Season of Shadows Blog

Today, the scarecrow saw the light of day for the first time since last Halloween. I drug it out of storage to get it fog machine ready. Normally the summertime weather, here in New Mexico, is pretty rough on my mache props. The extreme heat has a tendency to cause the texture to constrict, showing interior layers that never received a coat of paint. This one was actually in great shape, aside from the right arm slipping a little on the post.

My plans for the scarecrow’s role in the haunt this year is similar to last Halloween, with the exception of fog coming out of its mouth. After all the hours that went into constructing it, not to mention the thousands of individually rolled pieces of paper towel; cutting a hole into it was extremely difficult…not physically but emotionally! I almost couldn’t bring myself to do it. But the beauty of mache is it’s easily fixable. The openings are there to allow a pipe to be fed into the prop. The other end of the pipe will be anchored to the outlet nozzle of the fog machine. The hole is slightly off center because the prop has a thick wad of newspaper holding up the head. I grabbed some footage of the fog in action and will have it included in my next Halloween Haunter’s Reality post.

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Over the course of the next sixty three days I’ve decided to do a sort of reality video blog series- Halloween style. Each video will feature “fly on the wall” type recordings of my nine week prep work counting down to Halloween night. I have a lot of projects ahead of me- some I may finish, some I may not, but it’s my intention to document a large portion of these with short (roughly ten to twenty minute) video segments. Basically, I’ll be attaching the digital camera to my hip for the next several weeks. I’ll be taking it with me during every Halloween related trip or project I’m working on and grabbing footage along the way.

Since I’m emphasizing the reality portion of these videos, there’s not going to be any fancy camera work or great soundtracks. The footage will be posted as is, including all of the flaws, cracks and pops, with very little editing. I’ll be operating the camera myself, unless it’s set up on the tripod, so the majority of this series will be point of view shots.

While I’ve never been a fan of traditional reality programming, I thought this would be something really fun to do; since it’s actually about showcasing Halloween items and Halloween preparations instead of focusing on a person’s life.

The first video was recorded yesterday while I was adding skin and texture to a ground breaker skeleton in my garage. You can play it by following this link or watching it below in the embedded YouTube player. The running time is 7 minutes, 31 seconds. I hope you enjoy it!

The ambient music playing on my garage CD player, in this clip, is by raison d’etre.

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Halloween Haunter’s Reality #2