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Neat Homebrew Halloween Tech?
aibrahim asks: "I just saw a proton pack (alternate site) a friend has built. It made me wonder what other neat high tech things the Slashdot crowd might be brewing up for the coming holidays. What I am really after is stuff that one of you made, better yet would be diagrams or explanations of how you made it. Doesn't have to be a costume item, anything interesting that fits the season would do." This is a follow-up to the earlier
article. So what are you dressing up as for Halloween, and how do you plan on making your costume interesting?
1. Get a knife
2. Cut yourself with it
3. Profit! (or die)
This is what I am going as for Halloween. I figure it will scare the hell outta anybody.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
About 4 years ago (I was in 7th grade), I made a Borg costume. I went to Radio Shack and got a bunch of LED's, wired them to a switch and a some C batteries, and a switch, taped the to a black turtle neck and sweat pants. I took one of those black face masks (for skiing I think) and added a Borg eye attachment, consisting of a jumbo LED, wine cork, and drinking straw.
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
There are these two NASA engineers that live near me. They take their two adjacent houses and make one huge halloween scene outside. It was the first time in my <sniff> 17 years that I have ever seen VAX at work. THey had computer screens set up with wierd fonts, dry ice, cool lighting, and a hell of a lot of various 'shock' items. Occasionally, spaghetti would come shooting out over the roof, it was awsome.
In the 'off' season, they have an A scale train that spans their two houses.
Use this, make a haunted house if you have time, and dress up too.
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It ended up being very interesting holloween music, it still makes me shiver.
some other musical glasses links: 1 2 3
I'm going as a blowfish. For the spikes, I hacked up some large foam cones from a craft store, carved the pieces into spike-shapes, and used a file on them to get them smooth. I'll spray-paint them yellow, then use skin glue from a costume store to affix them to my yellow-painted face and the yellow bathing cap I'll have over my long hair (yes, I am female).
Proper dress? Oh, probably bluejeans and a blue turtleneck (simulated water)... or maybe this. Cripes, I love Halloween... what other day of the year do you have a chance to dress up as Puffy without a free trip to the mental asylum?
Get yourself a green t-shirt, a grey sweatshirt, some Robitussin and go as Ellen Feiss.
I don't really care about people's costumes. I want to know more about your Halloween _projects_. What cheap, creative ways are you using to decorate your house?
Here's an easy way to haunt up your front porch for less then $25. The neighborhood kids love it.
Last halloween I bought 10 pounds of dry ice from a local industrial chemical supply store for about $10. I placed the dry ice in a cheap black 5 gallon "witches cauldron", which I got from the local Haloween store.
To create the fog, I simply placed the ice in the cauldron, and periodically added warm water when I saw trick-or-treaters. The warm water melts the ice, and you get fog.
The dry-ice provided enough fog rolling down my front steps to freak out the neighborhood kids. This fog lasted approximately 4 hours.
For added effect, I placed a couple of those green and red glow sticks inside the cauldron (Since glow sticks glow less when cold, I placed the sticks on a pedestal above the cold ice and water), and added some reflective alluminum foil to enhance the glow.
As an added effect, I replaced my porch light with a black light, and added a bunch of those green-spiderwebs from the halloween store.
This gave the whole porch a nice eerie glow, especially with the green-glow eminating from the cauldron. The fog trickling down the stairs is a great and cheap effect, especially with flickering candle light from the jack-o-lanterns.
Whole cost of this operation, including dry ice $1 a pound), cauldron ($5 at the drug store), black light ($2 at hardware store), glow sticks ($2 each), spiderwebs ($3 a pack), pumpkins ($3 each) was probably $25. I'm going to do the same thing this year.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
There's a whole homebrew Halloween subculture out there.
Here's a great Halloween Project List with diagrams and everything.
Some of the projects cheap, easy and can be done in an hour (and you still have a few days left).
Other projects are more involved, like building a IR motion detector to detect trick-or-treaters and set off some effect (like a fog machine) further up the path, the famous flying crank ghost projects, glowing ghosts, you name it. I mean, come on, haven't you always wanted to build your own electric arc (jacobs ladder)" that you see in Frankenstein's Labratory???
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
For controlled environments (i.e., haunted houses) the head-on-a-platter gimmick is hard to beat for great reactions from the kids (and some parents!)
Basically, you get a thin aluminum serving platter, the throwaway kind, and cut a neck-sized hole in the center (tape the edge with transparent tape to avoid cuts). Cut one slit from outer edge to the hole. You can easily bend the platter open to put it on someone, then fold it back flat and tape up the slit.
Then get a board and cut a square notch into one of the long sides, about the middle. Put the board across some sawhorses. The person with the platter sits comfortably in a chair below table level, with the platter appearing to rest on the table. Throw a tablecloth over the whole thing and arrange eyeballs, worms, or whatever on the table.
If you're the head, keep your eyes closed until someone is nearby and speculating about whether you're real or not. Then pop open your eyes wide and scream as if just noticing you have no body.
When we did this one year, we picked up a ton of candy off the floor from kids who didn't stop to check what they'd lost! evil laugh
Your costume idea sounded pretty cool, and got me thinking about a more advanced version - you could have a loose bag wrapped around your whole body with lightweight spikes all over it, that would dangle along the costume.
Inside the bag, you would be wearing a backpack with a powerful vaccuum that could instantly inflate the bag, also make the spikes go straight out at the same time! What a great load of fun THAT costume would be, though I'll bet at a party you'd end up breaking something around you eventually, or at least spill a few people's drinks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Be Robot Frank
All things in moderation; including moderation
The best bit I ever saw as done by a neighbor when I lived at my old house. He got a big cast iron cauldron, filled it with candy and put it in front of the house. Next to it he put a stuffed scarecrow in a chair. You know the type, old shirt and pants stuffed with straw, old gloves, plastic pumpkin head and an old floppy straw hat. Next to the cauldron was a sign that read, "Sorry Kids, We had to go out of town. Enjoy the candy!"
Now the trick was, the scarecrow wasn't what it seemed, it was actually my neighbor inside some oversized clothes stufed with straw, newspapers, etc. He sat there motionless, arms and fingers askew for a couple of hours and waited.
When smaller kids came up, usually with their parents, he'd do nothing. But when some of the older "punks" came up, thinking it was easy pickings and they'd just take the whole thing, he's jump up screaming, "I'm gonna eat your face and knaw your bones!"
They'd run off screaming and more than a few would literally 'wet' themselves. One even dropped to the ground and started screaming for Jesus to save him.
I and some of the other neighbors sat in the house in the dark with his wife, drank beer and watched the fun.
Now here's the funniest part. Late in the evening a little girl and her mother came up to the house. The mother prodded the little girl, dressed as a princess, to go up and get some candy. The girl cautiously crept up to the cauldron and reached in, never taking her wide-open eyes off the "scarecrow". She took a couple of small handfuls of candy and ran back to her mother.
Half-way back to the sidewalk she remembered her manners. She turned back to the scarecrow and waved saying, "Thank you, mister scarecrow!"
Our neighbor waved back saying, "You're welcome!"
The little girl was unfazed, but the mother let out a scream that could probably be heard for blocks.
In the house, we couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.
Now one of the best costumes I ever saw was done by a college roommate. He put a piece of gauze over one eye, then covered it with extra-thick, congealing, red gelatin, which hardened on his face. Then he stuck a plastic eyeball on his cheek with more gelatin. some frayed, yellow, nylon cord was dipped in the gelatin to look like an optic nerve and pasted between the plastic eye and his eye socket. (I helped him get things placed just so.) A pair of sunglasses with one lens broken out and pieces of the lens stuck in the gelatin around the eye completed the effect.
More gelatin (green this time) on the side of his head was sculpted to look like an oozing head wound.
For the rest of his costume he put on an old, tattered, overcoat, some hideously ugly, green, monster-like, rubber gloves and carried a large plastic knife.
He took 3rd in a contest held by a local bar. He lost to a thin, blonde girl who had painted herself white with black lips and black eyeliner wearing a white wispy gown and a muscle-bound guy dressed as Rambo whose costume consisted of a pair of torn jeans, a bandanna and a kid-sized plastic gun.
First and second place got $250 and $100 cash respectively, 3rd place got a $10 gift certificate to the restaraunt next to the bar. Found out later the ghostly girl was the bar owner's niece and Rambo was his cousin. After that, my roommate never really bothered to do much for Halloween.
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I feel at least a little capable of discussing this, since I've been haunting my house for 3 years now. The key to good haunting, IMHO, is to never use store-bought things unmodified. It doesn't take much. I do break this rule in the website I reference above, since it doesn't have this year's pictures on it yet. Look for trends; effects that used to cost a lot of money are getting cheap and easy, like fog machines (a fog chiller is a must), fake flames (replace the cloth part, the default ones are terrible). These things are slowly becoming mainstream --unfortunately, since people can spot a store-bought effect much more easily, but fortunately because they are much more available and affordable.
I dislike moving props. They almost always look fake and mechanical unless you do a really good job. The only one I have is the Flying Crank Ghost mentioned above, that I built from a windshield wiper motor and various hardware. This is mounted in my balcony, running from below with fishing line so that none of the mechanism is visible. My personal goal is to have a mostly static setup with such a terrifying ambiance that trick-or-treaters refuse to get their candy.
Some quick tips:
* Know your location -- some things work well where others wouldn't. I've got a cheap winged-skull clock that fits perfectly in a space on my balcony; it wouldn't work in a lot of houses.
* Skulls, skulls, skulls -- possibly the best decorating element ever. Buy them by the dozen. I like Bucky skulls myself. Be creative. Use gel stains to age them, melt candles on them, stick spikes through them, layer lunchmeats on them for parties.
* Thunder and lightning machines are great. Hook up some spotlights and a thunder cd with some cheap subwoofers and you'll get everyone's attention.
* Ignore the infamous ten-foot rule. TOTs get really close to your props, make them believable from inches away.
I've slacked off a little this year, I still have some things left to construct. Use the monsterlist referenced above, it's a lifesaver. Join Halloween-L (www.wildrice.com/halloween-l to sign up) for lots of great tips. Be creative, work with what you have available.
Happy hauntings, and may all your dreams be nightmares
-SablKnight
I went to a costume party the other night as a software pirate. I wore traditional pirate garb but was carrying a canvas bag labeled "w4r3z". The bag was full of CDs labeled "Photoshop 7", "Windows XP Professional", "Mac OS X 10.2", "Windows 2000 Server" and so on. I then let people at the party help themselves.
I'm still waiting for the responses from people when they find out that these CDs are all identical Debian install discs.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.