This year, the goal was: ghosts over a spooky graveyard. In order to accomplish that, I had this crazy idea to build a ghost mobile. It was all made out of junk parts, and though the old fan motor burned out before it'd even gotten dark - before we'd even hung the ghosts - Lucy and Jen came up with the brilliant backup plan of using another big fan to blow them around. It worked fairly well, we only had to "restart" the ghosts occasionally.
Now, this pic is designed to clear one thing up: we get about a million trick-or-treaters. Not literally a million, but I'm betting over 500. This wasn't a particularly busy moment. This was a normal moment. We ran out of candy this year. Something we haven't done since 1999, and I wasn't surprised since the weather was so nice. I made the run to Walgreens in the nick of time.
Okay, another big part of the plan was low-lying fog. To accomplish this we created a fog cooler for our fog machine. It worked generally well, making the fog scatter far less than previous years, and giving that creepy, graveyard-fog look. Note the half-buried coffin near the walk. We'd intended to spend time in there scaring the kids, but given some technical difficulties (read: we were totally late and the fog machine clogged last minute requiring some emergency field repair) that little part of the plan didn't pan out.
Here's the fog spilling out over the sidewalk. You can see that it's certainly drifting along the ground. This was a slow moment, you can see the horde across the street.
A close-up shot of the ghosts. Unfortunately you can see the strap we used to kickstart them in that shot. Eve was concerned everyone would focus on the complicated mobile apparatus, but I think it disappeared into the dark rather well.
The tombstones were lit with blacklights. You can see the fog delivery (actually, borrowed dryer) hose there in the background. Normally I woulda tried harder to hide it, but like I said, things got a bit crazy this year.
Cyclops jack-o-lantern by Ken
Another tombstone detail. Nobody gets tired of the "told you I was sick" gag.
Some people said our tombstones were a downer. Sigh. Can't win, can we?
Dead pirate jack-o-lantern by Ken
Dead jack-o-lantern by Elias
Jack-o-lantern by Julian
Jack-o-lantern by Elias
Yes, I killed true love. Hmm. That heart needs a big crack in it...
Jack-o-lantern by Lucy
Jack-o-lantern by Eve
Jack-o-lantern by Julian
Aah the fog. What an important aspect of the whole thing it is. Next year we're going for more blacklight stuff - stay tuned!
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