A Quick Halloween Recap

There are good days and then there are GREAT days. The Pumpkin Gods definitely looked down upon us in abundant favor this year, and we are grateful!

To say that we had a great Halloween would be a massive understatement. Everything fell into place perfectly this past Sunday night, and we had one of our best trick-or-treats in many years. The biggest factor, the weather, cooperated fully giving us warm and dry temperatures with absolutely ZERO wind. That allowed us the best fog effects we've EVER had. 

Plumes of chilled fog rolled through the cemetery, hanging in the motionless air, and eventually spreading throughout the yard, spilling out into the street and creeping across to the neighbors' houses. I'm still in awe of how good it looked.

Add to that, every prop worked flawlessly, every light was lit, every jack-o-lantern was illuminated. And as darkness came, every scene truly came to life with lighting that I actually had time to adjust and perfect days before.

The days of Highbury Cemetery being a one-day-only show are over. Setting up at least a week in advance gives me the time to adjust, tweak, and perfect until my hypercritical self is content with the final show.

I have a ton of photos yet to go through, so for now I'm only dropping one teaser photo above. The newest members of the Highbury Cemetery family, my 3 new sheet ghosts, positioned up front and bathed in warm lighting while still casting dark shadows.

Check back tomorrow for the full gallery. I'm really proud of this year's display and I can't wait to show off all the photos.

  

Blade Runner 2049 and The Art of the Haunt

Last night I got a chance to briefly step away from all things Halloween when Mrs. Highbury and I went to see Blade Runner 2049. This was quite a treat because the last film I actually saw in the theater was Rogue One!

I won't go into any spoilers or even a full review, but I will say that I ABSOLUTELY loved it. As I was watching the visually gorgeous film, my brain began to think back to Halloween, and more specifically, my yard haunt display.

As the film played, I immediately noticed the attention that color played in every single shot. And because of the overarching dystopian feel of the film, it relied on bold, monotone swatches of muted earthy tones throughout. Especially during the scenes in Las Vegas. The sepia and orange was really blown out, giving it an incredibly harsh, arid feel. Does that color palette remind you of anything?

These scenes got me thinking about haunt displays in general, and how sometimes too many colors can actually work against you. And I think I'm a bit guilty of it, as well. Everything has a different spotlight color and before you know it, you actually have a Christmas display. Yuck. With all of theses colors competing for attention, the display loses a main focal point and everything becomes a jumbled mess.

This idea of color was carried out in other scenes, too.

Even with the scenes using cool colors, the palette was kept to a minimum, ensuring a dark, uneasy feel. The sparse use of highlight colors and an abundance of shadow worked incredibly well to produce a very specific feeling.

It's something that I am now going to explore more thoroughly in my haunt display. Pull back all of those competing spotlight colors and use the dark, shadow areas more prominently. I'm hoping that with less color, I may be able to actually evoke more atmosphere. This is something I hope to develop further and write more about this season.


Sound

The true effectiveness of Blade Runner 2049 was the union of two elements. The incredibly stylized, minimally-colored visuals plus an equally effective, minimal soundtrack to support them.

An effective haunt soundtrack is something that I have been exploring for some time now, as evidenced by how many music-based posts I have here. When I first began doing a yard haunt, I chose an old novelty Halloween cassette full of the standard, silly screams, moans and howls, and various rattles, clanks, jangles and skreetches.

But as my musical tastes continued to develop and evolve, I settled on the dark ambient genre to use in my display. It has an eerie, grating, uneasy feel about each track, and when it was paired with the visuals in the display, it works perfectly in the scene setting.

I really believe that the audio portion should support the visuals from behind, enhancing the look, and more importantly feel, of the display. With the old cassette, instantly recognizable sounds and vocals pulled the attention from the imagery to that sound effect. With dark ambient, you have a continuous sound effect that never jumps out and pulls the attention away. It supports and enhances the creepiness of the display and adds to the overall tension that we as haunters strive for.

The same idea was used in Blade Runner 2049. Some epic synthesizer notes combined with grading, somewhat industrial sounds and primal, tribal drum beats combine to really punch up the uneasy feeling of those beautifully colored scenes.

I have already downloaded the full soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch, and while I don't plan on using it in my display, I do tend to use it as an important source of inspiration for effective use of sound and how it relates to visual display.

In specific regards to use of audio in my haunt display, I will be using Jeff Greinke's amazing dark ambient track from 1992, entitled, "The Moor." A completely creepy track on its own, but sits wonderfully behind the visuals in my cemetery display and enhances the uneasiness of the entire atmosphere. I will also add a few sparse, targeted sound effects in specific scene areas, but this track will be heard throughout the scene.

So there is my quick, personal take on the balance of sight and sound and its effect in Halloween haunt displays. Drop a comment below and let me know your take. 

If you haven't yet, I HIGHLY recommend you get out to see Blade Runner 2049, preferably in a full digital theater with a good surround-sound system, and immerse yourself in a complete feast for the eyes and ears for a couple of hours.

It's back to the standard Halloween grind for me, because as I glance at the old Halloween countdown calendar, we're down to just over 2 weeks to get it all done for the big night. I still have a few more projects to get done, along with a big announcement that I hope to share with everyone next week, as well as a slew of Halloween posts to get through! The sun is shining and the air is still warm in these parts, so it's time to get out to the garage and get some serious work done today. Everyone have a great October weekend!!

The Lights of the Cemetery, 2014

Last week, I shared my ambient audio track selections that made up the soundtrack to my yard haunt. Today, I'll share the other important piece of my display, my lighting setup. Lighting is something that I have really focused on over the past few years, and after continuous refinement, has really increased the visual punch of my yard haunt.

Be aware that there are a lot of different ways to get a great lighting effect, this is just the solution that I use in my yard haunt.

Here is a shot from this year's display. There is a warm color overtone throughout the display, with subtle, cool highlights for my tombstones and props. I'm pretty lucky, as the base for the warm overtone is actually provided by my city.

I'm fortunate enough to have a streetlight at the corner of my front yard that gives off a really nice yellow-orange light, perfect for Halloween. It's a bright light, too, so I use as much of that light as I can in my display.

The rich, warm light together with the big old oak tree provide the perfect base color for my display. It really sets up some nice highlights and stark shadows, providing an uneasy entry to the rest of the display. Streetlights further up the block also provide backlight to help carry the warm glow across the entire yard.

Below is a shot of the front yard without any of the Halloween display. You can really see in this photo how the yellow light illuminates the entire yard and gives the base needed to build in my color highlights.

Usually, I let this light illuminate my secondary props, including the old wooden crosses in my potter's field. These crosses are on the far left side of my display. The flat light gives them a slight glow, but also keeps them in the background, framing the main tombstones in the center of the display.

These wooden crosses and jack-o-lanterns are on the far right side of the display. The flat lighting here achieves the same thing, forming the opposite end of the display.

With the yellow-orange glow from the streetlights set, I then build my colors from there. I start with some flood lighting for the front of my house. A big portion of my haunt is contained in my front porch, so I want to make sure that the house is included as part of the display. I use an outdoor floodlamp with a red holiday bulb to illuminate the front of the house. I also have a large Rhododendron, so I set the lamp at its base. With the light traveling up through the branches, some really nice shadows are projected. 

Here is the outdoor floodlamp and bulb that I use. The base of the lamp is a stake, so you can stick it right into the ground.

As an added effect for the house, I also picked up a large roll of transparent green plastic cellophane (from Pat Catan's) for the windows. I simply cut the pieces to fit the windows, doubled them up and taped the pieces to the inside of the window sills. When you turn on the lights inside the rooms, you get a really nice green glow outside. A nice subtle detail to complete the front of the house!

With the front of the house now lit and detailed, I can move to the tombstones in the display. I start with another outdoor floodlamp (like the one above), this time with a blue holiday bulb, and project it onto the front of the Highbury obelisk. This sets up as a strong swatch of cool color and becomes a center focus in the middle of the cemetery. And when the blue light wraps around the obelisk, it mixes with the red floodlamp behind it and casts a bit of a purple light.

The back row of tombstones, along with other important props throughout the yard, all get lit with standard 8.5" aluminum flood lights with colored light bulbs. I have about five or six of the flood lamps and I insert an array of bulb colors for each, depending on what prop it will be used for. I have a nice collection of green, red, orange and blue bulbs to use for accent lighting on the props.

A blue light was used to illuminate the Vodoun Wayfinder prop. I ended up setting the light to the side of the prop and glancing the light across the front of it instead of a straight-on highlight. I think it worked well and gave the prop a much creepier look in the indirect light.

And I set up an orange bulb to highlight my talking cemetery greeter at the base of the driveway. I positioned the light on the ground and then aimed the light straight on so that it would also illuminate the wooden crosses in front of it.

I also use these lights for the front porch crypt. I went with cold blue and green colors only (outside of the orange accent color above the corpse in the coffin and a grouping of LED candles), as I wanted the room to be a stark contrast to the bold colors of the cemetery. I wanted to keep the light low and gently illuminate the thick fog that was in the room.

Once all of the prop accent flood lighting was taken care of, I could then move to the most important lighting - the front row of tombstones. This is the main focus in the entire display, so I wanted to use the boldest accents of color to draw the eye in.

And four years ago, I found a great solution. I found a set of cheap LED bulbs from an eBay seller in Hong Kong. They came in a set of five, but the really great part is that it also came with a controller for the bulbs. You can actually point the controller at the bulb and pick one of 16 different colors for the bulb to display.

The bulbs screw right into a standard 5.5" aluminum flood lamp (that I painted flat black), and I now set up a row of five, all pointed at the fronts of tombstones. With the color controller, I can set up any number of color combinations, although I tend to choose cool colors to really pop the stones' contrast. The bulbs cast an intense beam of color and really highlight whatever they are cast upon. The light even travels beyond the tombstones and mixes with other accent lighting behind it to create new color mixes throughout the display.

These bulbs are really what took my display to the next level and I use them for everything. Whenever I do a lighted shot for showing off my new props, I set up one of these bulbs for the color lighting. I can't recommend these bulbs enough!

With a quick eBay search, you can find plenty of these bulbs for sale!! 


And that's it! I hope that with this information, I showed you the fun and importance of a good lighting set up and that with the solutions that I use in my display, also showed you that it can be done on a cheap budget. Happy Haunting!  Only 339 days until Halloween!!