Singing-Skull Animatronics
Custom hardware and software — no off-the-shelf parts — driving five hand-animated singing skulls for a Hill House Horror show.
This is the main display from the Hill family's Halloween 2007 haunt — an animatronic rig designed, built, and programmed in one month, with creative work from Dan Veazey in October 2007. (The original video was shot between trick-or-treaters, so it's a little shaky.)
The animatronic software and hardware are my own design — no off-the-shelf components. Each skull was hand-animated with a USB joystick and custom software: I built five separate "voice scripts" of the lyrics and hand-animated each one. I deliberately didn't drive the motion from audio amplitude — that never looks right. Time-consuming, but it was one of the "one-month challenges" I set for myself every now and then.