Thread: Pepper's Ghost idea

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So I have an idea for a peppers ghost, well I have two, so I will describe both to you, but I'm not sure how possible either one is.

They are both for my graveyard, and would be using projection/reflection on a piece of glass.

The first is in a dark back corner that can not be approached having a tombstone with a piece of glass in front of it that being dimly lit would not be noticable, then having a projector in front of it hidden by another tombstone, the video would be of someone crawling out of the ground.

the second is using a hearse/wagon type. You would have a casket in the hearse, and a piece of glass in front of the casket, the idea is to look like a ghost sits up and turns and looks at the crowd then lays back down.

I'm not sure if either of these are possible, but if they are, I definately want to add them to my haunt, course I have to build a hears first for the second one. I've never done the peppers ghost effect before, so any advice would be appreciated.

As far as your first project goes...i have seen it done here.This one uses a TV with a DVD.

Halloween Props - Halloween Animatronics - HauntedProps.com

Here are a few more Peppers Ghost links that might help you...

Ghost in Stagecaoch - kinda cool
YouTube - Tombstone Ghost and Legends Attraction

Girl ghost in Window Playing piano
YouTube - Ghost in the Window

Big Scream TV
Big Scream TV?

CGI effect - not peppers ghost
halloween CGI changing potratit
YouTube - Changing Portrait CGI

Hollowindow - Video effects
Hallowindow - Mark Gervais

Thank you so much, I love having all these resources... hopefully I can live up to them.

Those are some awesome pepper's ghosts.

The only thing is, you can't project directly on to glass. For the effect to work you need scattered light. You must have a source reflected off the glass. If you want a large image you can project on a screen and reflect that in glass( girl playing piano) . For the gravestone, a LCD screen reflected off glass would work.
Pete

Thank you so much for that information captpete, that will save me a lot of aggravation!

WOW I have my thinking cap on.
The first web sight offered the DVD for $100. ouch.
I want to do this too.
please IM me maybe we have time from here to come up with some Ideas.

I figure with a video camera and some black drape or paint, you can pull this off with some free video editing software, course I could be highly simplizing all of this, so until I can actually attack this project who knows. I think the hears with the way I have been picturing it, may be the harder of the two.

We did the peppers ghost and a ghost in a hearse last Halloween. The peppers ghost was pretty straight forward but doing the ghost inside of the hearse was a little more difficult. After experimenting with a whole bunch of stuff we settled on a method commonly used in stage productions. It is called a scrim which more simply is a sheer piece of black cloth. To get it to work right we had to get a "short throw" projector. The projector was mounted on the back side of the coffin we had in the hearse and pointed at a mirror inside of the coffin. The projection then bounced up on the scrim and gave us exactly the effect we wanted. It looked like the ghost was actually inside of the hearse and you couldn't see any light from the projector.

Our ghost was my wife dressed in a white dress and recorded on a table against an all black background. We used iMovie to render the video and looped the video from an old Mac computer through the projector. You could make a dvd and use a dvd player and play it through a projector, but we like the additional control you get from using a computer.

Here is a link to a short video of the two effects. You will notice the reflection of headlights on plexiglass we used for windows on the hearse. I didn't get a great video capture of either of the effects. I had to increase the exposure in the hearse clip which degrades the picture quality but I think you get the idea.

YouTube- Hearse Ghost

Now we found a short throw projector to be best for our application because you could get a large picture over a very short distance. If we had used a regular projector, we would have had to mount it outside of the hearse to get the picture as large as we needed not to mention the difficulties of hiding the bright light of the projector. The short throw projector was not cheap. About $450 on eBay. But we can use the projector for lots of other things in the future.