The Yard of the Living Dead 2012

Here are a few shots of the yard on the big night.  There were a lot of unfinished projects this year; but we saw a marked increase in the number of TOT's this year, so it seemed like a good year all in all.

This year saw my first foray into animatronic propmaking.  The prop was a simple shiatsu spider victim.  It is funny how home haunters who know about all of the amazing props out there can get a little embarassed about a simple prop; but the reaction by the TOT's is always positive.  Here is a short video of the prop in action.



I Finally Finished My First Groundbreaker!

Well, after an interminable amount of time stuck with "analysis paralysis", I finally got something new finished for The Yard of the Living Dead this year.  I used tips, tricks, and inspiration from various sources on the web and the forums.  This groundbreaker is one hundred percent homemade from the paper mache skull to the cardboard ribcage.  Here are a few pictures of him in the garage.

 

I will get a few more pictures of him after he is placed in The Yard of the Living Dead later today.  One thing I learned during the construction of this groundbreaker is that I suck at making hands, the thumbs especially.



The Rib Bone's Connected to... Some Other Bone

I wanted to put a full corpse in the cemetery this year; but time was just not on my side.  I will put together a corpse torso and have it "peeking" out from behind a tombstone.  I followed the steps outlined on Christian Hanson's video "Make You Own Scratch Built Corpse" and made a ribcage this week.  In his video, Christian uses a plastic 5 gallon bucket to make his ribcage.  I am super cheap, so I just used cardboard.  I think it will do for my purposes.

Here is Emma Sue The Littlest Zombie modeling the completed ribcage.  I will add a PVC pipe spine and arms and corpse it out this weekend.  More pictures to follow.

I Decided to Give My Minion a Hand... and an Arm

My minion is busy building his first styrofoam tombstones.  He is very excited to put them in the cemetery.  One of his tombstones' epitaphs describes the fate of a man who was buried alive.  He wanted to have an arm reaching up from the grave in front of this tombstone.  I slapped together a quick newspaper hand and arm for him to use.

I found a thread on the Halloween Forum by FearingtonHouse that talks about a super cheap and fast corpsing method using only outdoor latex paint and paper towels.  I am going to give it a try tomorrow and post some pictures of the results.