A Simple Holiday Project (ion)

Halloween is greeted with varying enthusiasm by Australians. From an awesome opportunity to dress up and beg neighbours for lollies, through to downright detestation of Imported Celtic/American rituals and celebrations.

I am probably somewhere in between.

However, many of my neighbours appear to be a little more enthusiastic, with the houses and gardens being decorated with spiderwebs plastic pumpkins and skeletons for some time in the weeks running up to October 31st.

And so, at 5 pm on Halloween I was starting to think that perhaps we should have some decorations up. That said we had no spray wedding, plastic spiders or anything similar. Just a lolly bucket shaped a little bit like pumpkin and purchased years before when my kids used to relish dressing up and begging the neighbours for sweet treats.

So I gathered my resources: some spooky looking mini figures, a light box, and my phone. And I took some photos of the video spectre as well as one of my ghosts from the Monster Fighters Haunted House.

I was able to reduce the background to total black and I placed the images in the centre of a larger black field. I import the resulting images into iMovie and applied the Ken Burns affect with extreme prejudice, to give these images a feeling of growing as they floated across the screen.

Now it turns out that I appear to have a data projector in our house, on loan. I also have very thin curtains, almost transparent, on the window. And so, an hour after I decided to get started, I was able to have ghosts floating across the curtain of our front room. I was also able to get the effect of Pepper’s Ghost, and old fairground trick, haunting my LEGO room.

I pasted the video into a keynote presentation, and set it to loop… and left it for the evening.

Such a shame that it was not visible from the street until after the sunset, at around 7:50 pm. The joys of Halloween occurring in spring. As the night grew darker, the projection became more obvious from the street. Such a shame most of the kids were tucked away in bed by then. Here then is is a video of how things appeared…

There you have it. This is how I incorporated LEGO Minifigures in my Halloween decorations.

How did you incorporate LEGO In your Halloween? Why not leave your comments below, and until next time…

Play well!

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