravestone Popper

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/16152087[/vimeo]This is another Frightfest build.  It’s just a simple pneumatic pop-up prop, triggered by a motion sensor which I hid underneath the lip of the Grave Robber’s wheelbarrow.  Next year I might add some sound to him, but even as is this little prop has been scaring people every night that I’ve had him working.

Next year I think I am going to try to make some kind of a tombstone that he can actually hide inside so you won’t see him sitting behind the gravestone.

The Crypt Freaker

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/16152111[/vimeo]Last year I had a similar prop outside the crypt we built.  That year he leapt up out of a chair.  This year I decided to mix things up a little bit by having him hide behind the crypt and then jump out when the unsuspecting kiddies trip a motion sensor.  This is another prop that  does not have sound.  I tried several different methods, but because of the way I am triggering everything, I wasn’t able to cobble together a sound board.  Oh well.  It’s still plenty startling when he pops out.