Friday, January 22, 2010 Bloody Head Friday

A good friend showed me this specimen before soaking. It's a meaty and bloody skull but its tone and texture is compelling.

Saturday, September 19, 2009 Saturday Morning Casket Gazing

It always makes me wonder when a friend calls because they saw a casket at a sale and knew I would want to look at it. But of course he was right and it was worth it to see this unusual little gem. The people selling it estimated it at about 125 years old.



The casket is unusually small (at around 5 feet) but larger than a child's coffin. The seller claimed that a small woman had it made for herself but then moved "out west" and did not take it with her.
The details make this specimen special. The removable viewing panel for the head always creeps me out. All of the original coffin screws are present, complete with decorative hardware.



There is some damage but nothing to indicate any serious structural problem. I haven't seen pin striping on a coffin before, and it adds a bizarre flair.



The sticker said $350, and it is probably worth it. When you already have two in storage, you aren't willing to spend that much for the privilege of storing a third. Sure is pretty though.

Sunday, August 9, 2009 Rey...a drop of golden sun

It was late and I was corpsing (applying construction adhesive and stain) the deer with bat wings project, when there was a whisper. In an almost imperceptible, sandy voice she said "They call me Rey and I have come to shine darkness across the land." Her talons clicked on the concrete as she hopped to the floor and she was clear of the garage door with just two beats of her wings.
Caroline came running with the camera just in time to get a few shots before Rey disappeared into the night sky.

Saturday, June 27, 2009 Deer Corpse In Progress

We FINALLY have some progress to report on our deer corpse.
Two yards of bathing suit liner proved to be a good wing membrane, and the corpsing of the head and body have begun. Much left to do.

Sunday, May 17, 2009 Deer Wing Test

We decided that the deer corpse needed wings. After some consideration we settled on bat wings, and even found a bat wing calculator (you gotta love the internet) from the good people at Zombietronix.
PVC seemed logical and aluminum worked well for the hinge joints. Though it won't be animated we did want to be able to change wing position to fit her mood. As pictured the elbow and finger joints can be individually actuated. Bruin (Boo) thought he could bring some scale to the photo - he's 70 pounds. He even busted out his psychological thriller expression to add depth.

There is much finish work to be done to turn the PVC to bone and we are still debating the best material to use for the membrane.

Sunday, May 3, 2009 A Bone and his Dog

This little ditty from the Post (full article here) was too good to pass up. Professor Gordon S. "Grover" Krantz with his beloved Irish Wolfhound Clyde.


Krantz was a teacher of osteology at Washington State University and dreamed of donating his bones to the Smithsonian. Indeed, other corpses must view him with envy. First his decomposition enthralls the faculty at the Tennessee Body Farm, and now school kids snicker at his bones.

Saturday, April 25, 2009 More Cool Bones

Another gift from a friend - this monster is large enough to encompass your head. It is the pelvis from a cow. It is heavy and the form, texture and scale is difficult to convey with little pictures.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 Deer In Progress

The skeletal deer transforms at a snail's pace. Cleaning every bit of tissue from the spine proved time consuming, but the stench of death no longer clings to the bones.
At this stage the spine is reassembled and structurally sound and the PVC fittings to attach arms and legs are in place. The skull is sporting new blank eyes and fangs - all ready for detailing.

He is whispering in my ear that he wants wings. More to come.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009 On a Hill Far Away

These deer crucifixion images were submitted by a friend. It was apparently strung up near where we live, so I like to imagine the person who did it as a young aspiring artist rather than a deranged nut-job.

Monday, April 13, 2009 Holiday Weekend Overdone

Oliver thinks Easter is a "zombie holiday", and he does tend to overdo it.
He looked mighty green in his cube at work this morning.

Thursday, February 5, 2009 Little Rosalia

This photo of Rosalia Lombardo (1918-1920) was taken around 2007. She is an amazing example of preservation by Dr. Alfredo Salafia, a pioneer in arterial embalming. A recent Nat Geo TV show featured an xray of Rosalia to prove that she was not artificial, and it revealed that even her brain and soft tissues were preserved. Truly amazing and more than a little sad.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009 Decapi-Annie

A while back a friend gave me a retired Resusci Annie, and this is her liberated head. Let the record reflect that a resuscitation doll creeps me out, even before the decapitation modifications.

Friday, January 23, 2009 Persistence

I've driven by this deer for many months, and think that it might find reincarnation as some form of dark art.

Sunday, January 18, 2009 Kris Kuksi

I ran into this guy's stuff and was floored.
Kris Kuksi

Monday, November 10, 2008 Halloween 2008

This year we took it easy and just set a few props at our friend's house. Sweet little Jewels is high tailing it away from Oliver.

This is Bob, a simple motorized grave popper we made this year from instructions on Haunt Forum.

Natalia returns for her third season as the ever popular flying crank ghost.

Lydia was excited to go trick-or-treating, but paused long enough for us to snap this shot with Oliver.

Saturday, November 8, 2008 Corpse Celebration

What is it about human remains that is so interesting? Recent remains do not hold my interest, but ancient remains can be captivating. These are a few catacomb images that I thought were compelling.

Thursday, October 30, 2008 Pop Up Corpse

Here are a few pictures of our first motorized prop. The project started with a frame from an old stationary bike, a broken weedeater, a wiper motor from a Buick Skylark and a $20 'talking bride' skull. The bride skull would cycle through three corny songs that were useless for scaring tots, but was equipped with an articulated jaw driven by a 5-volt motor. We wanted a corpse that would pop-up fast and say/scream something with synchronized jaw movement, did not want to spend more than $50, and did not have an air compressor. And so the design criteria were set.

This is the frame of the corpse in the rest position. The mechanical elements and hands are completed. His spine is the weedeater - the curve of the aluminum frame provided a good offset to attach the linkage from the drive arm. The main frame is the stationary bike, chosen because it already had good bushings where the pedals were mounted. The bushings were easy to re-use as the pivot point below the corpse's pelvis. The rest of the armature is old aluminum from other projects. Also visible is the wooden frame of the toe-pincher coffin, to be finished with cardboard (I know, I know) stapled to this frame.

Here is the corpse in the upright position with his scare full on. The theory is that once he reaches this position, an evil laugh (courtesy of Vincent Price) will be played from CD, complete with synchronized jaw movement and flashing yellow eyes. We will see...
His hands are the classic coat hanger wire, duct tape and glue-soaked paper towel technique. The fingernails are cut from a milk jug.

Raising the left arm was a simple matter of mounting it on all-thread, then adding a length of aluminum angle stock parallel to the spine with a pivot point slightly offset from the spine's. The right arm was to move sideways, and required a bit of clunky engineering. There are six pivoting joints in the assembly that transfers the vertical motion to the lateral motion that we needed. No way this could fail under repeated use, right?




Two end-of-cycle switches were required to stop the motor when the corpse was fully reclined and then again when he achieves the full upright position. Initial tests of controlling the motor directly through the switches showed that the cam would not park at the right spot to keep the switch open. The result was the corpse most often thrashing up and down continuously, nearly beating itself to death.

This was solved by using two 12-volt relays: one wired to 'latch' when it receives a negative pulse (until either switch is actuated) and in turn activating the second to provide 12-volt power to the wiper motor. The configuration worked quite well and was cheap. NOTE: the 12 volt power feed needs to be fused for safety!

A final treatment of glue-soaked paper towel has been applied to the head and hands, tinted with food color. The cardboard neck and a little of his chest received the same. The torso and arms have been filled out with chicken wire. We dressed him with a t-shirt to hide the mesh pattern, then a muddy dress shirt, and finished out the coffin with cardboard, foam and some old curtains. The foot of the coffin is left incomplete because we will install a chicken wire mound and cover with leaves and debris. This will hopefully create the impression that the coffin is jutting up out of the ground.




He moves pretty quick from activation to full upright position with the whole cycle taking less than 2 seconds. The motion has considerable force, which caused me to abandon motion-triggered activation, as there would be no barrier between him and the tots. No point in risking injury to anyone! Besides, I would have just sat and watched him scare people anyway.




Sorry that there are no photos of the inside of the head. After researching the normal circuits and endless douglas fir tree hacks I landed on a simple solution to synchronizing the jaw to audio: driving the motor directly from an amplified audio signal. How can you drive a DC motor and DC LEDs from an AC audio signal? By connecting the speaker outputs of one channel from a car CD receiver to a bridge rectifier (essentially four diodes, much like a car alternator uses to convert its AC output to DC) and then the outputs of the rectifier to the 5-volt DC motor and lights. This does present an odd (low impedance) load to the amplifier, and initial testing with an 8-ohm home receiver caused it to pop into protect mode at higher volume. The 4-ohm stable CD receiver that we used Halloween night performed well. Adjusting the balance control allowed shifting more power to the left (jaw motor) channel without overpowering the actual audio output of the right (speaker) channel. If our audio system had not included a balance adjustment, we could have increased the gain of the left channel before burning the disc.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008 Corpse

We heard about a DVD called "How to Make Your Own Scratch Built Corpse" by Special Effects Artist Christian Hanson and had to get it. This guy was crazy enough to sit down and document in substantial detail how to create a full size corpse out of commonly available materials. The anatomical accuracy that he achieves is impressive.

For the last two weekends we have been assembling one mostly based on his instructions. It might have been the buzz from applying ten tubes of construction adhesive, but I really enjoyed this project.

Out of respect for Christian I am not going to write up a how-to. Go buy his DVD!

In process - nothing better than a rack of bones drying in the garage!