Halloween Fun

At Robot Entertainment we love working on things that are fun and entertaining. And not just at work. With Halloween falling on a Saturday this year the extra time to prepare for the event gave my family the opportunity to do more than just hand out candy. We decided to decorate the front lawn in a manner designed to provide a spooky atmosphere for our visiting Trick-or-Treat’ers. This is something that I have wanted to do for a couple of years but never had the time to fully implement my vision. I wanted something that provided a nice Halloween vibe but was easy to set up and take down.

The quest for our Halloween lawn display actually started two years ago. This is when I created a spooky sound effects loop. It was made up of scary wind, rain, thunder and miscellaneous ghoulish sounds. With only this soundtrack playing in the front yard that year, many young candy seekers would stop at the property line and think twice before approaching the house. It was very cool and creepy but it needed a visual effect to really sell it. We needed lightening. So last year I began to work on building a lightening simulator.

Many seasonal Halloween stores sell strobe lights as lightening simulators. If you’ve ever seen a strobe light you know that their rhythmic flashing does not really look like lightening. Real lightening flashes have an organic feel to them with a very random flash pattern. So I began to experiment with some electronic circuits that could emulate lightening. I got the circuit flashing an LED in a way that reminded me of lightening. Then I connected it to a relay that could control 120VAC flood lights. This would allow me to control a lot of bulbs and really light up the front of the house with “lightening” flashes.

2008 turned out to be a very busy year so I was not able to finish the construction of the lightening simulator. The demands of work and family took precedence over the Halloween preparations so those plans were put on hold. But we planned to get’em next year. And we did.

With Halloween 2009 approaching my wife Tammy and I began to discuss what we wanted to do for decorations with our niece Jennifer who is staying with us for a few months. Tammy and Jennifer get really excited about any kind of seasonal decorations. And when those decorations have the potential to frighten children, well, let’s just say that their excitement approaches the realm of the giddy. So we decided to create a graveyard scene in the front yard.

We bought a bunch of very inexpensive tombstones at the Halloween store. While these Styrofoam stones look fairly real at a distance, they are not visible at night. Our design team decided that having the graveyard illuminated by black lights would add a nice level of creepiness to the display. So we got some florescent paint and Jennifer used her mad art skills to enhance the tombstones by adding what would become glowing accents. She also used liquid laundry detergent to paint the non-florescent colored parts so that they would glow too. Did you know that most laundry detergents will glow under black light due to the fabric brightening agents they contain? Have you even seen your blue jeans glow in black light? That’s why they do that. Here’s a photo of a couple of the tombstones glowing in black light.

So we had our graveyard. We also picked up a zombie (well… half a zombie) that was set up to appear to be rising up from the ground. Jennifer used her liquid Tide trick on him too. A test set up we performed on Friday night with the black light proved successful. Adding a 1000 Watt automatic fog machine to the back of the cemetery would hopefully provide some ground clinging mist to creep through the tombstones. Here is a photo of the display just before dark so you can see how cool the creeping fog looks.

Thankfully the weather was perfect. Even the slightest breeze would have ruined the mist effect. It was so calm that night that the fog we produced actually was creeping down the lawn and into the street for about a block. It made the entire area look very Halloween-ish. Now I just needed to finish the electronic effects.

All the electronics for the lightening simulator had been completed the year before. All that was left was to mount the electronics inside a box and mount the flood lights to the outside of the same box in order to make a self-contained lightening simulator. The completed lightening simulator was tested and everyone was very happy with the results. I was surprised at how much light was being produced with only two security grade flood lights. I was able to catch one of the flashes in this photo.

One of the effects we had talked about for our graveyard scene was evil demon eyes that would peer out at the visitors from the bushes. Having built a few blinking LED circuits for various reasons in the past I knew that this would be a snap. So I quickly built a prototype circuit that would light up two red LEDs and then “blink” them periodically. Once I was happy with the blink frequency I soldered up a number of these circuits with self-contained power sources so we could hang them randomly throughout the bushes behind the cemetery. This ended up being a really scary effect that the photos below just don’t do justice to.

For those interested in hobby electronics, here are a few “behind-the-scenes” photos of the home-made effects; the lightening simulator and the blinking demon eyes.

Everything came together nicely and we were all quite happy with the results. It took my niece Jennifer more time to hang spider webs on the front porch than it did to set up and take down the entire graveyard. We had so much fun working on the Halloween display and received so much positive feedback for our efforts that we will probably continue the family tradition in the future. Besides all the fun we had building the display, watching the reactions of the Trick-or-Treat’ers was priceless.

It will be fun coming up with things to add to the display each year. Perhaps robot zombies?

Electronically yours,

Royster