Plastic Skeleton Corpsing -- with Plastic

It's become a tried and true method of getting a quick corpsed look on a Walgreens skeleton: wrap the bones in plastic shopping bags or sheeting and melt with a heat gun. The results are a convincing rotting corpse once its stained or painted.

Although Allen Hopps probably popularized the technique the most with one of his old YouTube Wednesday shows, I recall someone several years before on HauntForum or Halloween Forum using plastic shopping bags. I had never tried it using that method, though I did use Allen's method once. But for the half-skeleton I'm using to hang on the crucifix in the church, I wanted a quick and dirty  method of corpsing, and that's what I turned to to complete it: plastic skeleton corpsing using plastic shopping bags.

Simple Corpsing Method of the Paper Mache Prop Hands

Having finished the crucifix, I'm turning my attention back to the second parishioner prop in the church scene. He's a bit of a disjointed mess right now: his head is in one place, his body's in another, and his two hands are elsewhere. It's time to get him together.

Before I can do that, though, I need to detail the parts just a little bit more. I'm starting with the hands which need just a little more to them than just bony appendages, so I use my "pancake batter" corpsing method: mix all-purpose flour and water to a consistency that's slightly thinner than pancake batter and then coat cotton balls onto the fingers to give a corpsed look.

Carving the Church Cross

Putting into practice some of those wood "carving" techniques I was given -- and going off somewhat on my own -- I begin carving the crucifix that will hang in my church scene,

Creating a Faux Wood Grain Effect

There are many ways to get a faux wood look from rigid foam insulation, and I apparently suck at them all. However, I try out three different methods and think I've come up with one I like best that will work for "carving" my crucifix prop.

Running Ragged

Whew! Today was one of those days. It started with iMovie beginning to wig out on me the other day. Not quite sure why, but I'm suddenly having problems with adding background music to the vlogs and that's making editing them take so much longer. Last night I didn't get finished till 1 a.m.
Yet this morning I woke up at my usual 5:30 a.m., which meant that by 4 p.m. i was wiped out and I crashed on the living room couch. I woke up 1-1/2 hours later and felt like my day was shot. I hadn't got anything accomplished.
I figured then would be a good time to start, but about a half hour into gathering my supplies up, I realized I lost my wedding band. Egads! That would not go over well.

I'm branded! 

Since  I've gone on the paleo diet over 2 years ago, I've dropped around 50-60 lbs. (it fluctuates) and my wedding ring is no longer tight on my finger. I've almost had it come off a couple of times but I've never lost it before. And I had no idea where it could be.
Fortunately I found it in the garage on the floor (!) but that had caused an hour or more delay in searching and didn't occur until after I went through the kitchen garbage can piece by piece to see if it had fallen in there. Yuck!
So now it's about 8 p.m., I haven't eaten and I haven't accomplished anything. Long story short (or is that short story long) I didn't get started working on any haunt stuff until 9 p.m. tonight and it looks like it's going to be another late night putting the vlog together so it's posted by 7 a.m.
But here's today's vlog, where I start trimming up the crucifix prop and putting it together.

A New Old Trend?

Are the Bloodshed Brothers the ones who started it all?

I think the Bloodshed Brothers are probably the granddaddies of haunt vloggers, and I know Troy at Halloween Hellmouth is a dedicated vlogger too, both of which produce daily content for their viewers. They were in part the inspiration for my own Bleached Bones daily vlog on YouTube.
While there seemed to have been a lot of people just a few years ago producing a lot of content to video -- not necessarily vlogs, of course, but Halloween and haunt related stuff -- it seemed most of it, if not died out (it didn't), got diminished as Facebook took over as the place to see what haunters were up to.

Steve Blumke was just lamenting about that yesterday...on Facebook! He missed the good ol' days when haunters were producing video content for haunters on YouTube, and it seemed like a really tight-knit community. (Hey Steve, where's The Boneyard Creep's videos?! C'mob, man, get back at it!)

I still think haunters are pretty close, but the explosion of people coming to the community has made it seem like we're really a large extended family. Many may not have the same hardcore, diehard love of the holiday that we do, and they're coming at it tangentially or just on the periphery. Is it that we liked being big fish in a small pond or are we already just accelerating nostalgia for a time that is only a few years past?

Obviously I've become more attuned to haunt vlogs more recently, and I noticed that MadCity Haunt has begun logging now too. Could it be a return to the good old days? Will more vloggers start vlogging their exploits too?

I know my personal life is just not interesting enough to support a daily vlog that covers my daily travails. Who wants to see me sitting at my dining room table in my underwear writing all day? Yet I also know that Jeromy and Zachary Ball and Troy Frantz developed a huge following for their vlogs by detailing their everyday exploits. As I said I'm just not that interesting. What my Bleached Bones vlog tries to do is give you just a snippet of something that is happening in my day but it's then mostly about what haunt prop I'm working on that particular day...all in about 5 minutes.

It's my belief that's all the attention span someone has to watch a vlog-type video. Hopefully people find what I'm doing entertaining enough to come back each day and see what it is I'm actually up to. I post my videos at 7 a.m. every morning, figuring it gives someone getting ready for work a reason to tune in.

So who are the other haunt vloggers out there? Is there anyone else producing daily content that I should be aware of? Is there anyone producing consistent vlog-style content, even if it's not daily? Let me know in the comments section below who you think I should be watching!

Getting' Busy With a Mannequin

Maybe it's the ravages of time eating away at my brain, but though I've been saying I need to get under my porch into my prop storage to dig out there mannequin forms I'll be using for the next prop body, the porch isn't the only place I store props. I have a shed loft too, and I really need to better organize how and where I stow things away.
But in the latest Bleached Bones vlog, I locate the forms and get to work using one as the base for making a prop body for the second parishioner prop in the church scene for my haunted house walk-thru.

Check it out and let me know if you've got any ideas for down and dirty prop bodies.

Whoa! Where the Hell Have You Been?

Have I been gone too long? Uh, yeah, when it's more than two years between posts it might be considered a long time.
Problem was, I had lost the enthusiasm for Halloween. While I set up my yard display every year, I built nothing new. Well, that's not quite true. I built a thrasher prop from plans from Pandemic Haunt Production in 2014, but I never completed it. So it's been sitting in storage.
Yet even setting up the yard became a challenge, and in 2015 I almost didn't put anything out. It was really only the constant prodding of the Dead with Dave show crew -- Dave Dankanyin, Sharon Lacaskey, Bob Connors, and Logan Roush -- with whom I chat on a daily basis, that convinced me to put something out. And just like that, I caught the fire again. I found that same old desire I previously had to build and create props rekindled.

I caught the, um, Spirit of Halloween again

I went dumpster diving at Spirit. I experimented with a new paper clay recipe. I even put put a new video up on my GhoulishCop YouTube channel showing it.
And then the video-making bug hit me again just as I decided that I was finally going to make good on my plans to have a walk-thru haunt this year. Because I was going to have to fill up my haunt with new props, meaning I was going to have to make most of them, I figured why not bring everyone along for the ride and chronicle my journey. So I started a daily vlog, Bleached Bones, that shows what I'm working on every day. They're not how-to videos...they're vlogs. A slice of my daily haunter's life. Mistakes and all.
At the suggestion of Jonni Good at Ultimate Paper Mache, I'm restarting this blog too. I'm not sure what my frequency of posts will be, whether they'll be daily, weekly, or when the mood strikes, but there definitely won't be 2+ years in between posts.
It's good to be back and I'm looking forward to what 2016 will bring.

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!