We made a Treasure Chest

Our good friend and resident artist Chris Reid sketched us an idea for a donation box this year. The main part of the prop is a large treasure chest. So I bought some fence boards at home depot on Friday and started work this Saturday. We got the box built and aluminum strap on it. Then Sunday our friend Elyssa textured and painted the aluminum. I also cast a latch and padlock using some quick cast resin. The basic concept is 2 small mud guys holding a chest. The chest is fake with a real latch and padlock in back to hold the donations. It is looking good!

The Mud Man Workshop weekend was a success

We had 4 pairs work on building their own mud man like the ones in our driveway at Halloween. Starting Saturday at 10am they finished forming the frame with chicken wire and then cut the burlap and then soaked it in mud and made the mud man. We let it dry for 24hrs and then came back on Sunday and painted them black, dry brushed them and applied some polyurethane. They came out great and we were very impressed with everyone who attend and well they caught on to the process.

Our Second Annual Tombstone Workshop

We just finished up with our first of 3 workshops this year. We had 7 people over and we showed them how to make their very own Davis Graveyard style tombstones. Everyone enjoyed themselves and we look forward to hearing about how their own tombstones turn out. Our students Anne, Mace, Judith, Sari, Ron, Kendra and Brian were all wonderful and did a great job!

New people at FFNW this year

We invited some of our friends of DavisGraveyard to stay at FFNW. They appeared to get along and enjoy each others company. What a crowd!

Another FFNW behind us

We just spent the past 5 days hosting FrightFest Northwest in Champoeg (sham-POO-ee) State Park. We took Wednesday off and packed up the camper with our stuff and LOTs of other stuff too. We drove down to the RV loop at the park we rented and started setting up that evening. Our long time member Steve setup a marvoulus moving theater we all enjoyed each night. The adult only horror movie selection was tastefully selected and watching 2 features each night from 9:15 - 1am each night was one of the highlights of the week. His 2700sqft theater area was equiped with a cool tiki bar with 2 featured drinks each night and a VERY cool zombie detector at the front gate plus tons of other cool features.

Getting Ready for FFNW

I built 6 cage stands this weekend to hold cages while you paint them for the 15 cages we are making at FFNW. Also made a few extra circle bending templates for people to use.

We have started to amass a small pile of prizes, decorations, supplies and misc stuff for FFNW in a few weeks.

Penny tombstone

For those of you who saw the display last year we made a tombstone in honor of the Dr. Horrible Sing along Blog. The female heroine Penny dies in the end by shrapnel from an exploding death ray gun. The actress who plays Penny is Felicia Day the creator of The Guild an online web series about a group of online gamers. Through a mutual Halloween friend Felicia has heard about our tombstone we created and asked if she could see it. So our mutual friend asked us to take a few pictures and he would send it to her.

Little did Felicia know but we had misspelled "Captian" on the epitaph last year. So last weekend we secretly filled in the 'ia" with expanding 2-part foam after doing a pencil rubbing of the letters on paper and sanded it out and re-carved it with the correct order and painted and detailed it. Our repair work is flawless.

WE ARE SO EXCITED!

We are on Hauntcast!

This months issue of Hauntcast features an interview with us. We had fun talking to Chris Baker and supporting the best Podcast for home haunters!

Halloween 2009 prop making has offically started!

Our friend Dan carved 2 coffin cruiser tombstones for us this weekend so we mounted backs, shaped and painted them.

These were supposed to be done last October but we didn't get to them. We wanted to get them done before car show season this year.

We are teaching Skeleton Cage making at FFNW this summer so I wanted to practice making one to take notes on what I am going to have to prep for. Also tried a new finishing technique. Using Great Stuff foam insulation we covered the aluminum bar and then painted it with flat black spray paint.

Hauntcon Costume Ball

Here is the photo they took of us for this years costume ball. There was a photo stand as you entered the ball and everyone got a copy of their photo during the evening. Wish we had copies of some of the other costumes.

Another Great HAuNTcon!

We just got back from our trip to Milwaukee, WI to attend another Haunted Attraction National Tradeshow & Convention.

There was so much to do and people to meet we don't even know where to begin. We saw tons of really good haunted houses. We attended a fantastic costume ball. We gave a seminar on building your own 3-axis bucky skull. We attended some very good educational seminars. We spent an entire day watching the Bad Boys Scenic design group build a Crypt scene in a day with a little help from us once in awhile. We stayed up way too late in a few hospitality suites. We sampled the local Wisconsin food. We are tired but fired up about halloweeen now that we are back.

Had a great time

on the Pre-Show tour. Off to another haunt tonight!

We will post more tomorrow.

We are off

We are headed to Hautcon for a week. We are doing the whole show, from the Pre-show tour to the the one day seminar on Monday from Bad Boys Scenic Design.

Should be fun as always! We will try to post while we are there.

Happy Haunting!

We have a merchandise store

After a few weeks of checking out Cafe Press and a few of it's competitors we decided to use Zazzle.com for our shirts and other stuff we can put our logo and photos on. One of the main reasons was we wanted to be able to put our logo on the back of black shirts. Something Cafe Press doesn't do. We also need a site that had lots of its shirt styles in black as well as some other intereting items like cups, mouse pads, magnets etc.

You can check out the store here http://www.zazzle.com/DavisGraveyard

We also updated our products page with a like to the store as well as links to our photo books that we buy through MyPublisher.com. As always our products page has the last 3 years worth of DVD's we have put together with footage and extras from each year.

http://www.davisgraveyard.com/products.htm

Zazzle even has a skateboard you can customize! We might make this available one of these days?

We have been published again!

Our second Haunted Attraction Magazine article came out this month. This one is about our video head effect that we presented in several seminars last year.

View Article

The 2008 Awards are here

Came home Friday night to box blocking my back entry way.....what could it be? :)

We open it up and find that it is the awards from Ghost Ride for the 2008 Haunters Videos.

They are very cool, shinny gold skulls. Reminiscent of the classic Golden Bucky Awards.

I will design and order the plaques for them on Monday and they should be ready in plenty of time to get out to the winners as soon as they are chosen.

Big thanks to Micheal at Ghost Ride for giving us a great deal on the awards. We have updated the Haunters Video Awards website. Works better and we have listed the volunteer judges for 2008 - big thanks to them too!!!

Theme to Halloween

Working on the "Easter egg" that we put on our haunt DVD each year is always a last minute idea that usually comes together quite nicely. This year, no exception.

We figured out the footage no problem, made some edits and then we had to find the music. We wanted something different than we normally use (although we love Midnight Syndicate and Nox Arcana) this year, as with our haunt video, we threw caution to the wind about copyright. Working often with artists, that is very hard for me to do. I am pretty anal about only using things that I have the rights to....I have this funny allergic reaction to lawsuits (some bad past life experiences.)

But, this year, with the home haunt, I finally gave in to husbands request to "loosen up." One of my favorite things husband did was create the "Ode to Halloween" video of our cat Hal (Halloween Cat.) The Ma Rainey song "Black Cat" is perfect, I like obscure songs that are under the radar - and that song is a good contrast to what we normally use.

We had already high jacked Christopher Walken for the video (not literally, take a lesson from Suicide Kings and never kidnap Mr. Walken), so when it came to score this year's Easter egg, we grabbed the theme from Halloween and the Shamrock jingle from the Halloween III movie and made this video.




It is very silly, but we made ourselves laugh, and that is the important part. It is like our video this year, made for us instead of worrying about awards and what the rest of the world thinks :)

I think I need to apply that philosophy to my yard. :)

Haunter's DVDs shipping soon!

The 2008 Haunters DVD collection is schedule to ship later this month. It is a real treat and an inspiration to see fellow haunt enthusiasts from all over the country submit their videos. This year there are Gathering photos and videos (groups of haunters that get together by region) and lots of how two videos. Should be great way to spend a few evenings....or a weekend.

Order yours today!

Finally!

We did it. We have 90% of the Halloween props put away (thanks Dan for helping with the mud men!) Except for a few things that need to be repaired and a pile of party decorations that need containers, all of the props are upstairs and stored until fall.

We have noticed that we are running out of room :)

Look! We can now get a least one car in the garage!!

A transplanted Rose

You will never guess who moved to the Northwest! Seriously, I screamed at my desk when I found out what happened to one of our favorite yard haunts - ever!

Ms. Rose, the famous Rose Manor haunt. Winner of the 2005 Yard Haunt of the Year award!

I don't know all the details, but it appears her owners couldn't keep her and needed to find her a home. The lucky new owners are House Bloodthorn. They seem to appreciate their new found treasure and we are glad to see she is in good hands and not forgotten.

Check out their blog and find out about this great new haunt. If you like The Davis Graveyard, you are going to love this haunt. Jeff and I always have a hard time getting out and seeing other haunts, but we are going to have to make an exception this year and get ourselves out that way this October.

Join us in welcoming Rose to the Northwest (where we have the best yard haunts!) :)

We survived

The funny thing about us is that we can pull this whole yard display off and the many events that surround it without wanting to kill each other, at least not that we would say to each other. :)

But when it comes time to make the video, oh my goodness! I thought our marriage surviving a major (down to the studs) kitchen remodel would be the worst of it, oh, no, that was child's play.

So after about of month of back and forth and back again, we are very close to having the 2008 DVD done. We spent most of Saturday just working on the Easter Egg. A part we always love when we are done, but the making process is a big relationship tester. (check out 2008's Ode to Halloween - our adopted stray, I mean what else to you call a cat that shows up in October?)

I think this video is our best yet. The 2008 shows the yard from setup to take down (a very sad day indeed.) And the best part is that husband found a unique soundtrack.

I come home from work and he tells me that he has found something that I will love or absolutely hate. I love it. It is perfect. It is Christopher Walken reciting The Raven. What, I ask you could be better? (besides Vincent Prices version which is about 2 minutes longer and we were already at 8 minutes.)

I was as happy as can be. I told him that like he said, people will like it or hate it - can't please everyone. Check it out when you get a chance. Better yet, buy the DVD set from Propmaster when they become available later this month!!!

2008 Videos on YouTube

We have uploaded our 2008 videos on YouTube

• 2008 Yard Video
• 2008 Year in Pictures
• Coachman video (our new big prop for 2008)
• 2008 Graveyard dancers (check out their new costumes!)
• Open House footage (news coverage 2008)
• 2008 haunt conventions (we were out and about in 2008)
• Tombstone class

Find all of our videos on the blog to the right. Happy Haunting.

We will have a 2008 DVD with more footage and a surprise or two available in late February. Check back for details.