HOWTO build a homebrew Haunted Mansion Singing Bust

The blogger at Panocamera works at a studio with a bunch of Haunted Mansion nuts who've made "Hitchhiking Ghosts" Hallowe'en costumes and changing-paintings like those in Disneyland's wonderful ride. Now he's made a singing bust like the ones in the graveyard: a sculpted blank head on which a face is projected. Unfortunately, there aren't many photos, but the build notes are intriguing:

The ingredients finally came together today. I started with a $29 PS2 joystick that had an embedded fold-out LCD. After some butchering, I removed the backlight and created the world's cheapest video projector. After rummaging through some old slide projector gear, I found a good lens to throw the image and (for testing) used my bike light as a projector bulb.

To feed the projector, I'm using an old Lyra video jukebox. It's amazing how gadgets age so quickly, iPod is just so much easier to convert video that the Lyra has obsolesced. The hard part was getting the Thurl Ravenscroft video from the mansion. 'Turns out if you ride a few times, you will sooner or later find the doombuggies in the ride stop so that people who need extra help can board. If one is quick with a camcorder, the whole performance can be captured in under minute. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Some Photoshop transformations were needed to orient the video for projection.


Link

(Thanks, Wil!)