Inside the Magic Blog

The finalists have been posted for the Disney Dream Job contest and I am one of them. You can view and vote for my video here:

http://www.careerbuilder.com/disneydreamjobs/dream-job-applicant.asp?jtid=3&ytid=LhDfxbgsLPU

It says that both votes and views will be counted so please vote for my video and view the page as often as you can! Remember, if I am one of 5 Haunted Mansion winners, I will be flown to Disneyland for a 4-day trip during which the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage will be opening, so I’ll be bringing back HD video and binaural audio (along with other rides, I’m sure) for you to enjoy!

Thanks!

Edit: I have confirmed that you can vote and view the video as many times as you want during the voting period, which ends on March 30th. So please, whenever you have a spare moment, hit the voting link for my video as many times as you can!

Link

I am retiring the Inside the Magic blog in favor of the new, broader distant creations blog. The new blog will cover everything that has been posted here and a whole lot more.

The distant creations blog covers not only Disney but also technology, Apple, Pixar, movies, travel, video games, collectibles, and whatever else is of interest. It will definitely be updated more regularly than this one.
I will be porting all of the posts from this blog over there soon.

Here’s a quick clip of what the games will look like in the now-announced Toy Story Mania at the Disney-MGM Studios:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/insidethemagic/toystorymania.mp4

Sorry for the quality. It was recorded off of the local news on my TV.

For completeness, here’s the recently-released concept art for this attraction:

The latest offering from Inside the Magic is a new line of DVDs called ITM DVD. The first DVD is on sale now and it is a complete walk-through of the Wonders of Life pavilion.

http://www.distantcreations.com/insidethemagic/store/wol.php

This DVD takes you on a walking tour of the WONDERS OF LIFE pavilion, stopping at its most popular and cherished attractions including Body Wars, Cranium Command, and Goofy About Health. The DVD is mastered in high definition, is 16×9 enhanced, and is presented with binaural audio. This is the first official DVD release from Inside the Magic. If it is popular, more will come!

Paul Barrie and I have posted our 2nd annual Disney Year-in-Review show, which clocks in at around 2 hours this year! During these 2 hours, we discuss everything major that happened in the Disney universe within the past year. I know a lot of you enjoyed last year’s discussion of 2005, so I hope you enjoy this year’s look back at 2006 and ahead to 2007.

You can find this year’s year-end wrap-up available as a regular podcast as well as an Enhanced one, in which you’ll be able to view images associated with the topics we’re talking about while we’re talking about them!

Regular podcast (MP3):
http://media.libsyn.com/media/insidethemagic/itms91.mp3

Enhanced podcast (M4A):
http://media.libsyn.com/media/insidethemagic/itms91e.m4a

You’ll need iTunes 7, the latest Quicktime, or a video iPod in order to enjoy the Enhanced podcast.

This is the third Christmas we’ve spent in this house and each year, I add more lights to the outside.  The first year we lived here, we moved in just 12 days before Christmas, so no lights went up that year.  Last year was pretty minimal.  This year is much better!

Here are the pictures (click to enlarge):

I used some of Disney’s lighting as inspiration this year.  I noticed that I really liked how Disney would often group single colors together instead of the usual multi-colored strands.  We have red, amber, green, purple, blue, and white solid-colored strands.  I also found these great multi-colored strands for the left side of the house that were non-standard.  A couple of them are teal/purple/blue and others are gold/red/purple.  I also switched out the bulbs in our landscape lighting in front of our two rock columns to be red and green.  I mirrored that effect with two flood lights (red and green again) facing the garage.

Next year, I may attempt to make them dance!

Thanks to everyone who showed up for the Inside the Magic MouseFest meet! It was a lot of fun meeting a whole bunch of ITM listeners and their families. Somewhere between 70 and 85 people showed up to hop on the Haunted Mansion with me and grab some chicken strips afterward.

Here are the photos from the event (click to enlarge on Flickr):

If anyone recognizes anyone else in the photos that is not tagged, please add a note on Flickr
with the name of the person and a little box around their head.

It took a lot of work, but I have finished decorating the Haunted Mansion room. I have plans to add much more in terms of lighting, music, and sound, but this is how it looks! I’ve included a QTVR view of the room, standing in the dead center. It’s embedded underneath the pictures below. If you can’t see it, you need to upgrade your browser and/or Quicktime.

Click the photos to enlarge:

QTVR (click inside image and drag to look around):

As you can see, we have nearly every Haunted Mansion collectible ever released. Most of our pins are not yet displayed, but some are in shadow boxes on either side of the stretch portraits. The closet is filled with the smaller items, with one shelf devoted to Haunted Mansion Holiday. The rest of the room is filled with everything else!

We purchased the furniture from a local antique replica dealer. One of the pieces is an actual antique previously owned by my grandmother.

There are several lenticular changing portraits on the walls, official and unofficial. The largest is the ghost ship from HauntedPortraits.com. The one underneath that is from a Haunted Mansion Holiday event at Disneyland.

The windows are blocked from sunlight using painted foam core boards (seen in the last update). Stay tuned for some window lighting and sound effects.

Here’s the latest from my Haunted Mansion room. I’ve hung the 4 stretch portraits and “framed” them with door molding that I painted. This molding looks just like the fake, painted frames that are around the real portraits in the Haunted Mansion.

You’ll also see some random stuff lying around the room, getting ready for the next major steps: wall hangings and populating the shelves!

Any idea what those blue/white boards are for?

Halloween has come and gone… and it was fun! We had 60+ trick-or-treaters and put on a pretty good show for them. Combined with their parents, I’d say well over 100 people saw our haunted display… and now you can too. Below you’ll find a video and some pictures of our transformation. It took around 5 hours to put everything up and only around an hour to tear it all down. Enjoy!

Pictures:

Click the pictures to enlarge them.

I carved the Jack pumpkin and Michelle carved the Sally one. The bottom two are fake.

The Hitchhiking Ghosts and lit-up tombstones came from DisneyShopping.com. The giant Haunted Mansion banner came from Mouse Surplus and was used at the Disney-MGM Studios to promote the Haunted Mansion movie’s release.

We had three separate audio tracks and two lighting effects. Booming thunder came from the garage every 30 seconds or so synchronized with lightning effects illuminating the house. The left side of the house had Haunted Mansion organ music playing (alternating between the foyer and ballroom organs) and the right side had Haunted Mansion sound effects (cats, birds, howling, creaky doors, moaning, etc). The interior lighting flickered constantly.

Everyone in the neighborhood seemed to enjoy the show and we even got a few comments from kids who remembered our house from last year, though we had less cool stuff then. I can only imagine what we’ll do next year to top this!