SlashGear

Halloween may be over, but Finkbuilt’s Steve Lodefink has only just got around to showing off the impressive DIY fog screen he built to befreak the local trick & treaters.  Based on the principle that you can project an image onto a moving wall of fog, Steve’s home-made system creates the screen using drinking straws and a fan, and projects an eye animation.

Check out the video demo after the cut

Commercial systems take a thin layer of fog and sandwich it between two sheets of air.  That way the screen is incredibly flat, and you end up with an impressively clear image.  Steve’s attempts to recreate it on a modder’s budget fell a little short, so he improvised by injecting the fog directly into a single airstream.

The fog itself is created by taking the smoke from a standard smoke machine and cooling it in a length of dryer duct pipe dunked in a barrel of ice.  Without the cooling the smoke would rise.  He’s got plans to tweak the system for a better image next year, including projecting a live camera picture onto it (after some suitably spooky visual effects have been added).