Halloween1998
From Simreal
I was planning on making two animated displays this year... the first was a monster in a cage that, when someone got too near to it, would shake on the bars of the cage. The second was another "jumper" but instead of in a trash can it would jump out of a large flower pot.
I have a mechanism for the flower-pot jumper, but I never put together the control electronics, proximity sensors, or anything on the caged monster.
Here is my living room, panning from left to right:
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The left image is from the kitchen, looking out over the "bar" that separates it from the living room. We put some nice pumpkin luminaries on the counter for a pleasant effect. To the left, you can see the black area where Floyd hangs out, and to the right is the beginning edge of the monster's cage. The candelabra behind the luminaries was made by Melissa -- it consists PVC pipe, small plant pots to hold the candles, black paint, gold paint dabbed over that, and moss stuck on with hot glue. Very wonderful -- the second of the set is on the patio.
The second image is Floyd and his pet spider (though the spider is hard to see, especially in the small image. Click on it to get the big version). Floyd is right off of our front door, and greets guests. Above Floyd is a large flourescent blacklight fixture giving a nice eery purple sheen to everything. Floyd (and Grace, seen later) was made using techniques described in "How to Build a Corpse" by DiStefano (with painting done by Seth. Hi Seth!). The stalactites were made with 1/4" wire mesh made into a cone, stuffed with newspaper, and then covered in <nop>FixAll. We used these everywhere to make a cavern theme.
We live in an apartment complex with essentially no kids, so we didn't expect trick-or-treaters... but our party-bags (on the table by the door) were stuffed with flavored crispy worms, and chocolate covered worms and crickets curtesy of our friends at HotLix. Yummy. Oh, we did get one TOT... and wonder what they thought when they got home?
The third image shows the monster cage and monster... if you get too close, a strobe goes off behind the couch and smoke pours out from behind the boombox (on the left). I used a dry-ice cooler to chill the fog, so we had a nice low mist throughout the party. To the right of the picture you can see our patio, which we blocked in with black plastic. Food featured on the dessert table includes white-chocolate colored and molded into halloween shapes, jellow Brain and Heart, and Cat Poop Cookies. More Yummy.
The fourth image shows some more of the patio, the dessert table, and the buffet table. The only scary thing there is the food. Miyoko brought some wonderful carrot and seaweed salad (orange carrot gratings, and a grated or otherwise thin black seaweed). She helped Melissa deep-fry some shrimp heads (which are truly frightening, though tasty. It's hard to eat food that looks back). Then there was the sushi -- premier of these were the Spider Rolls. We also found some small deep-fried fishies at our local culturally diverse grocery store. Of course, we had the classic eyeballs in the punch -- which was a simple 7-Up in a bowl, with bloody ice-cubes made from watermellon and pineapple juice blended together. Double Yummy.
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Here is the buffet again, with Grace to the right. The Cat-Poop Cookies taste far better than they look -- amazingly enough, we had lots of leftovers for these!
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Here are the close-ups of our Halloween Denizens. Cute bunch, aren't they? From the left, we have the un-named Devil, then a couple of shots of Floyd, and finally Grace. I did hair on these guys with standard Crepe hair-- but I don't much like that stuff. I found really cheap (I mean cheap $2.00) hair extensions at the local beauty supply that seems much more durable -- I will be playing with that for next year.
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Not that you can see anything, but here are the luminaries and the room in the dark... Halloween is so difficult to photograph. Use light and/or a flash and you can see stuff, but it loses a lot of its character. Shoot in the dark, well, it's all dark! I suppose if I used a real camera, it would work better.
Some things don't show well at all in the photos -- like the spiderwebs I made! I built a cheapo (and only vaguely effective -- I'm gonna buy a pro model next year) web spinner and put extremely realistic cobwebs over everything in the house! Like some demented spider with thyroid problems... and now Melissa says that I have to clean it all up. Humph.
