My yard display is up!
All in all it came together pretty smoothly. I was feeling bad about it after I set everything out during the day, but once night fell and I turned on the lights, all the yuckiness dissolved and I am just quite pleased.
In past years I've waited to document my installations until the very end of their lives because I keep tweaking things throughout a show and it looks best just before it comes down. This year I realized I can take some photos right away and take new photos if I make anything better later! So here's a pretty empty page that will get more detailed in the weeks to come.
It was gratifying to take some things I made for past Halloweens that I never properly finished painting and give them new life. Every time I do something like this, since the very first time in 2016, I'm amazed at how much better things look and feel when they just have a little extra paint on them.
The toucan is doing great, although as I write this it is raining pretty hard for the first time in months and I had to cover it up. I haven't assessed the damage yet but I think some of the cardboard stuff has kinda melted. But a lot is doing totally fine. Acrylic paint is basically liquid plastic and it's shockingly good at preserving cardboard so long as there's a stronger structure keeping everything in place.
I've also made a lot of progress on the band and I'm feeling really good about them! On Sunday a friend came over so I could help him trim down some IKEA IVAR shelf uprigts. As payment I got to keep the offcuts, and in a lovely twist of fate those offcuts were the perfect size to make a really sturdy stage for the guys.
It's kind of hard to believe but this is my first time working with fishing line. It rocks! All the strings that won't move are secured to the stage, and each character has one loose string that'll be attached to a servo as soon as I strap those to the "catwalk" or whatever.
I finally wrote some music for them to play; you can hear the 14-minute track here. As with most of my installation soundtracks, it is pretty spare and repetitive, trying to find the right balance of setting a consistent tone with no fixed start or end point but also not being annoying to listen to for long durations.
A unique thing this year is that I've got to actually program movements to this soundtrack! I'll soon fire up Bottango to record some servo movements, basically acting out each character with a video game controller one at a time, then writing that all to an SD card and playing it back over and over and over.
This stage will be nestled in the back of my yard, upstage right (i.e. on your left side as you face the house), obscured by the backdrop that is just behind the toucan. The goal is for people on the sidewalk to be able to tell something is going on back there but not have a good line of sight to it, encouraging them to walk up the walkway, into the jungle, to check it out. I want it to feel like it's integrated into the space, rather than a stage that is incongruously plopped in the yard, so I'll have to figure out how to decorate the set after the mechanics are finished. I'm thinking that having some leafy bits flowing out and breaking up the shape of the stage will help.
That's all for now! Tomorrow is my brother's wedding and hopefully the rain stops. By next week the band will be on stage along with some more little surprises (I hope), just in time for Halloween! Halloween…