2002 Halloween-L Haunt Video

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        Halloween-L Music Video - Low Res (320x240) (9.5mb .wmv format)

The Halloween-L group is an active group of hundreds of people who create Halloween props and homemade haunted houses. Professional haunters are also known to frequent the group.

In 2002 I decided to collect everyone's home movie of their haunted house and compile them onto a series of cd's. Since I had all of the raw footage in high-rez on my computer, it seemed a natural step to collate the best of the best into a short video.

Early in the project I decided only to use moving props or footage of props that moved, to give the video a lot of energy. I cut out the 1-2 second clips of dozens (hundreds) of props in action and consolidated them into groups (skeletons, graveyards, etc.)

Knowing I needed some good sound for the movie, I first tried to select Public Domain screams and thuds and gurgles but the results were not very satisfying, so in desperation I ended up with the idea of a "music video". This was kind of a last resort as I have no music ability or talent at all. I thought about recruiting someone with musical ability but I kinda wanted this to be "my" project, my little something that I give back to the Halloween community that has given me so much over the years.

So I settled on a "voice over" style, with me talking in the background. I whipped out my handy dandy beat-generator and spent some time coming up with a funky beat for it. Then I recorded the voice-overs and spent some time laying them down at specific times in the audio. Once I had the video done, the base beat done and the voice-over done, I was ready for a melody of some kind.

That's when it happened.

For some unknown reason, both the music file and its two backups died. I was using Cakewalk to do the music and their tech support was unable to solve my problem.

Faced with re-creating the whole thing from scratch, I decided that it was "done" as-is.

I hope you enjoy watching it!

Mark