If your street isn’t packed with cars and angry neighbours because your decorations aren’t completely over the top, you’re not doing Halloween right. If you’re not sure how over the top you need to go, let this amazing Ghostbusters-themed house in California be a good place to start.
As stores fill with giant boxes of candy and pumpkin spice everything, the arrival of fall also means YouTube starts to fill up with videos of Halloween house decor goals. It’s the one time of year when curb appeal and aesthetics go completely out the window, and the more elaborate your Halloween decor can get, the better. But while Halloween staples like Tom BetGeorge create elaborate seasonal displays by decorating their homes with thousands of computer-controlled LED lights synced to music, there’s an entirely different decorating approach that requires a similarly expensive investment in hardware.
Aside from some glowing pumpkins on the porch, in the daytime this house in Southern California probably doesn’t look like it’s the home of someone obsessed with Halloween. But that’s because instead of glowing LEDs, at night the house is brought to life using a technique called projection mapping, where an animation that’s precisely crafted to match its size and shape is projected onto the surface of a building.
In this case, the people behind the YouTube channel Seasoned Projections have carefully dissected parts of the two original Ghostbusters films and combined that footage with custom graphics and animations, creating the illusion that their home is everything from the Ghostbusters’ iconic firehouse HQ, to a haunted museum serving as the backdrop for a dramatic battle involving proton packs and Vigo the Carpathian.
In theory, simply pointing a projector at your house is a lot easier than spending weeks putting up physical decorations and hanging lights. But in reality, creating an animation like this that perfectly matches the unique size and shape of the house is a complex job, as all the elements have to be perfectly aligned to sell the effect. On top of that, even a home theatre projector costing a couple thousand dollars is nowhere near powerful enough to light up the front of a house like this. Projection mapping requires projector hardware similar to what’s used in movie theatres, which are both power hungry and expensive. When this homeowner gets their electricity bill next month, they’ll probably wish they also had access to an unlicensed nuclear accelerator to power this production.