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It's pretty obvious what our theme is - Disney's Haunted Mansion. Well, how can you have a Haunted Mansion without the Singing Busts? While watching videos of other Haunts on YouTube, and searching the web for ideas, we saw someone else do this with their Haunt. I've never shied away from a challenge, so my first thought was "how cool," quickly followed by "I wonder if I can do that too" ..... well, I just challenged myself didn't I?
Challenge accepted - lets make the Singing Busts!
Challenge accepted - lets make the Singing Busts!
It all starts with the correct foundation - and while we could have gone with styrofoam mannequin heads and projected onto those - why would we do that? In my maker room are two perfectly good Prusa 3d printers. Bonnie was able to find Singing Busts stl files available on Etsy - created by ShelbyRatz - all I needed to do was scale them to fit my printer and with a few modifications we were on our way. The image to the left is one of the busts on my slicer - for printing ease, I cut the back of the heads off, and printed the remainder in two pieces - usually with a seam on the neck.
Printing away one layer at at time
And here we have our first partial bust.
Reunited at the neck, we have our first bust - boy that's not usual for Halloween props, they're usually getting chopped at the neck!
and here's another completed print
and several completed prints - and a LOT of hours later - each was in the vicinity of 12-14 hours to print.
While these were printing we scoured the web looking for a good video source. We settled on a video from YouTube, which was downloaded and then put onto a cheap projector.
Projection testing - I wish I could upload a video here, and maybe I'll figure that out in time, but for now - here is an image with the video projected onto one of the busts. Testing was done in the garage, which was nice because it was easier to control the environment.
Now that we know we can do this, we needed columns for the bust to sit upon. I took a carboard carpet tube and cut it in half lengthwise, then into sections of appropriate length and got to work in the shop with embellishments.
A plywood base and cap cut to the same dimensions, some MDF scraps, various pieces of foam and a lot of caulking and glue, and they're starting to take shape.
Once fully assembled, I coated the all the columns with LeakSeal - a rubber spray on sealant, then coated it with spray primer and several coats of latex paint.
Sand was added at various stages to give a stone look, then several layers of washes, highlighting, tamping, and other faux painting techniques and we have some columns.
A close up of the texture created by the sand and multiple layers of paint.
Here we have the initial installation. The broken bust was not included at this time because there were adjustments needed to get the projection correct.
And here we have the final product. One thing I know I need to work out a bit better is the projection mapping - it was a bit more difficult in the front yard because of the elevation difference between the projector and the the busts. The slight "uphill" projection really threw things off - but it was good enough and no one said anything negative.
All in all - we received several comments from passerby's that this was one of their favorite installations. I'll call that a success any day of the week!
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