[Nephilim]

I now officially have geek cred - my Halloween prop-building site was featured on both BoingBoing and MAKE today.

Halloween is quickly approaching, and we're in the final stages of preparation, after four months of work. Our home haunt, "Carnival of Souls," has come a long way since I first started decorating our front yard for Halloween - it's looking like we'll have a staff of twenty (or maybe more) volunteers working seven different spooky attractions this year, three of them brand new for 2005. People are travelling from Arizona, Oklahoma, and Virginia to help out. I'm really fortunate to have a group of people who are willing to generously donate man-hours and moola to help me bring this vision to life for the local youth (and young-at-heart).

I'll be posting photos to my site in early November if you want to see how it all turned out.

Happy Halloween, everybody. Go scare the crap out of a neighbor kid for me on the 31st.
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[Verious]

That's very cool.

I usually go to my parent's house for Halloween. My mother goes way overboard with a large Halloween display, a "Hallow-Wheel of Fortune" that the trick-or-treaters spin to see what kind of candy they get, grave markers, and some other attractions; including, "shake the dead man's hand" (basically a rubber glove filled with water and then frozen), "touch the brain" (made from some secret recipe mainly based on Jello and a brain mold), a fortune teller, and more. This year she is adding some sort of new attraction in the garage. We usually get around 300 - 400 trick-or-treaters depending on the weather and day of the week Halloween falls on.

We usually have 5 - 7 people working to pull it off and she usually does stuff that tends to be more fun than scary, but the kids like it.

The previous Hallow-Wheel had twelve spaces the spinner could land on, which makes it pretty exciting for the kids; however, I've been working on a new Hallow-Wheel, which has an additional thirteenth space labeled "Lose a piece of candy". It should make things more interesting. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have the spinner mechanism completed in time for this year's festivities. The new wheel is made from a piece of plexiglass that was painted from the back, which gives it a very professional appearance and the spinner will light up LED lights as it spins around.

[DeveloperX]

Verious:

Holy crap! That's awesome! :D
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[Nephilim]

Verious, that wheel sounds cool! I bet the ToT's love that. You should post a how-to on how to make your wheel attraction, especially the bit about how you make the LED's light up. There are lots of people out there who would like to make something like that for next year's Halloween fun, including me.

We had over twenty people at our house today, working on various projects for this year's show, from about 10am to 10pm. The big thing we did today was erect the "Blackwood Mausoleum." Here's a shot of the exterior:



And here's an interior shot showing the crypt doors that visitors will be opening and reaching into to get their prizes:



(These shots were taken with the flash camera, so it washes things out a bit - the actual mausoleum is a lot creepier and dim than these photos. We even have subtle LED-based light effects on the corpses inside those crypts.)

More photos are available in my flickr set.
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[Nephilim]

Whew! "Carnival of Souls 2005" was a success this year. We scared and entertained a *lot* of people - we estimate we had somewhere between 700 and 800 people come out to our house to have some spooky fun. We had to go on three candy runs before the evening was through.

The Blackwood Mausoleum (shown above) was a huge hit with both kids and adults, and many of our visitors braved it. Their screams would stop the action on the midway fairly regularly. The Magic Mirror was a staple hit, and the "Madame Sarita's Spirit Parlour" black light puppet show got rave reviews from the kids. The only thing that really went wrong was the animatronic pirate skull show, which pooped out about halfway through the evening.

All told, we had 25 volunteers working the show, and if even one of them wasn't there, we would have had to start closing down attractions. I'm really lucky to have so many friends and fellow visionaries who are willing to put so much personal time and expense into helping me make this Halloween event a reality. They're already talking about how we'll improve things for next year; after all, we only have 364 days left...
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[Adam]

Great stuff.
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[Nephilim]

There's some video and Halloween night photos up on the web site now that can do a better job of showing what the Blackwood Mausoleum attraction looked like and how it worked.

Blackwood Mausoleum

I've still got more photos to upload and add to the pages, so you may see it change a bit over the next few days, but the Quicktime video is up, which is the main thing.
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