Halloween Love
Halloween is a great passion of mine. I love to marry show control with uncommon props. My biggest prop is my 2003 Subaru WRX.
Every Halloween, I take my beloved Subaru apart to make it look like there has been a major car crash into a zombie infested graveyard. I incorporate many different theatrical effects to really sell this illusion. First, I take the car and deflate the tires facing the audience and jack up the other side. This allows the audience to see more of the effects I create in the vehicle. Next, I disassemble large portions of the front end and leave pieces of the car dangling. In this broken frontend, I utilize a fog machine I’ve modified to shoot smoke up through the engine bay and have it escape around the bent hood. I place several flame effect LED bulbs to make it appear that the car is on fire.
Next, every few minutes I fade the vehicles headlights on and I hide an LED strobe and speaker in the engine bay. Frequently throughout the night, the car will make noises as if someone is trying to start the engine and at the same time I have the strobe effect go off. When this happens, the car’s headlights with oscillate as if the starter is pulling too much power from the car’s battery.
The car is speared through with the remains of a traffic signal, which I have wired and programmed an arduino to listen for artnet wirelessly from my control system.
I tie into the car’s speakers to play ominous music in sync with the rest of the audio of my outdoor display. Every minute or so, I have this audio cut out and play various radio messages from other survivors. This gives the prop great story telling ability, as I can tell the history of how the zombie apocalypse began and how others are dealing with the same situation.
I employ fake broken glass made out of silicone to add violence to the scene. This opens up the car so that the audio I’m playing can be heard by the audience. I also cut a fake arm and use magnets on both sides of the car’s windshield to make the illusion a zombie has crashed through and attacked the drive of the car.
The entire vehicle utilizes DMX controlled elements. The headlights are on PWM circuits, the fog machine is on DMX controlled relays, and the audio is distributed to its various speakers over the Audinate Dante system.