Errands & Shopping & Planning Oh My--from last year!

We had went out to JoAnn fabrics to look for some projection material last year but I wasn't happy with what I could find. Everything was too shimmery and I worried over the sheen being too reflective. So I ended up getting some projection material from AtmosFearFX for the front cemetery entrance and also for the cave as well. 
We talked about the cemetery entrance and decided to make it more from pvc and garden trellis and talked over dimensions. The deeper it is, the better to block out the street lights. Once we put it together, we painted it all black.

Here is where you can see the finished entrance in the picture below. 
I wasn't happy with how it came out as I wanted it to look like the ghosts were rising from the tombstones without projecting a larger version, a double, onto the house in the background. This was not using any projection material at all, just utilizing the projector alone. So when we turned the projector around to the other side to point outwards, it cast such a bright light that I didn't want it in the kids' eyes when they came up to the graveyard. So a lot of technical difficulties and with time fastly fleeing from us, we opted for a bit of a weird cave or alcove type of entrance, like a theater box more like using the AtmosFX projection material and we put the projector under the garden cement bench...not happy with it and won't do that again.

 

We got the Cauldron Creep all set and took another video with trying out some bubbling sound and hooked up some Bog Fog from Froggy’s Fog which worked well and added the pumpkin light too. He looks really cool! Will get the video of him put together and post it later. And yes, still after Lloyd to write out how he put it together. I do have some better photos of what is under the robe! ;) He ended up a lot more creepy than ever with his make-over we did last year.

I was painting the skeletons black and will splooge with gray and then once dry, they will be ready to be corpsed. I'll put together another post just on this process. :)

Did stop by Home Depot to look at their Halloween stuff and despite everyone oohing and aahhing over it all, which there is a lot, but still, I didn’t see much I’d want. I like the Costco skeletons a bit better than HD.
The ones at HD, the skull seems kinda small for the body, at least they did there at the store in the bin. A few nice pieces there, but a lot of it, I know I could make it instead.

We did pick up the orange and the purple fire and ice bulbs just to see if we want to add them to the cave at all since they were cheap, and cheaper than Spirit.

So after I corpse these skeletons (and aside from the 2 new ones, I have a few in the garage to do as well).

Then I can get to work on the new Haunted Cave sign that I want to make light up. I have been timid about working with the Styrofoam, despite the classes I’ve taken with it and doing that sign is also a bit challenging as I’ve not done one like this before. But it’s high time I dove into it all! 
Unfortunately, I ran out of time for the new sign, so I just opted for one I picked up for $1 at the Dollar store. It had a string on it but with the wicked wind blowing, it tore it off so I just tucked it down in back of the gate.

Alot of technical difficulties were faced last year. We took hours trying to figure out what projector with what device would play the video projections properly. The only one we had set was the top window over the garage as I keep those together and they have worked well over the years. The problem was that the iPod Classics do not work with the new projectors and the new iPods did not want to work with the projectors either. We tried iPhones and iPads even. It was a struggle.

But, despite all the technical video difficulties we faced, this past Halloween really went well. I'll have more pics on that later on. :)