Next Halloween, that is!
Trick-or-treating was good. I ran out of candy for the first time since moving to this neighborhood! I only bought like 40 or so candy bars (full-size of course) because usually we get like 10 people on our little dead end street, but even a light rain couldn't keep these kids away! Most of them were obviously more excited by the candy than the decorations, but more than a few stopped to compliment my work, which is amazing.
I ended up not adding last week's oscillating mechanisms to the display, and it was fine without them. I kept the soundtrack, but I did add one additional layer of audio—an unpredictable loop of various growls and hoots and caws, playing loud of the BIG speakers. I put the 25-minute loop on SoundCloud if you want to hear it for yourself! Put it on, forget you put it on, startle yourself and your loved ones repeatedly.
The yard is now back to normal, but I got some more photos and videos before that. I will eventually cut the video into a clip that demonstrates how the band looked. (They looked pretty good.)
I've been planning next Halloween for weeks, and I really want to do more with this mechanical marionette stage thing. I've grown tired of the flats and backdrops, and I think they might still have their place in the future, but I decided the big yard-spanning setup looks kinda shitty. My vision at the moment is to make five pieces that are more standalone but work together as a set. Each piece will be sort of like the manger-y puppet stage, kind of an isolated moment in time and space, but with enough decoration around it that it also works as a piece of decor for a region of the yard. So the space will probably be about as filled as it was this year (or last), but anywhere you look will make more sense on its own. This probably doesn't make sense! I will demonstrate later!
I arrived at a quantity of five of these things somewhat arbitrarily, probably mostly because 5 things made sense for Bobby's Birthday, but I've also walked backwards into a five-act structure feeling natural for this sort of simple-narrative walk-through attraction. I've mapped Pirates of the Caribbean and the Fantasyland dark rides to it, and that seems to repeatedly make sense; it's like my AABA Dark Rides idea from six years ago but with an extra A I guess; it's compatible with my deconstruction of gags which I wrote over a decade ago wow. I will never stop dissecting dark rides!
I'm considering popping by Six Flags this weekend because they were brave enough to extend Fright Fest an extra week. I also RSVPed to a passholder thing at Universal Studios Hollywood for Christmas because it's Christmas now. I'm thinking about a little penguiny display for the yard as well, but first I gotta finish packing up all the Halloween stuff in the garage.