Practical Lighting

Having Practical Lighting in your Halloween Village helps to create that fantasy realism that I strive for. By Practical Halloween Village Lighting I am referring to the street lights, lights in trees, lights beside paths and so forth. Most of these lighting effects I picked up at different stores during the Christmas Holiday season in their Christmas Village sections (Michaels Arts and Crafts is a good example, link on the left). But some of the lighting is specific to Halloween. Take a look at this photo from our 2008 Alien Invasion Halloween Village display.

2008 Halloween Village showing practical lighting

On the left are two lines of lights (3 lights in each) in front of the haunted house, these are illuminated skulls that came from a Halloween store. Just in front of that are two lights on a gate, the gate was a paper model from Ray Kiem (Haunted Dimensions), a gate from  the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland. I added two old fashioned street lamp posts to the top of the gate, the lamps are from the Christmas Village section of Kmart. To the right and left of the haunted house are two more of the street lamps. Around the cemetery in the center of the picture is a fence that included lamps, also from the Christmas Village store. All of these lights run off of either batteries or can be plugged into AC adapters (the way I use them). At the back (top) of the picture and just barely visible in this image is a gnarly tree with orange pumpkin lights, looking kind of light miniature Japanese lanterns. This is simply a battery operated pumpkin necklace that I have draped over the tree. The rest of the lighting in the picture comes from the LED Pumpkin lights (link at right) and of course the miniature fogger in the swamp (Ultrasonic Mist Maker).

Halloween Village Lighting

Here are a couple of shots from our 2008 Halloween Village, alien invasion theme (you can just make out several green aliens towards the back). These show the lights that we use, the LED ones for pumpkins. The first shot is taken during the day and shows the table layout, you can easily see the two LED lighting units at the far end of the table. The second shot gives a good idea of how the lighting looks at night.

2008 Halloween Village. Daytime shot showing lights.

In this shot you can clearly see two LED units at the far end of the table, you can also see the back of an LED unit in the bottom left of the shot, they are designed to sit flat but they stand on end just as well, which is how we use them. The haunted house in the center has another LED unit sitting inside giving the red glow to the windows. There are also some practical lighting effects in the scene, such as the lights for the walkway leading to the haunted house, you can also see a lit street lamp behind the house. The white fuzzy glow towards the upper right is a special effect purchased just for this display. It is a special piezo fogger unit that goes into a little bowl of water. The unit is designed for little home fountains and such, you will frequently see these in mall displays of Japanese style fountains. The actual unit is only about 1 1/2 inches across. It has the piezo fogger and waterproof lights in the same unit. For our display I cut a round hole in the table (the table is really a 4x8 sheet of plywood mounted on a couple of saw horses. I didn't cut a hole in a real table), then I mounted a plastic mixing bowl under the whole, dropped in the fogger, filled it with water, and instant foggy bog. The table is covered with green paper and irregular shapes of railroad display grass paper. This helps break up the large flat surface and looks great at night.

2008 Halloween Village at night with lighting effects

Here is how the right side of the display looked at night. The orange glow is the piezo fogger bog, the two LED units are upper center and right side. You can  just see some of the street lamps around the "grave yard" on the left. We hang a black sheet behind the display to act as a backdrop and to hide the living room behind. the trick or treaters view the display through the front window just to the right of the front door.

Halloween Mummy

Since our Halloween Theme last year was Mummies I needed a mummy in front. I did have some grand plans which didn't pan out, too busy creating a new training title for How To Gurus, so had to fall back on plan B. My backup plan was to go and buy a skeleton from a Halloween store and dress it up as a mummy. The best I could find was a 5 foot tall plastic skeleton that wasn't too realistic, but it would have to do. Next came a white sheet, that was torn into strips, died using tea bags, then tied around the skeleton. Voila, instant mummy!

Halloween Mummy

Since the Mummy was only 5 feet tall I attached him to a stand (you can see it behind him as a black pole). He was then placed behind a bush so that I could raise him up to 6 feet and keep his floating feet hidden from view. Our yard has lots of bushes and not much open space so we have to place props around where we can.

Just barely noticeable in this photo are two of the LED multicolored lights that are designed for inside pumpkins and make great outdoor lighting as well. They are sitting on top of the bush right in front of the mummy and in the dark they are totally invisible. These two are aimed at the Mummy and give a really spooky lighting effect as they slowly change from one color to the next. I will be doing a post on these great little lights later as I describe this years layout.

Also take a look at the pumpkin in the front, small and a little green on one side. This is one of the pumpkins from our backyard Halloween pumpkin patch. We used the good ones by the front door and put the rest around the yard.

This picture also shows the plastic light up pumpkins that we use every year, we have 7 or 8 of these and they are great for filling in those dark corners around the yard and putting next to tombstones. You can always find these at Target, KMart, and Walmart every year.

Secret Room

Every Egyptian tomb needs a secret room, so we put in a little Indiana Jones action for ours. This is placed below the table containing the main Halloween Mummy Village and is lit with miniature Christmas Village spot lights. Making these Halloween dioramas look good is all about the lighting. This one has two lights, one aimed at the left wall and one at the floor, the rest of the lighting is simply spill from these two spots, very effective when viewed at night. The light on the wall also lights up Indy as you can see from his shadow on the wall (rope and arm).

 The floor and walls are made out of foam core with flooring and wallpaper printed from images found online. The columns likewise are made of foam core rolled into tubes and then covered with with a column like wallpaper found online. Indy and the Ark of the Covenant are toys, purchased at Disney's California Adventure at a toy store right in the front of the park which has a big Indy section, good reason for a day at Disney! With park admission for me and my wife, plus food and of course Indy, this little display cost over $200, but it was a fun day. If you cut out the Disney trip you could make one for a lot less, Indy toys are all over eBay. The snakes are from Target, they were originally bright yellow glow in the dark and were simply painted using a Sharpie black marker. The Obelisk on the left is a paper model found online (I did a BIG search for Egyptian Paper Models on Google, pretty much used everything I found). The two Egyptian God statues are paper models from Paper-Replika.com , lots of great paper models on this site if you like making your own stuff.

The whole thing was simply taped to the bottom of the Halloween Village table using black duct tape, some black duct tape was also used to create "curtains" to hide the miniature spot lights in the top corners. Colored duct tape is a key construction technique I use in both the miniature villages and outside, with Black and Camo being my two favorites.

New Home for my Halloween Projects

Hi, this is the new home for my Halloween projects. Every year we dress up our yard for Halloween, and to keep things interesting we choose a different theme each year. The last two years we had an Alien Invasion, and Mummies. Along with our usual front yard display we also set up a "Halloween Village" in our front window. This is like a traditional Christmas Village, but with a Halloween Theme. And of course the theme matches the yard theme.

Last year we added a new element to our Halloween by putting a pumpkin patch in the back yard and we grew our own pumpkins, just seemed appropriate. This year we are doing the same, although on a smaller scale as the pumpkin patch has become a vegetable garden as well.

I am starting off this blog with a look at our previous Halloweens, I will follow that with a detailed look at the preparations and constructions of this year's Halloween. This year's theme is a Ghostbusters Haunted Street, combining Ghostbusters stuff with Ghosts of course and more traditional trick or treaters. The Halloween Village contains 8 Haunted Houses, most of which were built using free paper models available online (more info later), a great Ecto-mobile, the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man (paper model of course), the Statue of Liberty, and lots of other surprises (some paper models, some purchased stuff, some reused from previous year's displays. More info on all of this in later posts.

Part of Egypt Halloween Village with lighting

Egypt Halloween Village using Flash

Here are two pictures from last years Halloween Village, Egypt Mummies. Best viewed with the spooky lighting. The large pyramid is a purchased prop, there are several purchased mummies plus a couple paper models. The Sphinx is a paper model from Canon Creative Park. There is a Star Gate paper model, several Paper Model Pyramids and Obelisks, some Paper Model palm trees and assorted other stuff. It all really comes alive with the lighting. We use miniature village lights and some great color changing LED lighting that was designed to go inside pumpkins.

This years Ghostbusters theme will be far more advanced.
More later..