Happy Halloween!

Oct 31, 2011

We had some friends over for a Halloween party on Saturday. Inspired by a friend who loves this kind of illusion, we managed to put together a version of Pepper's Ghost, to entertain the guests and Trick or Treaters.

It was simple enough: an LCD screen (we had fooled around with a projector, but this worked better), laid down in my daughter's play-house, with a sheet of Plexiglas angled at 45 degrees to reflect the screen's image – which from a distance made it look as though it was floating in the air inside the playhouse.

The main trick with the video was to choose one such as this, with a black background and that can be played in a loop. For the audio, I used my trusty Logitech mm28 speaker, which incidentally is a very handy (and capable) speaker to take on the road.

Here's how it looked:

6 responses to “Happy Halloween!”

Jeremy Tammik

October 31, 2011 at 1:39 pm

wow, cool, good creative fun, man!

absolutely chilling 🙂

and congratulations on your mask!

you should wear that at conferences as well 🙂

Reply
Kean Walmsley

October 31, 2011 at 1:53 pm

It was certainly fun. 🙂

I was pretty pleased with the face paint, especially as I managed to do most of it myself (I needed a bit of help with the back of my head - I missed a few spots).

Maybe that would be a good one for AU - "you've heard of the Blue Man Show, now it's time to meet the Orange Man!" 😉

Kean

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James M

November 1, 2011 at 12:36 am

I was hoping it was going to be your picture floating in that playhouse! You could make it talk too. Add a real floating black cloak, and you have some serious effects going on.
I have to say though, I think you might have to have someone else do the soundtrack and lip synch for you. The vids I've seen of yourself, Fenton, and Stephen reveal the most civilized voices I've ever heard 🙂

Reply
Kean Walmsley

November 1, 2011 at 1:32 am

I did think about videoing my head, but I ended up running out of time.

Brits may sound civilised, but that's often far from the truth, trust me. In fact, we regularly meet up after work to bite the heads off chickens.

Hmmm - and don't most screen villains have British accents? OK, OK - maybe "most" is overstating it somewhat, but it's very often the case.

Mouahahahaha...

Kean

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James M

November 1, 2011 at 9:12 pm

well, you were a pretty good sport to post your face painted pic, I think I'm to lazy to put that much makeup on.
On another subject, i have always been into woodworking and hobby items like molded composite RC gliders. I have been looking at DIY CNC routers and thinking of using them to make scale replicas of land development projects. I would imagine that would someday tie into your point cloud models. Users might like making the models more if they could then 3d print them. Autodesk should buy you a makerbot jsut for marketing purposes.

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Kean Walmsley

November 1, 2011 at 9:38 pm

It was quick enough (with a big enough brush :-).

You might be interested in checking out some of the projects on instructables.com (a recent addition to the Autodesk family). I would love to spend time getting into the whole Maker scene - it seems like a lot of fun(although as I'm first and foremost a programmer, I'm happy with most of my constructs remaining virtual :-).

Kean

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Happy Halloween!

6 responses to “Happy Halloween!”

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