Ghost Projections Decorate Dental Offices in Toronto

Ghost Projections Decorate Dental Offices in Toronto

Halloween is predominantly a residential occasion and we wanted to change that. This year, Archer Dental Toronto dentists made lifelike ghosts in the waiting rooms at two separate downtown dental clinic locations.

Ghostly specters haunt Archer Dental Baby Point on Halloween

In sub divisions across Canada, the Oct 31st event is important because it allows neighbours to go forth and meet each other, often for the first time. Whole families go door to door and trick-or-treat face to face in the flickering porch light of friendly Jack – o – lanterns. Houses are decorated and people parade about in costume. But downtown, by contrast, the festival goes ignored. Certain community-minded shopping malls shamelessly promote their property as a safe alternative to dark streets, but by and large commercial businesses do not get the Halloween spirit, and if they do it’s only for marketing purposes.

The dentists reasoned they could do something exceptional as they have a good reputation for doing innovative things including painting huge wall murals, and making emergency dental courier videos, not to mention all the press they garner every day for doing world class dentistry. Back in September, the office managers for all three locations decided they weren’t going to simply trot-out the same orange and black streamers and not-so-spooky posters salvaged from some primary education school supply store. This year we vowed to do something better. We decided to make a proper ghost projection attraction that could haunt two of our offices (with street-level walk-in waiting rooms) at night, and make an impression on pedestrians who pass their front windows.

Making an impression on pedestrians who pass by!

So just what is a ghost exactly?

To make a proper supernatural presentation, it might be helpful to know just what exactly comprises an authentic ghost. Oh sure, it’s the spirit of a deceased person, as everyone says, but what is the actual substance we behold? The idea of ghosts has been around forever. They were in fact mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh, mankind’s oldest known written work. Ghost stories are part of most cultures’ folklore, although the essential definition of what comprises a ghost varies from country to country. Catholics for example have a Holy Ghost as one of three core components in their belief system. Shakespeare invoked ghosts in several plays and he advanced the idea that spirits were made of ‘airs from heaven’. Ghostbusters, a 1984 American fantasy comedy film debuted the idea of spirits being ectoplasmic. Today YouTube is filled with filmmakers who attempt to capture spirits on video. Have you ever watched those videos? They’re not very impressive. Real ghosts are often just unexplained bright spots or strange mists on camera. Fortunately our clinics have no real ghosts, and so we happily set about making some on this special occasion.

The realities of projecting ghosts

After some research we concluded that to make ghosts appear and disappear in a dimly lit dental office waiting room would require three basic components:

Projector – the source of the effect.
Ghost media – the video image that will be projected to make the effect.
The screen – the cast needs substance to illuminate, otherwise invisible, that is illuminated by the effect.

The media is loaded into a computer or placed directly into the projector. This device is then aimed at the sheer fabric screen that is otherwise invisible in the dimly lit room.

The exact positioning of the projector and screen are rather critical to making the ghost projection appear real and lifelike. Like any good cake recipe, the devil is in the details. Each time we set this up, we tried several different layouts with various different parts and pieces until we evolved just the right effect.

We got started the week before Halloween. The installation on the first night was a disaster. I’d gone out and bought exactly the wrong screen material from William F Whites, a film rental house in Toronto and that material was much too thick and too heavy. Two people labored to hang it in from the ceiling of Archer Dental Little Italy waiting room and it bent three ceiling tile flanges.

And it didn’t work. The black scrim diffused the light miserably and actually lit up the room; it simply made a fuzzy ball upon which it was near impossible to focus the beam. So we scraped it entirely and kissed $225 dollars goodbye. Someone ran to Walmart the next day and bought fabric sheers for $12 and binder clips and we tried again the following evening in the same location.

Archer Little Italy

Night Two is when we realized our FX projector wasn’t really designed for bright city streets. One of the downfalls of doing this in the city is how bright the streets are at night. You’d never realize it unless you did something like this and you need darkness for it to work. We could turn off all the lights inside our office of course, but we couldn’t control the light levels outside. And the Walmart fabric sheers had quilt-pattern folds which caught the light. And the video clip was too short and the amount of time the ghost was off-screen was too short. She didn’t disappear for any length of time at all. That meant the apparition could not then suddenly reappear and scare spectators. So that component also needed an overhaul.

The sheer fabric seen here is mounted too close to the window.

Night Three saw us try again with better screen material, a longer video, and a much better projector. We reconvened at Archer Dental Baby Point, 387 Jane St just south of Annette. The traffic cues up there at the stop light and so the ghost would be visible to passing motorists stuck at the light all night long. It would be especially visible to the passengers in those cars waiting at the light.

On that night we debuted the Epson VS250, a 3LCD projector with ‘3-chip technology’ which I think actually helped us get a better focus on the sheer fabric. The projector has an 800 x 600 SVGA resolution and a more finely calibrated focus ring on its front lens. The extra brightness meant we could get some distance back and still have enough intensity to mesmerize pedestrians.

Epson VS250

We also upgraded the screen again and this third iteration was the final evolution. We nailed it. That morning I’d visited Fabricland and had purchased a wide sheet of sheer material for twenty bucks, a fraction of the cost of the material we’d initially sourced. And being so lightweight it was infinitely easier to hang. The fabric was also quite stretchy and when pulled taut it almost disappeared into a misty ambiance. When viewed from outside with no ghostly lights the fabric simply melted into the air and made the interior of the dental office waiting room appear slightly misty.

So the stage was set for our ghostly lady to reappear, and that component was also improved in the interim. Our projectionist had gone online and downloaded Shotcut and thereafter she bought and then stitched together a sequence of short videos of one particular ghostly lady (sold online by AtmosFX com). She assembled a story that featured the ghost moving left and then right and then, most importantly, fading away for five seconds and then suddenly, shockingly reappearing. The specter explodes in anger which you can probably see in some of these pictures. There was audio too and next year we’ll hook that up to exterior speakers which don’t exist at these two locations at this time. The audio cues would be very helpful in getting pedestrians to notice the effect playing in the window.

The ghost dances left and right, courtesy of AtmosFX

Photo Credits

Guest Author Bio
Rob Campbell

Rob Campbell is a freelance nature writer and author living in Toronto, Canada. Son of a beekeeper, Rob is keenly interested in using technology to improve conservation and the preservation of our natural world; he funds projects that use gadgets to study and improve the lives of insects (honeybees) and animals around us, especially those unfortunate creatures that are, like so many of us humans, stuck living in the city.