Blanck Mortuary is a small yard haunt display in central Texas. The theme is a small cemetery where the creators of Disney's Haunted mansion were laid to rest. These videos are from Halloween displays or how I built my props.
Glad to hear you are back at it! I completely feel the sickness and much like Brokeback Mountain,..I can't quit Haunting lol, it's on my mind year round and I manage to find something Haunt related 365. Your passion enriches your community and the screams, laughs, and memories are more addicting than Crack cocaine lol. Can't wait to see what you have put together for this year!
I think the small effort to standardize your spacing will pay you back many times over. All you really need is a stick with two marks on it, or you can get fancy and drill guide holes in a board. Then when you're setting up you can just give someone a hammer, the template, and a stack of rebar and turn them loose.
Hallelujah this is fantastic news. I can hear it in your voice you are reinvigorated and you’re making plans to rework things and start new projects. we do tend to forget that there’s things that we need to do for ourselves to be able to do these things. there is no shame in asking for help. if your neighborhood is really excited about what you do, possibly someone would be interested in working with you. you are so correct in calling it a sickness. we dedicate ourselves to creating these displays, but there is no end to it. we never seem to get to the point where we’re satisfied with what we have done. There’s always this need to keep adding on. so happy that you will be continuing and wish you all the best. Happy Halloween. 🎃
@@sealy1 in my video description I have a link to the guy who sells the individual busts. I checked and its still a good link to his ebay profile and he shows them as available.
That's a great installment for a "Traces of Death" series. To add to that, my friend Liz is one of those types who brings out the whole neighborhood for events, and everyone pitches in helping her decorate. Every year for her Easter parade I always note the spots where the grass still hasn't grown back from the graves she and friends dug in her front yard for the Halloween party and to use for scaring trick-or-treaters. She earns extra money helping build film sets, so somehow she got in good with someone who owned one of those low-lying foggers that can cover the entire stage floor (e.g., like it's "Phantom of the Opera" or a Vegas magic show). She has the fogger hidden around the corner of her house with a couple dryer ducts coming out of it into the yard with large computer fans at the end of each. That blankets the entire yard, so no one knows they're walking past an open grave until one of her zombies (i.e., friends in costume) jumps up. I wish she'd get video and put it up for all to see. Her yard is awesome for Halloween and Xmas (She was on the "Great Light Fight" one year).
There is or was now a haunted house that had an underground path system to get to open graves in their cemetery. They are relocating so I imagine that feature will go away.
Really love how this new prop has turned out for you. Really appreciate seeing how you have it set up because it is on a project list of mine too so this definitely helps me be able to visualize how it needs to be put together. I also have started on props and design pieces for the upcoming Halloween season. It is never too early to get started on that.
What helps the illusion is the lighting in the environment. Our brain just assumes that since what we're looking at is a sculpture of a human head, the prominences of the face come TOWARDS us as we typically experience human faces in the real world time and time again. Formally, this is known as the Hollow-Face or Hollow-Mask Illusion. Dim lighting from BEHIND the prop should highlight the forehead and nose, and fade towards the edges of the bust. If you watch video from Disneyland's HM, you'll notice three very important but overlooked details that enhance the illusion: (1) the niches in which the busts sit have a rather high, ARCHED upper perimeter. The distance from the top of the bust's head to the top of the niche appears to be roughly the dimension from the bust's eyes to the top of its head. That seems to be a lot of headroom but the reason for that is for the next detail: (2) there is a chandelier that hangs to the left of the male bust and we assume the light coming from that fixture is what helps to illuminate the busts, highlighting their high points (foreheads and noses). In real life, that would not be the case but simply SEEING that fixture and its position relative to the busts reinforces our expectation of what the lighting on the busts SHOULD look like. Sometimes museums will light paintings with a strong light source positioned where the predominant light source in the painting is and all of a sudden the painting gains appreciable depth. And (3) the niches and the inhabiting busts are placed rather high up on the wall with the floor of the niches being almost at eye level which helps to conceal the bases of the busts. I also read somewhere that while this effect was discovered MANY years ago (some artisan back in ancient Greece or Rome allegedly noticed the effect when working with the negative molds of statues), the Imagineers found a way to "plus up" the effect by slightly and proportionally reducing the overall depth of the casting relief, meaning: if a positive cast was pulled from the form, it would look slightly squashed from front to back. Any surface of the niche from the effect side should be as matte black as possible so as to reduce reflection of the light illuminating the back of the busts. Black velvet works very well in providing a non-reflective, black surface.
