[BadTableManor]

Available through Halloween Express, Spooky Ambience dvds can add a bit of ambience to your party or haunt. I purchased Dead Sea Aquarium, and Possessed Paintings.
The Dead Sea Aquarium shows 5 underwater environments: Aquarium, the Deep, the Ruins, the Bottom, and the Anchor. Assorted types of fish swim around your TV, although these ones are in skeletal form! Neat-o! The eel and the angler fish are especially effective. There is also background music with an on/off option. A good dvd to have playing in your office; it's relaxing.

The one I was really interested in was the Possessed Paintings, because I love the changing portraits in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. Over 30 paintings, some a bit too bloody for me, but I really like the sloooowly changing ones. Wonderfully subtle. My favorites are the "Ring"-like girl, the portrait whose paint peels off to reveal a skeleton underneath, and the Haunted Mansion-like Medusa woman. The dvd always plays the portraits in random order, and you can also select a favorite portrait and have it repeat all night long. There's also mood music to increase the vibe. This dvd looks especially good played on a flat screen TV. This dvd gives you the option of playing in regular (landscape) or portrait mode.
Both dvd's loop for endless play time., and are created in 16:9 ratio (whatever that means).

The only caveat to the Portrait dvd is unless your TV is propped up on it's side, with the dvd playing in "portrait" mode, the TV cuts off the very top and lower half of the portrait (landscape mode). Not good. I will have to make a foamcore frame around the TV so it looks better.

A bit on the expensive side at $20 each, I would also have been charged a whopping $10 for shipping for one, but received free shipping for two.

Overall, I think it's money well spent.

 

[Zombie Machairodont]

I also bought the 'Dead Sea Aquarium' DVD and I quite like it. The fish designs are marvelous (they range from early-rot to skeletal), and there are certainly a number of fun little surprises through the cycles. Like BadTableManor's description of the portraits (which I now feel compelled to track down - sounds like a really great idea), you can play all the different settings on a cycle or select one particular setting to loop over and over. Because it is overall well executed and very creative, I would rate the 'Dead Sea Aquarium' positively.

However, there are a couple things that bother me about the DVD, simply because I was looking less for pure ambiance and more for a potential haunt effect. I was hoping to do a Pepper's Ghost illusion with the animation and have the undead fish swim around in a real modified fish aquarium, which, in all honesty, the product probably wasn't meant for.

First Gripe: You don't get a full aquarium view because various fish swim into and out of the sides of the frame. I think it would be great if it looked like you had an entire aquarium on the screen, with every fish always within frame unless obscured by part of the scenery. However, the scenes are set up as though you are looking at a small part of a rather expansive environment that extends far beyond the edges of the screen. Now, this would in fact be really effective if you place your screen behind, say, a porthole in a sunken haunted galleon, so it would still be a great haunt effect. My initial plans for the video simply did not correspond with the product itself. Maybe I'll just have to get a bit more creative with it, that's all.

Second Gripe: The end of each individual loop is marked by a rather obvious fade in/fade out from black, which kind of messes with the continuity of the video. It seems like it would look much better if the cycle ended and began with the same frame image, so that it may be a little less obvious that you are looking at a looping video.

Again, despite my petty little complaints, I really like this ambient DVD and would recommend it. Creature design, animation, and overall creativity and originality are all thumbs up.

 

[Dark lord]

I have the portraits & the tombstone.Tombstone is great & used a rear projecting to a large tombstone with a white sheet (like the hallowindows) in the graveyard.
Was cool & with the occasional things that popped out on the screen really added to the effect. want to get the fish one,they used that at Pirates of Emerson haunted house
& was pretty cool. Bought mine thru Target online $19.95 ea with $3- shipping & arrived quickly !!