# Our Halloween Show



## Fishbulb (Oct 7, 2018)

Hi Everyone,

I've been stalking for a little while now getting ideas from everyone, but haven't really posted. My wife and I are Halloween nuts and love all of the ideas we've seen here. We've been busy with Christmas decorations but finally put together a video of our Halloween show. It is more geared towards little kids and the hope of not frightening any of them. Anyways, we'd love to get feedback.






Cheers,
Fishbulb


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## Hairazor (Mar 13, 2012)

Hot Dang, if I lived in your area I would be giving you treats in thanks, and who doesn't like "The Time Warp"!!


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## RoxyBlue (Oct 6, 2008)

What a fun light show (and a great song)!


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## jdubbya (Nov 6, 2005)

I'm generally not a fan of light show displays but this one was really fun and entertaining. Love the song and the pumpkins.


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## Headless (Sep 4, 2011)

What jdubbya said - That is awesome. I have to ask though - I have always wondered how do the neighbors cope with the lights and constant repeat of the music on these sorts of displays?


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## Fishbulb (Oct 7, 2018)

Thanks guys, I appreciate it. The show started with just the pumpkins one year and we loved. The kids went nuts with the singing jack-o-lanters. We thought the lights rounded out the show nicely to kind of extend the effect wider across the property. This was the first year we tried the animatronics with the talking skulls kits. Synchronizing them to the chorus was an absolute nightmare and we're already working on next years show to try to get that set up better. The trick was that we really didn't want to program the servos position manually for every syllable of every song. So we worked out a more automated method that required precise triggering and that just regulated in too much jitter. The giant spider to the right was also rigged up with eight pneumatic piston driven legs and was technically programmed to do the thriller dance and the time warp. But of course our first test run was the night before halloween and the pistons pretty much blew al of the legs off the spider. So this show was actually what we were able to scavenge from all of the failed ideas. But fun nevertheless. I had actually 3D printed about a dozen large animal skulls as well that we put onto skeleton bodies. The skulls were all going to be motorized as well, but man Halloween snuck up on us. A couple got done but never were incorporated. Overall looking forward to doing more animatronics and pneumatics next year.

The neighbors are ... tolerant. Halloween is tough because we go late and loud. But our street almost never gets trick or treaters (as can be seen in the vid) and attempts to bring or keep kids on our street is also generally appreciated. Lots of the neighbors that drop by also come with their kids, which love the show. Lot of the adults at least are intrigued by what it takes to coordinate something like this, so again the are sympathetic and a little tolerant. We also collect money for charity at the show and serve hot chocolate and cider for the kids, which again gives us lots of sympathy points.

Christmas is tougher because it goes on for about a month. So we only do weekends till 9 and it's quieter. Some of the neighbor kids have birthdays in December so we do special birthday shows for them as well with lots of special requests (such as Star Wars theme or including video projections into the window). You really have to be in tune with the neighbors and cater to them. Make them feel like part of the show or that's it's directly benefiting them.

It's also kind of a catch 22. The larger we grow the show, the more we can collect for charity and more we'll really annoy the immediate neighbors. We plan on really growing it over the years with lots more animatronic elements and lights. So we've already discussed possibly moving it to a neutral place like the local firehouse and possible switching the donations over to them. 

Cheers,
FB


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## Batbuddy (Sep 3, 2014)

Well I love animated light shows and this is the first good Halloween one I have seen! Very cool. Are you using VSA for the animated skellies? I am curios what Your "more automated method" is? Love it.


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## Fishbulb (Oct 7, 2018)

Thanks Batbuddy, I appreciate it.

The skulls were a nightmare. The lights and pumpkins are synced using xLights freeware. So that's pretty straight forward. I've never used VSA so we devised a really roundabout way of "programming" the skeletons.

I idea starts out simple, which is to control the skull using a picoTalk from FrightProps. Then you can just send the audio to that and the skulls will sing. The two issues are syncing and getting just the voices. I found this cool software that automatically converts any song to a karaoke version by using artificial intelligence (AI) to remove the vocals. They also allow you to download just the vocals track. That software is call Phonicmind. It's a couple of bucks per song and works very well for basic songs with a single singer. Bohemian Rhapsody is a nightmare. If necessary, you can clean up the vocals track with something like Audacity. I found that putting in pure silence between words and stressed syllables made the jaws pop more and looked better. The cool thing is getting to this point is REALLY fast for any reasonable song. Minutes to an hour at most. So this seemed like a win over programming individual syllables in xLights or VSA.

Now we have xLights outputting the music to the speaker and coordinating the lights. xlIghts can also output DMX signals. So we just put all the lyric only tracks on a BooTunes and just triggered the BooTunes via DMX to drive the skulls. So in all, that was a really slick fast process. The issue is that there was a very high variability in the triggering of the BooTunes which made it super difficult to get precise triggering. We got it good enough for this year but we are working on tweaking it for next year.

Next year we will still go with the PhonicMind approach to extract the audio, clean it up in Audacity, import into Python to convert waveform to simple 0-255 DMX single, then output this from lights to a servoDMX board from FrightProps. But no way are we going syllable by syllable to set the jaw position. The lights are time consuming enough.

Here is an example of hour a more skull heavy song turned out. Again, I think it's quite cool that both skull jaw positions could be set for the how song in under an hour. It's just the syncing that was a pain. And hopefully we'll get that sorted out by next Halloween.






Cheers,
FB


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