Every year I look forward to January, primarily because it's my time to catch up physically, psychologically and even spiritually after the hustle & bustle that stretches from September through December. I've been updating the Halloween site with my 2019 photos and haven't really covered my Halloween shenanigans from 2019.
My dear friend Britta Peterson (right) and her husband Glen Simon were in a house selling/buying frenzy so as the Scream Team we decided to have Eerie Elegance do a takeover of my yard haunt! We chose a revival of the 2015 Day of the Dead display, our greatest collaboration to date, which features large colorful tombstones, 300 flickering candles, ghostly projected figures, and a full animatronic skeleton band playing and telling a story!
Many of the larger tombstones we used in 2015 had been lost, so Britta recreated them from scratch. We also remade a large portion of the candles, each hand wired & soldered. She is a very talented, tenacious woman – sometimes terrifying – and a complete inspiration to me! Her Halloween displays are legendary and feature amazing tech and builds that far exceed what I can do, so to have them at my house was a dream come true. We used the same script we wrote and performed together in 2015 but made a few edits.
My front yard is very different from hers so she made many adjustments to the layout and projections to compensate. It was an insane amount of work for one person. All these while trying to revive the skeleton band that was disassembled and refused to get back together without a lot of negotiations. Typical, right?
Glen, who is the resident engineer and makes things move, tasked me with working on what he described as a "simple" animatronic: a pop-up skull. Truth be told it was really straight-forward but being my first foray into animated props it seemed daunting. He handed me a motorized rig, a power supply, and skull. After some trial and error, I did it! You can see my handy work in the spirited ofrenda (altar) video, link below.
In the end it all worked out and we ran just under 100 shows for 8 days, with over 1000 total visitors on Halloween night alone. We also entered the City of Santa Clara Halloween Decorating contest and won the People's Choice Award. Not a bad way for Britta & Glen to end their run in Santa Clara now that they own a (HAUNTED!?) Victorian mansion in San Jose, CA home of the infamous Winchester Mystery House.
View the full gallery here senorscary.com/2019dayofthedead and at
eerieelegance.com, and the short video below:
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