Hell Freezes Over

Despite my saying I would never, ever, ever vlog -- that is, post a video blog -- I went ahead and recorded one anyway, and posted it on my YouTube channel, which is GhoulishCop. That's the screen name I use on the haunt and Halloween forums.

Now Cecile B. DeMille has nothing to worry about with my freshman directorial debut (exactly how do you not constantly record your chin?) but it was fun. I tried to keep it under 10 minutes, because I think that's about the limit of anyone's attention span, so a lot ended up on the cutting room floor...which I'm sure you'll be thankful for.

Future episodes will be somewhat improved. I've already viewed my first vlog with a very critical eye, and though I posted it knowing there were a bunch of flaws, I figured if I didn't actually do it this time I'd probably never get around to it. So by forcing myself to post a video that I know has (many) areas for improvement, I'm actually pressuring myself into posting a second, better one so that the original isn't my entire legacy.



Having done this vlog, however, I have a lot more respect for those haunters who do this every day. I can assure you I won't torture you with daily updates of my exploits (pigs truly don't fly), if for no other reason than I'm just not that interesting. I'm sure my ramblings on this blog can make you think I'm something of a dullard at times (self-edit, self-edit!) so having to watch some stream of consciousness verbal diarrhea from me would undoubtedly be excruciating.

But what I would like my vlogs to cover would be my Halloween-related activities. I mean, that's the only reason someone might be remotely interested in watching them anyway so I'll limit them to covering that topic. The benefit to me is I think it might help me work on more projects. This blog helps me in some respect that way, keeping me interested in building things, and vlogging my progress might too. I know reading about your own haunt activities and viewing your videos gets me excited, so maybe in some small way I can do that for someone else.

Anyway, you've been forewarned: drivel ahead!

Postcards From the Edge

I took a couple of days off from working on my cemetery pillars but have been enjoying BlogTV, a combination of video chats and instant messaging. While anyone can host a session, obviously I'm interested in communing with my fellow haunters.

Some of the people who've hosted recently that I've tuned in to, and you might be familiar with, include Halloween Hellmouth, FrightGuy, and Steve's Haunted Yard. These are freewheeling, fun discussions, usually about Halloween and haunt related topics, but with a decidedly adult bent. In reality, anything's free game but because we all share a common interest, the dominant topic is Halloween and our activities surrounding the holiday.

Last night, for example, FrightGuy from Grimlock Manor, discussed techniques he's used to age paper and pictures, including coffee, cinnamon, and cumin. While I've used coffee before, I never heard of the latter two so that's something I'll have to try.

Also Steve, who also posts daily vlogs on YouTube, recently hosted BlogTV and corpsed a blucky. He also held a contest where the first five people who texted him (you know, having a literature degree I still haven't gotten comfortable with "texted" being a word let alone a verb) received a unique postcard that he picked up from the Museum of the Weird in Austin, TX (he also vlogged his time at the Museum). I was one of the five (I think there were only five of us on at the time) and, true to his word, I got my postcard in the mail yesterday. You can't go wrong with Lon Chaney as "The Phantom of the Opera!"

Perhaps even more important was Steve's own artwork added to the reverse side of the card. I'm sure that it will be worth something in a few years so I'm hanging on to this!

Thanks, Steve! And for everyone reading, check out BlogTV. Look up the folks above searching under "People" and subscribe to them. That way you'll receive notification when they're planning on hosting a new chat session. It's great hanging out with names you've probably seen on the various forums and discussing in real-time Halloween and haunt related topics.

Pillar Update

Did a little more work on my cemetery pillars the past couple of days. I finished carving the stonework into the foam on all four sides and then painted it with a coat of Drylok. I opted not to use any Monster Mud because I didn't want to cover up any of the detail, and in the end it really wasn't necessary.

(What's interesting is how the blue ink from the foam mixed with the Drylok, yet in that one spot where there's an "S" it didn't. Nor was that visible before I started painting. Ooooooh! Spooky!)

After that coat dried I painted it all over with a coat of black paint. The goal will be to build up the paint layers in successively lighter colors with the end result that it looks like stone. We'll see.

Painting melted foam isn't as easy as you might think. Getting the brush into all the nooks and crannies that are formed is a time-sapping, laborious process. My neighbor was leaning out her window watching me and offering commentary on my work (Yes! That's what I need!) when she asked, "Wouldn't it be faster to spray paint it?" I  explained about the melting properties of spray paint on foam so that I'd still have to provide some sort of primer coat on it. Plus, spray paint can get expensive, though the basic flat black cans at Home Depot and Lowe's are cheap at just $0.99.

As I sat there jabbing my brush into the crevices, I suddenly wanted to smack myself upside the head. I have a compressor with a sprayer attachment! So I went hooked everything up, and in 5 minutes time had the entire pillar painted. What had taken me three times as long to do just half of one face of the pillar took me a third of the time to complete the rest of it.

Don't know why I drew a blank on the spray unit before, but I guess my neighbor's colloquy really was what I needed after all.

Brick by Brick

Between building my cemetery pillars and remodeling my basement, space has become a premium in my garage. I got 14 sheets of 5/8" sheetrock for free from a Yahoo! group called Freecycle and they're stacked to one side of the single-car space while my columns take up the middle. While I'm slowly making my way through the sheetrock, I figured if I'm really ever going to open up any room in the garage I'm going to have to get these columns done and put into storage.

So after lots of procrastination I began work on them again. The one column had the rigid foam insulation already applied while the other is still just the frame. Since I don't have space just yet to go get and store more insulation to skin the second one, I figured I'd do the design work on the first and at least get it out of the way.

Of course, working without any clear idea in mind as to the exact effect I want is difficult, but I decided that rather than brick it would have something of a stacked stone look. After laying out how big I wanted the courses to be, I measured and scored them, then began the laborious process of using a wood burning tool to make the mortar lines.

While that was actually quick enough, I didn't want neat, sharp lines since these are supposed to be aged pillars. So after making the outlines of the stones I wanted using a straight edge (the stones would have been straight and orderly when initially set), I went back and began "aged" them by rounding off corners and generally "unsmoothing" the neatness. That was the time consuming process.

Once that was done, I used a technique I had seen on a vlog by Steve's Haunted Yard where you spray water onto the foam and then hit it using a heat gun. It gives the foam a stone look almost instantly. Very cool! (I looked for but couldn't find the link to the exact video. Sorry.)

I only finished two sides of the column and will complete the other two today (hopefully). The second side took a little bit longer than the first because it was the side I have my access panel on and I wanted to disguise its presence so there are a number of smaller and misshapen stones there. While I think it hides it fairly well for the most part, it took a lot more time to do all those extra stones. But it also underscores why I built my foam-cutting tools: the score-with-a-razor technique left a lot to be desired. I'm confident my second column will come out much better using my hot wire cutters.

And while I probably don't have to coat them in Monster Mud before painting, I probably will anyway to cover up as many imperfections as possible. Then adding a bit of Drylok on top of that will give an additional layer of protection and stone-like appearance.

On a side note, it was actually odd using Drylok on a non-haunt-related project. While I don't have a problem of water leaks in my basement, since I'm putting up new walls on the exterior concrete block, I figured it was a bit of preventive maintenance to cover them in Drylok to inhibit any moisture that might want to work its way in after I put them up. Now that that's done, I'll be able to finish another corner of the laundry room. But that means it's almost time then to renovate the back stairwell which entails tearing down my old stairs and building new ones.

How the heck can I make Halloween props when my wife insists on me finishing the basement? That's the difference between doing the work yourself and hiring a contractor to come in. They'll be in and out quickly while I have the luxury of squeezing it in around skinning my cemetery pillars. I'm thinking though I may have to focus on getting the stairwell done quickly though. I might want clean clothes occasionally and I don't want to have to tell my wife, "Careful going to the basement, honey. That first step's a doozy!"

Hook Me Up

I'm not much of a TV person and it wasn't until I met my wife that I became anything close to a moviephile, but a good TV series (say, The Walking Dead) or a good movie (28 Days Later) can reel me in (Heh! Get it? "Reel me in." Movie reel. Okay, onward).

But finding good shows or movies to watch can be hard because there's just so much crap out there. Too often, the trailers for the movies or shows contain all the good stuff and the rest is just filler, and bad filler at that. Worse, a director can do really good things with a movie, but gets stuck in how to get out of the box he's created and so comes up with a lame ending. A lot of times I'm left feeling there's a lot of film that's been left on the cutting room floor.

However, lately I've become addicted to a resource that's at least leading me in the right direction to really good cinema: Hook's Haunted Hollow.

I'm not sure how I found his blog, but I started tuning in lately and I've found it's just a wealth of movie and TV show trailers and links for stuff that's coming out that looks like it's going to be awesome. For example, there's an indie movie that just came out called The Tunnel, about an Australian news crew doing a story on an abandoned subway system in Sydney. Thinking it was more a story about homeless people going missing, they find there's a lot more going on beneath their feet than anyone could imagine.

I had seen a trailer for the movie and thought it looked really cool, but then Hook's blog posted the filmmakers were offering a free, legal download of the movie -- in high-def even. I immediately downloaded and watched it yesterday and it was every bit as good as I thought it was going to be. I wouldn't have known about the free download had it not been for Hook's post.



Then there's the regular updates about the coming movie Super 8, several new TV shows coming out this year that look very cool -- The River, Awake, and Person of Interest -- and more. The man's got way too much time on his hands to be finding and posting all these links, trailers, and updates, but I'm glad he does. I'm pretty much a couch potato as it is (though my laptop is usually in hand rather than the TV remote), but I may never have a reason to get up with all the cool stuff he's finding.

If you're the least bit interested at all in horror, thriller, and even sci-fi-ish stuff (he's got Green Lantern updates, X-Men, and Transformers too) you must check out and follow Hook's Haunted Hollow. Really, it's simply a convenient way to stay on top of the best these genres have coming out. It's definitely on my daily, must-read list.

Logging a Lot of Miles

Not me, but my fellow haunters. I've recently got hooked on watching haunt and Halloween related video blogs -- or vlogs, for those of you who might not have found them yet -- and one common thread that runs through all of them (aside from being haunt and Halloween related) is these vloggers love to drive and vlog at the same time.

Whether it's going to the local Goodwill store, running to the post office, driving to or from work, or heading out to some convention, these vloggers are behind the wheel videotaping themselves. While I appreciate the spontaneity of recording thoughts as they happen, maybe it's because I'm a retired police officer but all this "distracted driving" drives me nuts! And they say talking on a cellphone leads to accidents.

I haven't witnessed any wrecks just yet, but paying attention to what you're saying to a camera instead of driving that 2,000-lb. machine and what's around you -- though I do notice a lot of checking the mirrors; maybe they're looking for cops? -- is going to lead to bad things eventually.

For the sake of the vloggers who I've come to really enjoy watching and learning from, please put the camera away while you're behind the wheel. We can wait till you get wherever it is you're going to hear what you have to say.

While I've only just started subscribing to various YouTube channels, I already have a number of favorites that I make  sure I watch every day (probably because they post every day!). Typically the best ones (for me) deal specifically with props and prop building, though catching up on some of their everyday lives is fun too.

I would like to see a little more self-editing in some of these, though, so that they stick with the main thrust of the video and don't run more than 10 minutes maximum. I wish I had time to sit and watch endless hours of stream-of-consciousness ramblings, even if it is about Halloween, but I need to get in and get on to other things so I often find myself fast forwarding through a lot of what's being said. Keeping it on point would be a big help.

Despite that minor criticism, I'm enjoying the vlogs and seeing things occurring "real time," or close enough anyway. Here's a list of some of my favorite vloggers:

Steve's Haunted Yard
HalloweenHellmouth
My Little Piece of Hell
The Bloodshed Brothers

At the top of the list, however, is HauntVentures by Haunt It Yourself, two vloggers who give really great tips and inspiration for haunters everywhere. Jason Dasti and Melissa Mcknight are professional haunters (or something). They have a huge workshop up in Canada and build some amazing props, and were also behind many of the videos posted for Hauntcon, where they took you on tours of many of the haunted houses, vendors, and workshops that took place there. I really want to go see the Dent Schoolhouse as a result of their videos.

I had seen the Dent Schoolhouse website previously and it looked really cool, but HauntVentures' tour through the haunted house really made up my mind. What I liked best was you get to see these haunted attractions as they appear to regular guests, but also with a "lights on" tour. Then you get to see the level of detail these attractions put into their work.

Hauntcon apparently offered a number of attraction tours, and Jason and Melissa I think captured them all on video. Well worth the time invested in watching them all (perhaps 80 videos or so!).

In short, if you haven't started watching the vlogs, I think you should give it a shot. Many are very informative. I don't think I'll be vlogging anytime soon myself, but I have at least considered putting up some videos of projects I'm doing. If I do decide to do that, however, I'll make sure none of them involve being behind the wheel of a car!

Handheld Foam Cutter Tutorial

The latest addition to my hot wire foam cutting tools is a handheld device for when I want to do close-up work and don't need the table. Detailing the edges of tombstones, for example, or carving out pieces of foam that might be too awkward for the table to handle are the instances where a handheld foam cutter would be handy.

While initially basing my handheld cutter on a device hpropman made, this one is much smaller than his as I envisioned using it for the times I mentioned above. His cutter was about a foot or more in width; mine is about 6 to 8 inches.

To make the cutter, I used scrap 1/2" Schedule 40 PVC though I imagine other sizes would work, as would thinner Schedule 20 PVC. The parts list for my device are as follows:

Handle - (1) @ 8"
Cross bars - (2) @ 2"
Arms - (2) @ 4"
T - (1)
90 degree Elbow - (2)
End Caps (3)
Nickel wound wire 18 gauge
Screws (2) @ 1"
Nuts (6)
Washers (4)
Wire Connectors*
Wire

* I'm not sure exactly what they're called. They're circular and allow you to insert a wire into the end which you're then able to fit over a screw.

After cutting all the pieces to length, I dry fit them together. Actually, I didn't glue up any of the parts because I figured there may come a time when I want to swap out the parts for wide or longer pieces, depending upon what I'm working on, and rather than building a whole new cutter, I could just remove whatever's in there currently and replace it with the new parts. The caps definitely shouldn't be glued because you may need to gain access to the nut holding the screw in place.

This is a really quick project, the hardest part being fitting my fingers in the end caps to tighten down the bolt. Here is a picture of the end cap assembly showing the screw, two nuts, wire connector, and washer. As you can see, I drilled a 3/8" hole in the top and side of each end cap. The top hole is obviously for the screw; the side hole allows the wire to travel down inside the PVC.

I wrapped the 18 gauge nickel guitar wire below the top nut and tightened the nuts down. I stretched the wire across to the other side and did the same thing. Since I couldn't show a picture of the completed end cap assembly underneath that would have any meaning, below is a drawing of how the assembly looks.

One adjustment I may look at making is coming up with a way to fine tune the tension on the wire because when it heats up it does stretch a little. But in the meantime it works just fine. I also noticed I didn't need nearly as much power with this device as I did with the table. Or rather, I noticed the wire actually turned orange on the handheld at the same setting it was on for the table. Perhaps it has to do with the shorter distance between the wire, or maybe it's that I'm using 14/2 Romex wire compared to the 16 gauge wire I used for the table that I had left over from my LED spotlight project. Either way, I dialed it back before I snapped the guitar string.

With the hot wire handheld cutter and foam cutting table, I think I should be able to tackle any of the foam cutting projects I have in mind. I do have a tendency to build jigs and tools to help build projects without building any project itself! At least now I don't have an excuse for not working on props.