Halloween - getting creative with editing.

Halloween Season is here and for me playing the "Keeping Up with the Jones' " game involves Halloween decorations. Which, is really hard as some of my neighbors work as SPFX artists, but giving it the old college try and never saying die, I  came up with these yard decorations. Having young children myself, I was concerned that most yard decorations were too much Friday the 13th and not enough Scooby-Doo. So I took inspiration from the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland and created a "scary" but not "horrific" realm for children to trick-or-treat. My TV crypts are modelled on the old crypts like those you'd see endlessly on a loop  in a Scooby-Doo episode as the Gang would run-by again and again chasing or being chased by a villain, On Halloween night I install old TV monitors inside them and play a clip edited on a loop. In this case the old "Skeleton Dance" by Walt Disney. Produced in 1929 and drawn by the amazing animator Ub Iwerks, it was the very first of the Silly Symphonies and in 1994 was placed at #18 of the Greatest Cartoons ever by a vote of  animators.
 
"Skeleton Dance" was shot on the aspect standardof the day then a 1.33:1 ratio and 35mm black and white film. Both the title card and ending card original music are  missing in later  re-issues, so music (and some efx sounds) were used from a later short cartoon,  Mickey Mouse's: "The Mad Doctor."

It's so much fun to watch the kids and families stop and be dazzled by the videos running inside the crypts. Last year I added a Digital Video Projector and turned the upper windows in the house into movie screens also running the "Skeleton Dance" cartoon. 

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