HauntX

We just got back from a Haunted Convention last weekend. It was in LA at the LAX Hilton. You can check out all the details at www.hauntx.com. There were a couple of reasons for going. One of the major ones is our current plan to try to figure out how to make money doing something with halloween instead of me going back to work in the computer field. The other reason was to attend the "Golden Bucky" awards for best Yard Haunt of 2006. Chris and I didn't enter this year due to a mixup on when things should be submitted. The awards were fun and this year they even had 2 other sets of awards that were presented to the pros.

The conference was a lot of fun. The vendor displays were pretty cool with lots of halloween stuff from costumes, masks, animated props, electronics, and more. They also had a floor of B-Movie actors to sign autographs. There were also some paranormal experts there to talk about "real" ghosts (yea right!). They had seminars on all sorts of stuff. We attended 2 on Marketing your event. We also attended a couple of technical ones on programming animatronic boards and building animated props. We met a lot of people in the industry and a few home haunters like ourselves. We didn't buy tickets to the dinner/dance which we regretted since that was were a lot of socializing went on. But the tickets were $50 each. We also didn't get in until almost midnight on Friday and we missed the meet & greet they had that night. But all in all it was a good weekend. They had a lot of entertainment options for the out of town people to go see and do. We stayed in our room Saturday night and just relaxed and soaked in all that we had saw and talked about what we thought we would be able to do. Sunday night was the awards. Oh, we did pick up our copy of the 8 disc DVD's of 125 haunted yards, homes, parties and pro/charity displays. This is what the awards were based on. Pretty cool stuff.