Pepper's Ghost skeleton: white or green?

I don't know of any pre-painted skeletons. At least none which would be high quality.

As far as color, I am a traditionalist, so it would be hard to go wrong with white. I think green would look too much like the cheap, pre-fab, GITD skeletons. Though it might be interesting to have a white base coat with some black 'low-lights' or shadows to emphasize the 3D structure, and maybe some red 'highlights' for key areas, too.

I've never really had an issue with solvent spray paint and any plastics which were strong enough to actually give 'structure'. Most cheap plastic things seem to be polypropylene, polyethylene or polyurethane - all of these are relatively solvent resistant. There might be some slight change for the moment or two the paint is wet, but once the solvent evaporates, everything generally goes back to normal. Actually, many issues have been just the opposite... it's hard to get paint to react or 'stick' to the surfaces, so it ends up flaking off.

The one location I did have a bit of trouble was spraying a styrofoam (polystyrene) tombstone with some GITD paint. The paint did sort of 'zap' the foam and where ever the paint was heavy, the foam sort of crumbled away. Ultimately, it just sort of added a more aged look to the tombstone, and not one ToT has complained and/or offered to give back the candy due to the somewhat deteriorated tombstone!

Hope this helps!

corey872 said:

I think green would look too much like the cheap, pre-fab, GITD skeletons.

Click to expand...

I get what you mean. But I'm still torn between these two options, I think both would look great.

If I could sufficiently control visible light spillage I would of course not have to use any fluorscent paint at all. Perhaps I should just give it a try: get some of the darkest, non-reflective cloth I can find to cover the walls surrounding the sekelton and see what happens with just plain visible light.

I do have three of these skeletons so I could just try with both green or white fluorescent paint if regular visible light spills too much. As long as the 'green' painted one is not mostly lid by UV it's going to look normal and unpainted (the fluorescent paint is essentially transparent) so I could still use it with visible light either for this prop or some other.

I will have to so some experimenting anyway to find the best location in or around the house to do this, ie. build a test rig to hold a smaller piece of foil which I can place anywhere and in any angle to find out where the larger, made to measure wall-to-wall frame for the foil should go. I can calculate the positioning all day long but I won't know how it will really look in any spot until I try it.

That reminds me, I am wondering what distance between viewer and foil will work best: closer is better for 3d and parallax effect but it increases the chance of being able to see the foil. I'm guessing you need to be a few feet away for this to work, especially with foil.And the close you get, the 'cleaner' the foil will have to be.

corey872 said:

I think green would look too much like the cheap, pre-fab, GITD skeletons.

Click to expand...

Though it might be interesting to have a white base coat with some black 'low-lights' or shadows to emphasize the 3D structure, and maybe some red 'highlights' for key areas, too.[/quote]

I don't think it will be necessary to greate artifical highlight, even with fluorescent paint the surface will look darker the more it's turned away from the UV source. But you are right that I do want it to look 3d, I mean that's the great thing about the Pepper's Ghost illusion in the first place, that it's not just a planar projection but has real depth and parallax effect.

corey872 said:

I think green would look too much like the cheap, pre-fab, GITD skeletons.

Click to expand...

Actually, many issues have been just the opposite... it's hard to get paint to react or 'stick' to the surfaces, so it ends up flaking off.[/quote]

Mmmm, hadn't really thought of that but you're right. I wonder if I should give Skelly a bath first; would make a lovely photo opportunity too 😁 . Or maybe scrub it down with some alcohol or something to remove dirt and grease at least.

corey872 said:

Hope this helps!

Click to expand...

It does, thank you!

Thinking a bit more about this, I'm sure dressing up the 'set' while help a great deal in hiding the trickery and selling the effect. The more things there are to distract the eyes the better. If I do it right at the front door, I could maybe use some 'Ghost Line - Do Not Cross' tape to make sure ToT-ers don't get too close; it's busy enough that the front door will be open all the time with me standing outside to hand out the treats and watch over the stuff I put up there anyway.

Surrounding the door post with an LED strip might also make it more difficult to see exactly what is going on inside due to the high contrast; the bright LED's will cause the pupils to contract and if I drape the walls of the hallway in black velvet, spider webs etc they may have a difficult time to spot the frame, which I will not be able to get completely out of view unfortunately, especially on the ceiling (we have really high doors, almost as high as the ceiling itself and the ToT-ers are small so they can easily look up).

Hiding the edges always is always a concern. I've been through haunted houses which address this in a couple of ways. At one, they had a room of strobes/lights just prior to entering the 'effect' room - so as you say, get the pupils to contract a bit and make a very mild case of 'flash blindness' . At a different house, if they caught anyone looking/staring for too long, a monster would jump out and scare everyone along! So no time to sit and ponder 'how did they do that??!?' Guess it was also good to keep everyone moving!

Another thing for consideration - there is also an effect where props are lit by normal light to generate one scene, then lit with black light to generate a different scene. Quickly alternating between the two light sources gives a neat effect.

I've seen this done sometimes with masks, faces where you have a normal light face, then a black light demon. But might be interesting if you could work it into your scene in some manner. With the instant on/instant off of modern LED lights, the effect becomes even more dramatic.

corey872 said:

Another thing for consideration - there is also an effect where props are lit by normal light to generate one scene, then lit with black light to generate a different scene. Quickly alternating between the two light sources gives a neat effect.

I've seen this done sometimes with masks, faces where you have a normal light face, then a black light demon. But might be interesting if you could work it into your scene in some manner. With the instant on/instant off of modern LED lights, the effect becomes even more dramatic.

Click to expand...

I had though of that. I also came up with this idea:




By having two 'glass' panes stacked behind each other you could in principle 'project' multiple physical objects at the same location and do a kind of morph, a cross-fade really, between the two.Now if only I had the space to pull off something like this. I'm also not sure if this would work with the foil which might not be quite as transparent as a sheet of plexiglass.

Another idea would be to use two use two identical skeletons and have it appear first further away from the viewers and then in a split second it would suddenly disappear and re-appear closer:



That might cause a bit of a scare I think 😁

I might actually be able to do this, and I do have three identical skeletons . But let's try a single one first.

Batbuddy said:

The plastic film you mentioned using is probably a good idea. Many are heat shrinkable and that makes it tight and avoids any wrinkle/waviness.

Click to expand...

I've read about it being done with good results so it should work. I do know the stuff, used it in my previous house for it's intended purpose (insulation) and it really was absolutely wrinkle free after hitting it with the hairdryer.

I ordered some from Amazon because what's sold locally here is only 1.5m (5 ft) wide which is not enough if I also want it to stretch from floor to ceiling which is 2.6m (8.5 ft).

Batbuddy said:

The angle to the layout is the most important aspect of the effect.

Click to expand...

For a glass panel the incident angle has to be larger than 42 degrees to achieve Total Internal Reflection but that's for glass. The foil is bound to have a lower density so probably the critical angle will have to be a bit larger than that but I'm not sure how much. I found some heat shrink foil that has a density of 1.32 g/cm³, which is quite a bit less than the density of common glass which I believe is 2.5 g/cm³, but I haven't found out yet how to convert those numbers to refractive indices (I'm being a bit lazy and looking for an online calculator that will just do it for me) to calculate the critical angle for foil.

I'm not sure if achieving Reading up on this, Total Internal Reflection is not required actually, regular partial reflection might will do the job just fine, as long as the area behind the panel is kept fairly dark and the object to reflect is sufficiently lit.

I have several setups that might potentially work but I'll just have to try them out. One of them involves placing the skeleton in the toilet which is in the hallway, although I might have to remove the suspended toilet from the wall and possibly also the basin and tap to make room . Might be best to do the testing with those still there and only remove them on the night of Halloween so as not to distress the missus .

EDIT: Total Internal Reflection not required

It DID happen (just not on Strava)...



I actually used a tempered glass pane!!! (Supplier asked me "what in the hell is this for?") I did need to control my sight lines; keeping people back a bit so that the side chamber wasn't noticable. Hope it works well for you.

Here is a picture of my "crossfading light controller" (a battery-powered barbeque motor!)



Couple the two linear dimmer switches (coat hanger wire) to crossfade, or uncouple to just fade the side chamber up/down.

By the way, this was in a "haunted goat shed" I built in the side yard, so the depth of my side chamber was an issue.