All Hallow's Eve(Adventures of...)

As I've said before the wife and I really enjoy Halloween. This year has seen us make the purchase of two 1000 watt fog machines to help with our Halloween walkway we have every year. One is a VEI(Low end Chauvet?) and the other is a Fitco fog machine from Spirit of Halloween. Trying a couple different types just to see what, if any differences there are. Managed to get the two stores to compete with each other and they both came down in price and threw in a gallon jug of fluid. Funny thing is the craft store my wife works at carries the glycerin :D

So now with our 400watt manual Fog machine I have two timed machines. Last year I put up a tarp over the sidewalk to help keep in the fog from the small machine and everybody loved it! Now we are having the Trick-or-Treaters walk around a grave yard setting I've set by the sidewalk before going through the tunnel again. I've been planning on using some snow fencing to keep foot traffic from going to the back yard but my mother gave me a large arch and some ground breakers to help keep with the spooky feel.

Attachment 1856

Hope to get some video of the action this year since we've always been to busy with the action the past years to get pictures before. Last year had over 600 people stop by and we hope to have more this year!

We used to do some thing for the trick or treaters years ago but now we don't get any at all. My wife buys 1 bag of candy and we end up eating it ourselves.

In the beginning I wasn't sure if we would get many people due to the fact parents are pretty mistrustful. When we first started the mall in town and the senior care center were the only areas that set up for large numbers of people to go. Now several haunted houses have started in town. Jaycees have done one for a few years,the College started one this year, and one private is also starting up.

For our own neighborhood the attitude has been very positive. A couple houses actually allow people through, but most just decorate and greet the people who knock. We've been told before we started there would only be a few people from 6-8pm(stragglers from the Care Center up the hill) then nothing. Now we officially open the gate at 6 but we give candy to those coming out of school(3:30) up until the candy runs out, normally 9-10. Afterwards we take those that help out to dinner, though now that the rail road killed their contract with a few of the restaurants,so now they close at 12am, I may have to just do a back yard BBQ instead.

Few of the items we will be "entertaining" the Trick-or-Treaters with:
Attachment 1859http://www.thehorrordome.com/images/...il/tb37038.jpghttp://partycity1.scene7.com/is/imag...resmode=sharp2http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...L._SL1500_.jpg

Candy comes today! Or at least the tracker from Oriental Trading is saying that...lol! :D

Hope it lasts till All Hallows Eve!

ORANGE CANDY STRAWS One bag of 240
GHOST JUICE LIQUID CANDY PACKS Two bags of 12
GUMMY SEVERED FINGERS Two bags of 42
TMNT CANDY MIX Two bags of 52
EYEBALL SWEET CREAMS One bag of 108
CREEPY CRAWLY CANDY ASSORTMENT One box of 130
EYEBALL GUMMY Two bags of 46

Over 780 pieces...plus or minus the "taste testing" that occurred after I opened the box. ;) Kids should be pretty happy to stop by, even with all the scares in store for them :D

making me hungry, but i'll pass on the severed fingers...

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Originally Posted by John P. Myers

making me hungry, but i'll pass on the severed fingers...

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Wife was disappointed that they didn't offer the "Flesh Fries" we've ordered from them in the past. We'll get some chocolate candy locally but we love to offer the larger gummy pieces. Tried to get the wife to buy locally at first but the amount of candy we purchased would have easily cost three times the amount plus the local gummy offerings are very small packs (like three tiny pieces) of indistinguishable items(appropriately called Boogers).

Wishful thinking for next year to accompany the Grave Yard Arch we received this year from my mother.
http://wegli.com/wp-content/uploads/...e-carriage.jpg

Day before yesterday we had some gusts up to 30mph and I had an idea for the yard. The wife was kind enough to help me throw some pallet wrapping plastic on the fence so that the wind could rip through it and it turned out rather well. Now not only do I have some cushion for people to bounce off of instead of hitting the fence proper it looks like spiders have infested the fence line. Just have to get some pipe cleaners to make up some small spiders and fill up our big leave bag spider and make it look like its climbing the fence with its "children".

Hope to get the grave yard fence line set up on Thursday and maybe get the grave props up if it doesn't look to be too windy. Friday during the day I'll get the props set up as well as the tunnel and get some pictures during the day. Depending if the video is any good I'll try and get some of it uploaded to share after Friday's festivities get done.

Tonight we have a small group going through the spook houses in town. Hope to have fun and get some more ideas for next year!

Attachment 1864

I hope all had and fun and safe All Hallows Eve!

In Addition to our tunnel we also set up a grave yard walk around with one 1000 Watt fog machine attached to a home made fog chiller. Music was provided by an IPOD radio transmitter for both the butcher shop and grave yard. A blow up Arch blocked by additional grave markers covered another 1000 Watt fog machine and led light.

Black lights lit up our porch and “Butcher Shop” and allowed us to display our “wares”. After visitors said the magic words and received their candy the tunnel had a 400 watt fog machine and multiple home made and store purchased items to scare visitors that could not stand jump scares.

Attachment 1865
Scene from our "Butcher shop"
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"Before" picture of the fog Chiller
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Fog Chiller inside
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This years "Fence walker"
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Wife and I

looks like you really get into it sarge, I would bet that fun was had by all.

Looks fun! I spend all of last week in bed with strep throat and still aint over it! My wife took our kids out and got some candy but we didn't get to do everything we wanted to do because of me being sick.

Just a bit of video from our event.

Me and the wife discussing an issue with the little 400 watt fogger. Fixed it just a bit ago, I didn't think it had a screen but there was one that the pump tried to drag through the hose.

Demonstration of the effects in the walkway.

A little bit boring demo of the grave yard effects.

Walk through of the set up.

Just a quick note: My knowledge on video isn't the greatest and these vids will show it. There isn't a lot of light in the videos so many may just get a lot of darkness like I did on my plasma tv and led computer monitor. The weird thing is I showed the videos to some other people on a cheap LED tv and it was like looking at an entirely new video with a lot of detail and the ability to see a lot more of the effects and props. After I figure out what to adjust to bring out those details I will try and get some better videos up.

sarge when u run out of fog fluid give this stuff ago
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Master-Fog-C...item4adf07008c

i have tried all different brands of fluid and this stuff hangs around the longest by far and works great outdoors

what did u use inside the fog chiller dry ice?

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Originally Posted by dave c

sarge when u run out of fog fluid give this stuff ago
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Master-Fog-C...item4adf07008c

i have tried all different brands of fluid and this stuff hangs around the longest by far and works great outdoors

what did u use inside the fog chiller dry ice?

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Just regular ice since it was still fairly warm out, I'm trying to get a hold of our gas supplier to see if they can acquire dry ice pellets(normally around 75 cents a pound). Past experience with dry ice blocks(locally over a dollar a pound) have a lot of powder when broken.

The fog machine behind the arch I still need to make a chiller for that but the effect was still pretty cool. That fog machine by itself pretty much fogged up the neighborhood :D.


I've seen some good reviews for that code six fluid but I'm hoping next year to make my own using a 10% distilled water: 90% propylene glycol mix. Of course it's just down to getting a good supply but I've got a year to do so :D

All and all it was a blast to do and I am looking forward to getting better at setting up year after year. Hopefully next year I will have some better video since a few friends have offered to actually walk around with a camera for us.

An edit of the original Walk through video. I found that Windows movie maker did not get rough enough with the video white balance to help me so I had to upload the raw footage to Youtube and use the editor there. I didn't really need to put too much into the balance but I'm still waiting on processing to see if artifact'ing is going to be an issue. If you try and view the video immediately it is still being processed by Youtube (52% done so another half an hour I hope).

Like I said I'm extremely new at the video editing game so I may try and see what I may have missed with the Microsoft software but if that isn't the case I may have to shell out a bit of cash on something that can actually do some post processing for me before I get it to Youtube. Any suggestions?


(90% done as of this edit!)

There are a lot of video editors that you can use without license and try them to see if they fit your proposes or not, usually they put a text for sometime saying it is the free version at the beginning or the end of the video.

Of course you must try and retry things till you have what you want, learning editing is a matter of being stuborn and never give up. You can try to download one (or more) of those on the list and try them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...iting_software

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Originally Posted by Duke of Buckingham

Of course you must try and retry things till you have what you want, learning editing is a matter of being stuborn and never give up. You can try to download one (or more) of those on the list and try them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...iting_software

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LOL, if being stubborn isn't the truth! I did take a look at the listing there and tried Lightworks. It's a little over my head in terms of use but I was able to get the video looking halfway decent without the artifacts killing the quality. As I get used to using the software I hope to be able to be a little more decisive with edits to get better videos out but for now just getting those dark videos playable for a wider audience is what I needed. As I read up on the features and begin to understand its uses I think Lightworks will be a very powerful tool before I upload to Youtube.

Well I really dont know much about computers but I worked on Television for about 30 years, I dont think I can make you understand editing and I dont think you can make me understand computers but being stubborn really helps on both or so I think.

Try AVS for a start and never give up, I am sure you will make what you want to do each time a bit more.

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Originally Posted by Duke of Buckingham

Try AVS for a start and never give up, I am sure you will make what you want to do each time a bit more.

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You just reminded me I had a License key for AVS4YOU software, and I remember they had a lot of cool tools on their site. Will experiment with their video editor and see how it handles. I loved their sound editors so I'm intrigued to see how they handle video as well. Thanks again for the help DUKE!

First thoughts on the AVS software. It seems to be 32bit vice 64. While processing it seems to be taking a lot longer then the 64 bit Lightworks software. Other then processing with the handbrake on the design of the software is definitely more NOOB friendly but I will have to do a bit more editing with it to see if it can do what I want.

One minor gripe is the editing window seems to be fixed at a small width x height making it more difficult to do corrections effectively. Again this is just a quick and dirty edit on a clip so I may have not noticed a way to make it larger yet.

Original file was 1.82Gig file.
Shot with Canon Powershot SX20IS

AVS 00:17:38 Processing time
Final product 176Mb Video Clip (.avi)
All CPU (high)
Limited lighting tweaks and small preview window made editing difficult. Result was brighter then original video but still not clear enough to view.

Movie Maker 00:5:00 Processing time
Final product 302MB MP4 File (.mp4)
Moderate CPU and moderate GPU
A lot of front end prep, Lighting tweaks are very limited
Overall video was still too dark for viewing

Lightworks 00:08:00 Processing time
Final product 538MB MP4 File (.mp4)
High CPU and little GPU
Very clear compared to the original video. Found out the reason the file size was so large was a large amount of added black screen time(making the overall time 30min) was put on the end of the video. Will try and edit that out when I get it processed on Youtube.

Tried to put the final output as high quality as possible even with going with the Youtube MP4 standard

Edited Lightworks file trimmed down to 11:15 and 154MB after Youtube processing. Obviously the processing time would have been less if I had noticed the added black screen time. Overall I'm happy I went through the hoops to experiment with the different editors and I am excited to use them in the future to make better video.