Singing Pumpkins
I recently ran across a HauntForum post about The Singing Pumpkin, which sells animations that can be projected on uncarved pumpkins to make them appear to be singing Jack-o’-lanterns. It’s a neat idea, but since all they’re selling is the animation (they don’t license the song, so you have to supply that yourself), it made me wonder if there were any DIY versions out there.
Indeed there are! There’s a fantastic Instructable by David Andora which goes into detail about the materials and equipment you’ll need. Halloween Underworld also has some tips on setup and some specific information on connecting the projector.
Both of those tutorials use commercial animations by AtmosFEAR or Window Creeps, but if you’d rather do the animation yourself check out Karlfalcon’s video on DIY pumpkin animation; briefly, you film yourself in Jack-o’-lantern makeup and then do some video processing. There seems to be some free downloadable animations as well, like these at MP3li. (They may be ripped copies of commercial products, in which case, don’t pirate, kids!)
It’d be expensive to buy the projector and other equipment needed for this illusion, but if you’ve already got that stuff (or have been looking for an excuse to buy it) this would be a really arresting addition to a Halloween yard display.
Posted in Needful Things | 3 Comments »
August 26th, 2015 at 8:00 am
Greetings foolish mortals…Hauntforum member here and the singing pumpkins are not hard to put together and actually, projectors are not as expensive as you might think. If you read up on this, a lot of people say you have to have at least 1000 lumen (think light bulb watts) but depending on how dark it is where your haunt will be, or how far the projector is to be from the pumpkins (can also project onto tombstones and more). Only 1 projector is needed to use on up to 4 pumpkins. I have 4 projectors in my haunt and 2 are only 70 lumen which i got on ebay for $60 each. Give it a try!!!
August 26th, 2015 at 5:09 pm
This is pretty much how the Singing Busts and Madam Leota in the Haunted Mansion work. (Or used to; I imagine they’ve gone higher tech.)
January 11th, 2017 at 5:40 pm
While Karlfalcon’s video is a DIY project, everything else you mentioned and are all ready-made animations just like those offered by us (TheSingingPumpkin.com). ALL of them are just selling the animations like we are, and ALL of them require you to provide your own pumpkins, projector, media player, and speakers. In fact, our website gives ALL the info needed to set up your Singing Pumpkins display, just as the David Andora blog and AtmosFX site does.
In addition, the Window Creeps animations require you to edit the songs in yourself, provided you know how to do such a thing. Whereas, we edit the song into the animations for our customers as a FREE service, thereby avoiding the hassle of trying to do the editing yourself.
We also offer a LARGER selection of songs to choose from than anyone else, and our list keeps growing.