Digital Halloween Decorations: More Halloween, Less Stuff

There is something wonderfully ridiculous about Halloween.

For one night a year, otherwise respectable adults put skeletons in their yards, ghosts in their windows, tombstones on their lawns, and giant spiders on their houses. We buy candy by the bagful and dress up as everything from superheroes to serial killers.

I’m not here to spoil the fun.

In fact, I’m here to suggest a way to make Halloween even more spectacular while buying less stuff.

Instead of filling the garage with another collection of plastic decorations or using perfectly good food as a temporary lawn ornament why not put the decoration on the house itself?

I’m talking about digital Halloween decorations.

The problem with decorating for one night

If you’ve been reading Old School Joe’s for a while, you probably know that I’m fond of a simple philosophy:

Reuse. Repurpose. Recycle.

That doesn’t mean I think we should stop enjoying holidays. Quite the opposite. I think we should find ways to enjoy them that don’t require us to continually buy, store, and eventually discard more stuff.

Halloween presents a particularly interesting challenge.

Every year we’re encouraged to buy the latest giant plastic skeleton, inflatable monster, plastic tombstone, animatronic ghoul, or whatever the seasonal merchandise departments have dreamed up. Some of those things will last for years. Others won’t.

And even when they do survive, there’s a strange phenomenon that happens with mass produced seasonal decorations: once everybody on the block has the same giant skeleton, it isn’t quite as special anymore.

Those twelve foot plastic skeletons may look scary now. But imagine the fright you’ll experience when 12,000 of them join the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But the larger point isn’t. If we can create a spectacular Halloween display without manufacturing another giant piece of plastic, that’s worth considering.

Maybe the old fashioned approach is better

One alternative is to go back to the way people decorated before seasonal merchandise became a major industry. Use what you have. Use things from nature. Use your imagination.

Carved jack-o’-lanterns are the obvious example. A pumpkin is certainly preferable to a plastic pumpkin that will eventually become waste. And if you actually eat the pumpkin, roast the seeds, or compost it afterward, even better.

I’m certainly not suggesting that pumpkins are somehow environmentally evil. But there is an odd practice surrounding Halloween: using food as a temporary decoration and then throwing it away. If you’re going to eat the pumpkin, that’s one thing. If you’re going to compost it, that’s another.

But if what you really wanted was the appearance of a jack-o’-lantern on your porch for a few weeks, there’s another possibility. You could make the pumpkin out of pixels.

What if your house became the Halloween decoration?

Imagine looking at your house and seeing a window. Now imagine that the window suddenly appears to contain a ghost. Not a flat picture of a ghost. A moving ghost. Or skeletons dancing inside your garage. Or a haunted room appearing behind your front door. Or a jack-o’-lantern singing on your porch. Or a group of ghosts appearing to float in midair.

That’s the basic idea behind digital Halloween decorations.

Instead of buying the physical object, you project an animated video onto a surface. Your window becomes the decoration. Your garage door becomes the decoration. Your wall becomes the decoration. Even your television can become the decoration.

And when Halloween is over, you don’t have to find a place in your garage for any of it. You put away the projector. The ghosts go back into digital storage. That’s it.

The same projector can be used again next year, and the same decorations can be displayed in a completely different place.

And they’re much more impressive than you might think

This is the part I think is easiest to miss if you’ve never actually seen digital decorating in action. It isn’t just putting a spooky video on a television. The illusion can be remarkably convincing.

Here’s a little Halloween display I made at my own house:

My house isn’t exactly located in the middle of Trick or Treat Central. We live on a dark road with no sidewalks, next to a cemetery and a swamp, with very few neighbors. In fact, we’ve never had a single trick or treater. But that hasn’t stopped me from decorating.

For this display I used AtmosFX’s Behave or Die decoration from the Phantasms collection and rear projected it onto a shower curtain that I attached to the inside of my front door. The shower curtain became a screen. The projector became the decoration. And suddenly my perfectly ordinary front door became a haunted schoolhouse.

That’s one of the things I find so fascinating about digital decorating: You aren’t limited to the shape of the object you’ve purchased. You can change the entire scene simply by changing the video.

The simplest setup is remarkably straightforward.

You need:

• a projector
• a surface onto which you can project
• a digital decoration
• something capable of playing the video

That’s about it. And you don’t necessarily need a computer sitting beside the projector. Depending on the equipment you use, digital decorations can be played from a USB drive or other compatible playback device.

AtmosFX currently offers hundreds of digital decorations, with options designed for windows, walls, TVs, projection materials, and other surfaces. Some are specifically designed for rear projection through windows, while others can be displayed on walls and other large surfaces.

ATMOSFX / DIGITAL DECORATING

Then, if you get hooked, you can get considerably more ambitious.

From a window to an entire haunted house

This is where things get really interesting. A technique called projection mapping allows you to distort and position video so that it fits the contours of a physical object or building.

Instead of merely projecting a rectangle onto a wall, you can make the video conform to the architecture. Windows can appear to change. Doors can move. Parts of a building can appear to collapse. Characters can appear to interact with the structure. The house itself becomes part of the animation.

AtmosFX now has a dedicated projection mapping section for people who want to take digital decorating much further.

I have played around with projection mapping myself, and it can become a wonderfully nerdy rabbit hole. But you can get a surprisingly impressive effect with a very simple setup.

You can even make a pumpkin without wasting a pumpkin

Here’s one of my favorite possibilities. A singing jack-o’-lantern. You could carve a pumpkin, put a light inside it, and enjoy it for a few nights. Or you could project an animated pumpkin onto a suitable surface and make it sing.

And here’s an especially clever twist: digital pumpkin effects don’t necessarily have to be projected onto a pumpkin shaped object at all. AtmosFX demonstrates projecting its pumpkin animations onto real or artificial pumpkins and even other rounded objects. So you can make a pumpkin appear to come alive without actually cutting up another pumpkin. That’s pretty close to Halloween magic.

This isn’t just a Halloween trick

Another thing I like about digital decorating is that the equipment isn’t necessarily a one holiday purchase. The same projector can be used for Halloween, Christmas, birthdays, parties, family gatherings, movies, presentations or absolutely nothing at all for most of the year.

And the digital decorations themselves don’t occupy a shelf in your garage. You can have Halloween ghosts, Christmas scenes, birthday animations, or other effects without acquiring a corresponding pile of physical objects.

That’s a pretty good example of reuse. Buy the equipment once. Use it repeatedly. Change the experience with digital content instead of replacing the hardware.

A word about AtmosFX

I should probably stop here and make something very clear. I am not an unbiased reviewer. The company is owned by my brother-in-law. So yes, I have a family connection to the company. But I wouldn’t be writing about AtmosFX simply because my brother-in-law owns the company. I’ve actually used the products. I’ve seen what they can do.

And I think the underlying idea creating reusable decorations digitally instead of continually buying physical objects is genuinely interesting for anyone who cares about reducing waste. You can, of course, make your own digital decorations. If you’re handy with video editing, you can create whatever you want. And there are even some free projection mapping tools out there, like VPT (though not the easiest thing to learn).

But producing professional quality animated decorations is a rather different proposition. AtmosFX has built a library of professionally produced digital decorations for Halloween and other holidays, ranging from relatively simple effects to elaborate characters and projection mapping material. For someone who wants the spectacle without learning how to produce a movie, that’s a pretty useful shortcut.

And there’s another reason I’m rooting for small companies like this

There’s a broader issue here that has nothing to do with Halloween. When household budgets get tight, people quite reasonably cut back on things they don’t need.

A new Halloween decoration? Probably not essential.

But here’s the problem with that way of thinking when taken too far: A lot of small businesses make things that nobody actually needs. They make things that make us laugh. Things that entertain us. Things that decorate our homes. Things that give us hobbies. Things that make a holiday more fun. Things that make life a little more interesting.

Those things may not be necessities, but they are part of what makes life enjoyable. And small companies specializing in those kinds of products can be particularly vulnerable when people start tightening their belts.

So when you find a small company making something you genuinely enjoy, there’s something to be said for supporting it particularly when you can buy something that you’ll use repeatedly rather than something destined to become another piece of clutter.

I’m not suggesting that everyone should go out and buy a projector. I’m suggesting that when you are going to spend money on something recreational, it is worth thinking about what that purchase leaves behind.

Reuse doesn’t mean giving up the fun

I don’t want sustainable living to become a competition over who can have the least fun. Quite the opposite. I’d rather find ways to have more fun with fewer resources. That’s what appeals to me about digital Halloween decorations.

Instead of asking: What else can I buy? You can ask: What can I do with what I already have?

A projector can become a haunted window. A shower curtain can become a movie screen. A wall can become a haunted house. A television can become a portal to another world. And a digital file can be used again next year without occupying a cubic foot of space in your garage for the other 364 days. That’s a pretty good Halloween trick. And there’s no plastic skeleton required. Well… Okay. There’s still a projector. I’m not claiming I’ve solved climate change. But if we can reuse the hardware, reuse the digital content, avoid unnecessary physical stuff, and still scare the neighbors, I’m willing to call that a pretty good treat.

Happy Halloween and remember: Reuse. Repurpose. Recycle.