2007

2007 was a very busy year. With my crazy home addition, and my work for my brother-in-law's company Invision 4-D I barely had time to breathe. Here is a video showing some of what happened at a local cornmaze south of me. The animatronic farmer was designed and built by me... My first animatronic!

Thanks to my electronic genius uncle I was able to extract a serial communication signal from a surround track of a DVD. The signal was generated by some custom software I developed also for this thing. Is it any wonder I was having time problems this year! I never really liked the way his mouth worked. It worked really great the first day, but kept stripping servos. Finally I had to mess up my firmware to keep him from breaking again. Oh well, live an learn. This video is from after I put in a very nice titanium servo in his jaw, but it worked differently then the ones I was stripping out, so I had to hack it and ended up with something less than perfect. Thanks to the great John Williams at efx-tek for their great support and wonderfully inexpensive Prop-2 controller.

Fear.net ran a set of nicely produced videos of home haunts which they interviewed me for. Here is the episode:

Anyway, on top of that I went on vacation to Disneyland for the week before Halloween. Despite that I still changed a few things.

• A spider we found on my trip in California
• Fixed some of the flight paths on the ghosts that looked a bit "computery" (as someone's comment on youtube said... Thanks for the catch, hopefully I got it)
• Cleaned up the pumpkin chorus behind the Jack-o-lantern song.
• Added a "vortex" around my front door to hopefully make you feel you are entering another world to get your treat... Well at least the little kids might feel that way. ;-).

Also since everyone has seen the show before, the video this year has the live audio recorded with my camera's lame mic, so you can get more of a feel of how the show works. Also notice the people standing around and that I am able to project past them most of the time because of the angle I am projecting from.

Also, parts of my video are now available for sale for use at your own haunt. A nice guy from Austrailia had the pumpkins visit this year, and it went well. The money I was paid has already been spent buying equipment for next year's haunt (like Adobe Premiere CS3... Now available for Mac again!!) Let me know if you are interested...