Life Size Witch Prop (with Animated Gemmy Halloween Hag Spirit Crystal Ball)

01/31/2011

This is my life size witch project. The witch was built with some simple house hold products and simple construction components; a Halloween costume and an animated witch’s head from Gemmy (Animated Gemmy Halloween Hag Spirit Crystal Ball) and some salvage stereo speakers. With all of this, I was able to create a very realistic prop that almost looks store bought. Later I added a caldron and a small gear motor to animate the witch stirring the caldron with a stick.

As the picture shows below, I start this project with a stool and bucket. The stool is from Goodwill for $10 and the buckets are $5 at Menards. I start almost all of my life size animated props with a stool and buckets.

As seen in the pictures, you can see how I mounted the buckets on top of the stool and the computer speakers to the base of the stool.

To create the witch’s shoulders, I drilled two ¾” holes in each side of the top bucket and used some ¾” Pex-Al-Pex Composite Pipe (flexible water pipe) and threaded through the bucket. You could use CPVC pipe or something similar. It is important that the pipe is hollow…this is aid in the over all stablility of the prop.

I bought a witch’s Halloween costume after the season for the usual 90% off price and probably had it for years before I found this opportunity to use it. I bascially dressed the bucket and under lying stool using the costume as seen in the pictures. Looks pretty good already.

I bought some multipurpose wire (very bendable, but stif) and 2 pool noodles that were hollow inside (very important). I cut the pool noodles to arms length and pushed the hollow part of the noodle into the pipe on both sides of the bucket and threaded noodles through the the costume’s arm holes.

I kept enough wire on both ends to form wire hands. See the pictures to see the wire hand formations and the latex gloves used to keep the wire hand’s form (in place and contained). In some of the other pictures later, you can see the wire hands can be practical when forming them to hold onto things such as the witch’s stir stick in the last picture.

The whole setup is triggered with a motion sensor. The witch’s head is triggered with a relay modification that turns on the witch’s animation when power is supplied. The gear motor is also powered up when the motion sensor is triggered. The speaker wires of the witch’s animation were extended to the computer speakers. The computer speakers have constant power and since they have a built in power amplifier and volume control, I can really get a good effect when the witch speaks by pumping the sound out through the speakers.