I have been battling this short movie clip for months. It was created in an obsolete .MOV format and I figured it was gone for good. This morning I uploaded it to youtube and see if that would convert it into something watchable. It worked. Sure, it's only 3 seconds long and shot with a super 8mm camera in the 80s and then converted to VHS tape and then to digital, but it's still pretty neat to watch.
I've blogged about her before, but this Witch prop was the first significant prop that my brother and I built. He was up in the top window releasing the prop upon unsuspecting kids and parents on the sidewalk below. Despite the other end of the cord being attached to a lamp post, and despite the cords being bright white, you'd be surprised how invisible the support lines were. Then, silently and suddenly, a Witch would swoop down and race towards her victims. He got quite good at this effect and people must have thought they were about to be nailed by this angry creature on a broom. But she'd suddenly stop as though she changed her mind... and up she'd go again. She would rest flat against the bricks below the windowsill, like Dracula scaling his castle.
Small crowds would form to watch it happen again and again, but they always seemed to have the sense to move out of the way and they'd act like they weren't a waiting crowd. So the gag wouldn't be wasted or revealed to new victims. Without fail, people would scream and run. After all, it's not every day a real Witch dive-bombs out of the darkness.
Man, was it neat.
Click below for three simple seconds of some super wonderful memories.
14 comments:
It's much less frustrating to watch this short video if you choose "LOOP" for the video in youtube.
And a side note: Her hat would later become the hat of my Johnny Appleseed scarecrow - spray painted tan with the point poked inward.
and, of course, you can slow down the playback speed.
Yep it’s short but, I like seeing the early haunt experiments…
That is pretty freaking sweet! This is such a treasure to have.
Wow! So Cool! Thanks for posting this. Pretty ambitious for a couple of kids.
Awesome - that's a stroke of genuis and the foreshadowing of the Halloween brilliance to come.
Thanks, guys!
Proud of this trick as I haven't really seen it anywhere in the years I've been searching for blog material. You just need some poor schlub who agrees to operate it all night long, at the risk of being sore for a couple of days after Halloween.
You could always use the Axworthy rig….
This is soooooooo AWESOME! I love getting to see this little window into the early years. And I am blown away you guys accomplished this at that age. Love that you posted this!!!
Fantastic! Thanks for sharing it.
Thanks, guys.
Wishing we had filmed the other Pulley Projects.. A Big White Ghost, a Giant Bat, and the huge Black Spider (there was a Slimer too, but we don't speak of that). Thankfully photos exist of the Ghost and Spider and they're at the below link. But to see those giant things coming down that line again in video would be so nostalgic for this guy. The Spider was the most natural-looking, since the cord was essentially her web.
http://pumpkinrot.com/pages/Page6.htm
This is such an amazing throwback moment for me...the first time I was ever captivated by a home display was someone who had done a pulley ghost from a second story window.
This was decades ago; well before the advent of the internet, long before the existence of an online forum, and certainly before you could just walk into a store and buy some kind of animatronic....it was a mystery to me how someone could have something like that running at their home.
I watched that thing for a very long time, and from that moment on, there was absolutely ZERO chance that I wasn't going to grow up to have my very own Halloween display.
Great work!! It's the little simple things like this in the beginnings that we treasure!!!
Thanks!
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