We are now in the process of planning a new show sort of like last years "Nighttime Spectacular". This years has the same name, just a brand new show.
Here is a diagram from the planning of a cool new piece that will show up. (There is more info on the actual drawn diagrams, but we can't tell you everything)
This show is going to include original animations, a bright amazing light show, and fireworks (of course). More info coming soon.
So this year will be our third year haunting up our yard, house and our haunted house (garage).
The haunted house is in the garage.
This year I stepped up my game with lighting outside and making everything look even better outside, because you know what if a crazy kid is to scared of the actual haunt, ya know?
This was a test we did using some lights outside on trees. (the white lines are not in real life, just and effect)
With EVERY haunt I believe you need a graveyard, we do have a graveyard but do not put it up until Halloween day or sometimes Halloween eve!
These are Diagrams of the outside of the house, just for your reference,
You will see, in these pictures, the "Witch" so this year I got a coupon to Party City and I bought a hanging witch. It's not like the awesomely GIANT hanging props but it still is pretty cool!
I REALLY like adding lighting and sound to the haunt because I do a lot of that as hobbies which includes DJing and making videos, lots of videos. So I use a lot of different lights in the haunt/outside including par cans, LED par cans, outdoor flood lights, lighting gels (on top of lights) and SO many more! So then another things is audio for audio I usually use computer speakers, iPod Speakers, wireless speakers, and some of my DJ speakers that I tend to use outside.
Funny Story, so last haunt season, when I was building in like beginning of October, I heard a big loud pop then looked over and my amp to a DJ speaker was smoking. Thankfully I had the garage door open so I just ran it outside and just let it sit out there. I still have the speaker just not the amp.
:(
Each year I start in about the beginning of September starting to post pictures on my personal Instagram and trying to "advertise" the haunt so that I can get some people I know to help me or even just come!
Here are a couple ads I made for Instagram and stuffs~
The ads are pretty easy to make. You could make some yourself! I take the pictures myself sometimes at night I will take something outside and set up a light and take a pic, that was the case with the reaper in the top right hand corner. Then I will edit it and take it into photoshop. If you can't get Photoshop try Paint.net or Gimp. I have used both and still use them sometimes and there basically photoshop just a little more to get used too.
I make all the ads except for one thing, the reaper. Earlier this year in June, I decided I wanted a new tradition that involved a new logo! I found an awesome designer who made this for me for a great cost , I also bought a copyright agreement just to be safe, ya know what I mean? So this is the whole thing of what he made me, but I cut it down because I liked it better a little smaller with the orange circle. (I watermarked it, just to keep it safe you thieves)
The detail is awesome and I really am pleased with it, hopefully we add a new character each year! Meet all the characters from all years: Meet the Characters *UPDATE: WE'RE GETTING A NEW MASCOT FOR THIS YEAR! CHECK BACK IN APRIL OR MAY TO CHECK IT OUT!
Next is the absolute hardest part in the process, IDEAS! This part takes us weeks, sometimes even maybe a month. This is wear we have to come up with ideas and figure out exactly how to go after the haunt this year. In 2015 we didn't do so well with this. We never really came up with ideas for all the rooms. We really only had ideas for 2/3 rooms and then just hung stuff in the first room and blew a lot of smoke, I mean a lot as in I am pretty sure I broke a fog machine. Ya, that much.
Here are some of the maps we drew to try and come up with ideas:
This one I really wanted to do but couldn't get a farm or person to supply the cornstalks.
Really we had the most problems trying to come up with an idea for the 1st/2nd room. We knew we wanted the 2nd half to be a graveyard. Check. Then we thought we could do the other half 1 room, so instead of 4 rooms like the past we could just do 2. But, we couldn't come up with any ideas for the first half so it ended up being 2 rooms instead of 1 long room.
This section is pretty self explanatory, we had to turn our drawing into a reality. We take many pictures of this part but I have a couple and a timelapse that we took when laying down the mulch in the graveyard.
The hardest room to build this year was definitely the graveyard. We drew out what we wanted but of course that is not how it came out:
In the end it came out that we only had one side with tombstones and stuff and then one side where people walked through. We actually put mulch down on the graveyard side. Then we needed to figure out some sort of fence. We decided to build one. Here are some pics of building the fence:
Painting the dowels before they were put into the sand buckets.
Here is the finished product, we made 3 or 4 and attached rope to them with twist ties.
Then we had to put down mulch filling it in:
My favorite! I am a DJ and do a lot of stuff on the computer like motion graphics, graphics, photography, that kind of stuff, so I like doing all of this type of stuff a lot! It's one of my favorite parts! I talked about Lighting and a little sound in the Outside section. I'll go into depth here.
Sound
Sound is a huge part in a haunt, it's one of the things where if you hear a loud bang or roar you expect to see where it came from. So if you have a loud, I mean really loud, sound effect of a roar being played right near peoples ears while they are walking through then there going to expect to find where it came from. Maybe you play a muffled roar at the beginning and then it keeps happening but louder and louder. That would freak me out because I would be expecting to see the creature that it's coming from. Maybe you don't have Sound Effects but you just play creepy music. This year I had no music playing on the inside of the haunt but I had the Haunted Mansion Singing Busts music playing but it wasn't that clear in most parts of the haunt until you got right near those guys. I had a large PA speaker near the outside screen playing the sounds from the Digital Effects. Then we had outside the haunt on the driveway another large PA speaker playing music, you know just the standard Halloween party hits. Here is a playlist to the music played outside the haunt on the driveway on Spotify:spoti.fi/1RSC8Lo
Lighting
I think I pretty much covered all of the lighting stuff outside of the haunt in Outside. Inside the haunt we used a fire and ice light in the first room. Then in the second room we had 3 strobes hanging from the ceiling and a bendy light from ikea, HERE except ours had a clamp on the end, with a green gel pointing on the main prop in that room. In the graveyard we used little battery clip lights, HERE and HERE, there super easy and cheap. On some I just left them white and then others I put gels on. I believe that there was also a black light in there too.
Special FX
Fog is a given. We had 2 fog machines in the haunt and 1 outside in the front yard graveyard. Then I had strobes, everywhere. I had one of the water misters in a cauldron outside. The biggest special effect was the projectors. We had projection outside on a giant 8 foot screen that we built.
This the screen hanging outside during the day. Took me 2 hours to hang. Scary.
Then this is a picture of it on Halloween Night in Action.
This section might be the most important. You need to take pictures and video. They might not look as good as the really professional ones taken with big cameras, they could be, or you could pull out your phone and take them. I used my Cannon DSLR and went out when everyone was gone and took pictures of everything. I used a technique called long exposure which you need to have a tripod for. Check out my pics below:
Thanks for checking out the Behind Scarecourt 2015 I am going to do this every year so check back in November of 2016! I will add things periodically to this post too, so check back.
