The Slaughterhouse is a well-known haunted house in Tucson and because the event was held on Halloween weekend Creative BackStage wanted to create a design that represented the ghoulishness of the holiday as well as the Fear Fest festival.
"The idea was simple, to use LED video screens for eyes and a mouth with video images that would be of the fear kind with monster eyes and teeth or devilish eyes," explains John Garberson, owner of Creative Backstage and lighting designer for the event. "We set up two 8x8 Elation EVLED video screens to create the eyes and put a 12x4 EVLED screen in front of the DJ for the mouth." The 20mm pixel pitch EVLED 20IP LED video screen had all the elements required - tri color LEDs for a large array of color choices, 4000 Nits of brightness and a weatherproof IP65 rating.
John's initial design on CAD came out over the top, he says, a setup that included a 30' tall demon with horns using truss, video panels and lighting. But the budget didn't allow for the more elaborate setup and John had to strip down the demon design into something that would fit the budget. "So we relied on video loops and design to bring out the evil-looking faces," he says. "We added 10' circle trusses for the eyes in front of the video panels and mapped them with circles and used a 30' long truss giving the design a face outline."
John outlined both trusses in Elation Flex LED tape so they would pop. "I also placed Cuepix Strips across the 30' truss," he says. "And we placed Cuepix Panels across the front truss for blinder effects and it also helped with the face look." The rest of the lighting was made up of Elation Platinum Beam 5R moving heads and color-changing Opti LED pars. No Halloween event should go without fog and special effects so John incorporated Z-1520 RGB foggers, M-8 foggers and F5 Fazers from Antari along with CO2 jets and a confetti blaster.
(Jim Evans)
