Scare Children & Combat Climate Change at the Same Time : Old School Joes

Those 12 foot plastic skeletons may look scary now, but just imagine the fright you’ll have when 12000 join the great Pacific Garbage Patch. Reducing our carbon footprint is something we need to be thinking about every day, holidays included. Those plastic decorations won’t last you a lifetime. You’ll find them utterly vapid within a season or two, once you see them in every yard on your block, if they even last that long.

Going Au Naturel

One solution is to take a page from the playbooks of our forbears. They decorated for holidays with the resources they had on hand. You’ll see great examples of this in places like Colonial Williamsburg. To an extent, we already do this. Carved jack o’lanterns remain the most iconic of all Halloween decorations. But, while jack o’lanterns and other nature-based decorations are far less impactful as their plastic counterparts, we can still do better.

Hi Tech and Eco-Friendly

My solution- go digital. Simply project your Halloween nightmare directly on your house. With digital decorations, all you are required to store is a projector, which can be used year after year. You don’t even need to have a computer handy anymore. Most new projectors accept memory cards, so video files can be loaded in advance. There’s almost no limit to what you can do.

Where can you get the files? If you’re super creative and have lots of time, you can film your own, but there are companies like AtmosFX for example, with high end production crews that have put out some seriously impressive and reasonably priced digital decorations. Also, with AtmosFX, they employ graphic designers and actually film live action scenes with real actors- no AI, which we all know, uses up enormous amounts of energy. I should also mention that my brother-in-law owns AtmosFX. But really, they make great products. Give it a try.

Living on a dark street, with no sidewalks, next to a cemetery, and a swamp, with almost no neighbors, we have never got a single trick-or-treater, but I still like to buy candy and decorate. This years theme is The Haunted School House. I used AtmosFX’s digital decoration, “Behave or Die” from their Phantasm collection, and back projected onto a shower curtain, tacked to the inside of the door.

A few more examples from the AtmosFX website:

Dancing skeletons from the AtmosFX digital decoration collection, Bone Chillers 2, projected on a garage door.

An AtmosFX digital decoration running on a loop on a flat screen TV, disguised as a painting.

For those of you who really like to push the bar technology-wise, consider integrating projection mapping into your digital decoration repertoire. With free projection mapping software such as VPT 8 digital images and video can be custom warped to fit the projection surface perfectly. Imagine having a sing jack o’lantern on your porch without even wasting a perfectly good pumpkin! (by the way, Atmos FX does singing pumpkins too)