white noise

Here it is, a full two weeks since our party, and one since Halloween, and I haven’t posted a peep. Needless to say the 10th annual Nightmare Before Halloween was great.

Lots of folks came out (about 40 altogether) including a few who hadn’t made it in years. The theme was “The Ghost of Halloween Past”, so we relived themes and costumes of the past and gave out awards for some of the most memorable contributions.

Joe and Carol won the costume contest with a film-worthy rendition of characters from Hellboy 2. But it was only a narrow win over John and Kelly’s costumes from the upcoming Alice in Wonderland remake.

As for D and I, we revisited an old costume with a new twist – the ghosts of Willy Wonka and Oompa Loompa.

And just to start things off, we helped set a World Record for the largest, simultaneous dance to “Thriller”. Nearly 23,000 people around the world grooved together for nearly 6 minutes as we participated in Thrill The World 2009.

The invitation for the Tenth Annual Nightmare Before Halloween has been posted. Actually, I don’t think the word “invitation” cuts it anymore. This baby is over 5 minutes long. It pays homage to all the hard work and great times we’ve had over the years.

This year’s theme, “The Ghost of Halloween Past”, is all about celebrating our tradition of insanity. With any luck we’ll see plenty of callbacks to old themes and costumes along with a few new surprises.

We’re also quite excited about our Thrill the World dance which will kick things off. I know most people are awfully reluctant to dance – especially when it takes time to learn the full routine, but this is a pretty unique event. For five minutes or so, our little corner of chaos will join over 300 sites around the world in celebrating the best horror song of all time. I’m hoping that most people remember how reluctant they once were to get in full costume with a bunch of adults, and give this a shot, too.

Oh well, one month to go!

Danny Elfman – This is Halloween

I’m pleased to announce that the Powerloader has won the Instructables.com DIY Halloween Contest! We were awarded the Craft Grand Prize and the Core77 Editors’ Choice Award (Core77 is a design website/zine). There were a bunch of prizes and different categories, and I’m sure the Instructables editors wanted to spread the wealth a bit, so we’re not mentioned under the costume category which is sort of humorous.

In all there were 328 contest entries including some projects that were really ingenious and complicated. After entering and losing three other online contests it’s sweet to have nabbed some of the top honors in this one (this site, after all, is near and dear to the DIY geek community and was the one I was really gunning for). The swag we should be receiving is quite generous – over $900 worth if you can believe that! While the hourly rate spent on the costume doesn’t even match up to minimum wage, the prizes easily pay for the materials of the costume several times over.

I really encourage those of you who routinely blow us away with your Halloween creativity to document your efforts next year…it very well may pay off!

The cable channel G4 featured Donna’s Halloween costume on Monday’s episode of Attack of the Show! Check us out as third item in this clip:

I’m just digging that they called me a “nice, young man”. Ah, the anonymity of the internet.

And yes, I’m working on the Halloween website, but I’ve got a cold, so give a brother a break 🙂

for best costume!

Vote for the Powerloader in the College Humor costume contest (http://www.collegehumor.com/halloween). The site randomly pits two costumes against each other, so you probably will have to vote on several before you see Big Yella.

UPDATE: We didn’t win. At the time the contest ended we were in second place and prizeless.

You can’t blame a guy for trying to milk the most ambitious Halloween costume he’s ever taken on, right? Good. I’ve been posting Ripley and her Powerloader all over the net. I’m hoping we might even win an online contest or two.

Check out a full play-by-play of how we put it together in this Instructable. And here’s a little video from the party:

Lastly, here’s one more shot of Ripley on Halloween night with the treat-or-treaters.

Very happy to have delivered another great party to everyone last weekend! We had about 35 party goers and all had suburb costumes. As usual the night was a blast and it seemed to fly by far too quickly.

Our apologies for being a little late to getting things rolling. Rob and Stacey and then Keith and Farrah had to entertain themselves for a few minutes (without music!) while D and I slipped into our costumes. I think we finished our last decoration and started changing at a quarter to 8.

Speaking of which, our Aliens costumes finally came together the day of the party. The costumes we wore were awfully simple, but it was all about the accessories this year. In my case I built an M56 Smart Gun of the colonial marines. It had the pan and tilt harness, a working ammo counter, and lights and sounds when firing. It also plugged into my headset and sent a live, wireless video feed to the TV. Fun stuff to make.

But that was way outclassed by Donna’s “accessory” – a working Powerloader. The powerloader stood about 7 feet tall and had ten degrees of freedom built into it (that’s ten joints for the non-engineer types). There’s an electroluminescent light around the operator cage and of course a working beacon light on top. It was a blast to build, and though heavy, Donna could actually move in the thing pretty well. For her sweat and my tears we were rewarded with best costume.

The game was good – and while the questions were pretty easy for the scifi devotees, they also weren’t so hard to complete annoy everyone else. The Starship Troopers team warped to victory on the strength of their impersonations in the final round.

The nightmare website will be updated after a few more days with photos of all the action. Happy Halloween!

Theme and date announced!
You’ve got nine months to prepare. GO!

Just in time for Thanksgiving, you can go re-live the Halloween party. The Halloween website even has a new, dedicated domain: http://NightmareBeforeHalloween.com. Go check it and don’t forget to put in your suggestions for next year from the home page.

The 80s era falls silent once again as the big Halloween festivities (the 8th if you are counting) have come and gone leaving us all with a post-partum malaise before the actual holiday was even here. The event was glorious and all the costumes inspired (and theme appropriate!). We’re really lucky to have such a great bunch of friends willing to participate in the silliness year after year.

The build up to the big event was very feverish. I took a total of three days off work and Donna and I worked countless hours on different projects. Many nights I was up until 3 or 4 in the morning. But it was not for lack of starting early. Some projects (like the Marshall amp stacks) were started two months in advance. Despite that, decorating continued until a half hour before the start of the party when we finally starting getting dressed.

The two projects that really put on the pressure coming down the stretch were the Billie Jean lighted sidewalk and the giant Rubik’s cubes for the game. In the past week a typical night would consist on Donna and I getting home from work unusually early, grabbing a quick dinner, then working on the cubes until close to midnight. By that time, Donna would crash out and I’d move on to the sidewalk for about 2-3 hours of work. Finally, before turning in, I’d try to put an hour in Flash to flesh out the game we’d be playing. But it all came together and no project was left unfinished.

As usual, we got some very key help. Suzie and company brought a bunch of food, as did Carol and Joe, Brian and Teri, and several others. Carol also made the Thriller zombie scene possible and Joe did his best to keep Donna from sliding off the roof while she was hanging the Back the Future clock in the rain.

For all the hard work, I certainly made up for it with some hard play. Once the formalities of the game and video voting were taken care of, I really cut loose. The further the night went on, the fuzzier my memory. The last of us crashed or departed at about 5:30am, and the last couple hours are a complete blur. I guess I did my alter ego, Slash, justice and truly partied like a rock star!

An update to the Nightmare web site should occur this weekend, complete with lots of photos, so stay tuned.