Toolshed Technologies
Andy Hunt
Musician, Author, Programmer
Real Ghosts
11/24/2003
I’ve had a lot of people ask me about the special effects I engineered for Halloween, so I thought I’d describe them here.
- First, I bought a soundtrack of a live thunderstorm
- no scary additional noises, just plain thunder. I played this on my Denon amp with the Definitive Tech speakers placed in the downstairs windows, and my wife reported that it sounded convincingly like thunder up to a mile and a half away :)
- What’s thunder without lightning? I hooked up an optoisolator and triac circuit to couple the speaker-level output to switch a 120V load. The result was excellent: as the thunder peaked, the four flood lights (aimed strategically at the front of the house) flashed brightly, synchronized exactly with the thunder.
- Next came the fog machine. I built a chiller box (to make the fog colder than the surrounding air so it will hug the ground) as described here. The result was a nice, low-hanging fog that crept through our small graveyard, with the flashing lightning bouncing off the fog.
- Finally, the good part. I hooked up my LCD projector to my laptop, which was running a Java applet of animated, flying ghosts. I put projector on a shelf bracket and aimed it out the second story window, using a pivoting mirror to aim the images down at the graveyard area in front of the house. The image of the ghost would appear and undulate in the fog in 3D, in a very convincing fashion.
What’s the use of technology if you can’t have fun with it??
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