Madame Leota Makes Her Appearance!

Hey Frightners!

Well the post Halloween blues have already begun to set in but already my mind has turned to all the ideas I have for next year!

As is the case every year in NJ mother nature decided to check in with her latest nuisance and this time she opted to drop 6+ inches of snow on top of us! Snow in October?! Really!

Many of my haunt buddies had issues with their displays because of this storm and a few even experienced some bad damage to their props but what was most unfortunate was the lack of Trick or Treating that went on because many towns actually put the kibosh on Halloween all together because of the damage the storm did. We just can't seem to catch a break these past few years.

I still managed to enjoy my Halloween as my wife and I made some rounds to check out a few local haunts in our area which I will write about in an upcoming post but for now I would like to start sharing with you a few pictures from my haunt.

Luckily I held my Halloween party for friends and family the weekend of the 22nd. We had 70+ people come to Grimlock Manor to experience this years show and were thankfully blessed with a cool crisp October night perfect for haunting!

One of my favorite props this year which turned out to be the big hit was our Madame Leota Spirit Ball. It was my first time experimenting with projection effects and though I am no pro at it just yet I had a lot of fun setting this up and am now looking forward to adding more projection effects to our display next year. Thanks goes out to Mr. Chicken & Shellhawk for the great tutorial on this effect. If it wasn't for the both of you I may not have tried this.

Below are a few pictures of Madame Leota as we had her set up the night of the party. We used a deconstructed Gemmy Spirit Ball, foam wig head (as is) and an Eyeclops Mini projector that we bought on Ebay brand new for $40. We surrounded Madame Leota with about 25 hand made candles which we made from Toilet Paper & Paper Towel Rolls that we dripped hot glue from then added tea lights to and painted an off white color and finally we hid the projector with a number of creepy picture books an a large half skull.

I did take pictures of the process to set this effect up from deconstructing the ball to setting up the projector so I will be sure to do a future post on that but please enjoy the pictures and stay tuned for the full video of not only Madame Leota in action but an entire walkthrough of Grimlock Manor 2011 Haunt.