Haunt Weekly - Episode 379 - Rotting Orchards & Igor Box

[0:20] Hello everyone, I'm Jonathan. I'm Crystal. And this is Haunt Weekly, a weekly podcast for the non-detract channel entertainment community. Whether you're an actor, owner, or just plain aficionado, we aim to be a podcast for you. And this week we're reviving a tradition at Haunt Weekly, and that is talking to people who are smarter than us about the things they're smart about. Exactly. And so we're very excited this week to be doing a live episode. So definitely take a moment real fast and I gotta get this plug in before we start.
Find us at the places we exist. We're at HauntWeekly.com, Haunt Weekly on Twitter, Haunt Weekly on Facebook, which is where we do the live shit. Yes, and if you are there with us now, be sure to comment with any questions.
I am monitoring it.
Yes, we are monitoring it.
I think I can monitor it too.
Maybe? I don't know. I'll be in and out on the chat, I'm pretty sure.
But regardless, you can also find us at YouTube.com slash Haunt Weekly and wherever you get your podcast from. So anyways, we went to Transworld recently. Yes. And one of the great things about going to Transworld is you meet a lot of people. We do. And we met two wonderful people who are going to be joining us today. And honestly, I'm going to give as little introduction as I can because I want them to introduce themselves. So our mic just decided to go into business for herself. Okay, that's fine. Yeah, I think you picked a little thing.

[1:43] But regardless, please say hi to Mike and Lisa from Rising Orchards, which turns into Rotting Orchards and Haunt Season, and who have something new-ish they want to talk about.
Let's bring them on and here we go.
Alright they are here! Mike, Lisa, hey, how's it going? Hey, Lisa, hey, how's it going?
Everything's going good. How about you? Going good, good. Like I said, it's been a bit of a struggle trying to get.

[2:10] Everything working again on the live chats. For those who don't know or haven't been to one of our live chats, we are in completely new digs. Yeah.
Used to be we would record these from our haunt, especially during COVID times when we were not doing much with the haunt, but now the haunt is a haunt and there is no room for that crap.
So we are now using the back room of Ellie's Yarn Store and it is quite cool and it's great because it's set up as an AV space to begin with. We didn't have to bring the internet to it.
It came with an internet. But anyways, Mike and Lisa, thank you very much for joining us.
So much to go over and talk about. So hey, why don't you introduce yourselves?
I'm Lisa, also known as Issa. I am an artist. I done event planning. I am most passionate about, of course, the one time of year that I can put everything aside and work on our haunted house, which is 100% for charity. I am excited to be here tonight and talk about what we have on offer. And this is my husband, Mike.
Hello, I'm Mike. I'm the, I guess the engineering side of our haunt, right?
She's a designer. Professionally, I'm an engineer. So two of us together have been- We're a pretty good team. We're a pretty good team.
And yeah, just super excited to come and chat with you guys and talk a little bit about what we've got going on.
A designer and an engineer as a team, that's a scary thought.

[3:40] That is a completely scary thought. So how'd you get started with rotting orchards?

[3:46] Oh, well, I was one of those kids that just fell in love with the community I was in.
I grew up in this small town outside of Chicago that absolutely had a passion for Halloween.
There'd be people that would dress up in, do you remember the 90s Batman movie that had a catwoman?
Like there was a woman who would answer the door in the exact replica costume with all the zippers, all leather, it was just awesome. I'm just going to say that some fetishes were probably born that day too.
To. Oh, absolutely. 100%. But like the guys like before like anybody else had them they had the because I'm no spring chicken. Um, that was like the full setup with the electric chair in the front and all the other good stuff and it's just it's light a spark and then unfortunately, our girls go true was thrusted last second into doing a haunted house. I was so excited. No masks, no costumes. I think we had a little bit of like toilet paper or some gauze or something and we were just supposed to like stand around and that's what I knew what I didn't want to do. That was a good first lesson but uh yeah it all started in childhood of course because the awesome people who go out there and decide that they're going to turn their house into something spectacular for Halloween. Yeah my story's a little different.
He hadn't even carved his first pumpkin until after he met me.
I still haven't caught the pumpkin.

[5:12] What? I have never carved a pumpkin in my life. We actually talked about this a while back and we meant to do it this year, but we lost the plot and it got too busy and it didn't happen.

[5:23] Oh no, you have to, but I do recommend. But anyways, head and carve a pumpkin.
Okay. Okay, okay, okay. We have power tools.
So, I grew up in a really small town in Florida, so the trick-or-treating thing was not a thing.
You didn't do that.
You disappeared if you went trick-or-treating in my neighborhood probably. So it was just not a thing. Like we didn't really get to do that much. When I was like a little kid, I wanted to do it so bad. I wanted it like Halloween. And then I would like get so excited. Like my parents want to take me somewhere and I get so excited. I get like sick and I would like miss Halloween, like multiple years in a row from it. But to be honest, that was probably the drive to really push us into doing our own haunt is just so he could fully experience all the magic that Halloween Yeah, we were just kind of like decorating our house when we were living in California and at the time and decorating the house and we just started, she was like, you know, she, started reminiscing about her haunted houses when she was a kid in her neighborhood and, I started thinking like that would be nice.
That'd be kind of cool. We just kind of look at each other and went, let's do it this year.
And that kind of started it. And that was over 10 years ago now.
Wow. Nice. So one of you grew up with it, one of you didn't, and just jumped in literally to the deep end of the pool.

[6:45] Yeah. Yeah, basically.

[6:47] So- I mean, it wasn't that deep. It was only, you know, the garage.
But it grows, you know? It's the place.
You know, and as home hunters ourselves, saying it's just the garage really doesn't work because you know how much that can actually be.
I mean, it's just the garage until you decide you wanna make all these wacky creations and build new stuff.
Then you end up with a carport tent in front of the garage. And then you end up with stanchions and you end up with a thousand people and you end up multiple nights.
And a show for the people that are waiting in line. And yeah, we've not done it all.
Yeah, that's the one thing we have not done. We've not expanded outside the garage. No.
But, and I don't think I want to because like I said, the queue line.
Well, we do have queue line actors. Yeah, we have the queue line actors. We did all that.
We did add that stuff because like they said, you start getting a thousand people, you're running a line and you got to entertain them somehow.

[7:51] But yeah, but no, that's really, really cool. So tell me about the haunt.
I'm very curious about what it is and kind of the spirit of it.
Okay, so we are rotting orchards because where we started out, we started out in Campbell, California, which was a old Africa orchard.
And the lady across the street from me got so excited that we were doing a haunted house.
She actually brought out like 100 year old farm tools for me to use in my haunt.
She was like, oh, you're going to be the orchard? Like, let me help you.
I'm like, yeah, I'll bring it, baby. Hold on. Don't minimize this lady.
She was awesome. Adeline was awesome. She was this little old Portuguese lady that was roaching on 100. And she would tell me the whole area and the history of everything. She was an original owner of this 1950s track home in this neighborhood.
She lived there. She was the original owner there.
And she was a ball of fire. She was like the fireball old lady. Like, I mean, just.
She was my very, very good friend. She was awesome. She brought all this stuff over.
She was so excited about, about She was a little bit of an enabler.

[8:59] Sounds like the best kind of way.
We did that years. And honestly, it started out because I was like, well, we were in an old orchard and I'm like, I want to be able to grow.
Anything can happen on a farm, right? Oh yeah. Like you can have millions come.
You can have like the zombies can come alive.
You can have the campers being eaten by werewolves. Like, yeah, you can get all the people that cross under the property. I mean, Jesus Christ, you could get a whole bunch of baseball ghosts to play a game of baseball. Anything could happen. Yeah.

[9:29] Yeah, that's a good point. We built it in a few years. We decided we were just going to be charity the whole time. We were just going to raise money for various different...
It started out with UNICEF, then we went to Raising a Reader, Magic Wheelchair, and now we're with the Innocence Project. And it started literally, whatever we had laying around thrown up on a wall, like we did a spark wall that was closed on, we were not, we were not chaos certified.

[9:58] We did bad things. It started, it was funny. I was, I was looking at stuff, uh, this week, actually, like some of the original things that we built and, um, you know, it started with her going, Hey, you don't be really great. Like the first electronics sort of thing I built for the haunt was like, Hey, it would be really great if we had like a spark wall. And I'm like, well, doing it with a car battery is a bit dangerous. So let me build a power supply." And that sort of started the whole, you know, the rabbit hole. And then she's like, oh, you could build that. And then she would be able to say, Hey, could you like make a thing that does this? So that, and yeah, just to just kept. But what we found over years and years and years of doing this, like there was some major inefficiencies. So like, that's, that's where we're trying to like, better our game and and finding out that there's a lot of other people that are in the same boat.
And so we were trying, like we had constantly messing with like the infrared sensor, trying to like fix.
Oh, you know how it is, right? You're like, come on. Raspberry pies were everything for so many years.
You know, so, yeah, so that's kind of how it started.
Okay, we have a question real quick from the audience. Any 12-foot skellies at the Orchard?
Oh yes, so we just got one this past year. He was holding the banner for the haunted house.

[11:18] That's actually a legit use of the 12-foot skeleton. I actually like that.
Yeah, we had one of those big banners made like years ago and it was relatively inexpensive.
We're on a corner lot, so the back part which is on like this main road through the community, He's like standing with all this up lighting with these in between two trees with like the moon behind him. It was perfect in the banner It looked great. It looked like he was holding it, So yeah, it worked out really well. So yes, we fully believe in our 12 foot skeleton It took us a few years to get one. But yeah, we got it. We have not brought ourselves to pull the trigger yet, We've had a couple of opportunities. We have not pulled the trigger and May I don't know we got there with the store in the bastard first I'm on top of a key line.
You know what? I ended up buying two of those giant spiders this year because they did improve the quality.
But they are stuffed under my king-size bed.
Yeah. I went with a couple of the target ones, too, that were larger.
There's like a spider leg hanging out from one side of the bed.
It's shit. You know, there's a reason why Hauners aren't victims of home invasions.
There is a very simple reason. very very simple reason.
Um, but yeah. Um.

[12:34] So you mentioned that you're now with Innocence Project, just a fun side fact.
We actually live next door to the house where people...
The Innocence Project freeze in New Orleans, kind of land after they leave prison.

[12:52] They stay right next door to us until they get at their own place or whatever their next step is in their journey or they move in with someone else or whatever. So yeah, we live next door to an Innocence Project house and we've met some really interesting people through that.
A lot of very scary stories about the justice system. Oh, that's actually kind of funny because this past year was the first year we did anything with the Innocence Project. And I was doing a bunch of research and I was reading a lot of their.

[13:23] Published papers. And every 10 minutes I'm like, Lisa, come here. This is insane.
Like, read this. I know about a lot of them, but he didn't fully understand, like, what everything the Innocence Project did. And so to get him fully on board, I'm like, just look into it.
And he's like, oh my god. Oh my god, you got to read this.
And then we had all the people that were volunteering, helping us this year.
Like, they were up on it as well. Yeah, we had to educate them.
And we found out, like, we had to educate quite a bit of the public.
Like, they thought they'd heard the name somewhere before, but they couldn't place what it was doing.
And so hopefully, it was beyond just raising some money. And then you start saying, you know, then you start saying like, hey, you know, like, wrongfully wrongfully convicted people and like, well, how do they know that?
I'm like, well, because they put it like it takes a lot of money to get to that point.
You know, like, yeah, that's the point of the whole thing.
Like, yeah, like, give an example from the people next door to us.
We had a guy who spent I think 30 years in prison for a crime that was committed while he was one state over. He was in Texas.

[14:25] And could prove it. you could prove it. Wow. And in Louisiana it was especially bad because for a long time there you only had to have 10 jurors for a conviction and so that yeah that produced some bad results.

[14:40] But anyways moving on back to the haunt stuff I think it's I do think the idea of working with a charity do you work with a different charity each year? Are you um think you're going to stick with the Innocence Project? I mean honestly it started out that you know it was just the little boxes of the money things that for UNICEF and we're like okay here's a charity that could use some money so we stuffed their little boxes. From there we were educated on other charities that, were needing more help in our area. Raising a reader we stopped using because Target was involved with them. They were getting a lot of funding through Target. The same with Magic Wheelchair, we had a lot of friends in the community they're like they're great to work with, they're really fantastic and then we start seeing more corporations and larger things helping them out. I don't see, I see a lot more individuals donating to the Endocyn's Project and so we like to make an impact where it's.

[15:32] So yeah, so yeah, to summarize that, right? We are not loyal to anything.
We change when we feel the change is needed. When one of the charities starts getting a bunch of money in, it's like, okay, let's find somebody else that can use small sort of grassroots local stuff, right?
Because I think that's what haunts do best when they go for charities.
I think they work best doing local charity work because haunts are fundamentally, especially home haunts, are fundamentally a community project.
But makes sense in any charity work would be community charity work.
And what I think about Hauntz is, even if the money that we, home Hauntz, donate isn't huge, oftentimes the exposure and the platform, is what's more important than anything.
Just getting in front of that many eyeballs. People come and then they ask you what that charity is.
And then they're learning about it. And then they're like, oh, we should do blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, yes, you should. But like, it's a wonderful way of advertising for a cause that's in need.
And I couldn't, I really wish that there was more done with that.
We're in a neighborhood that likes to keep their own money and they're very giving, but like, it'd be really cool to see more fundraising things throughout every event.
Like we live in a fun thing, fun side fact, I guess.

[16:50] We moved here to Florida two years ago, a little over two years ago to our current community, which is a gated community.
Yeah. We do a home haunt in our gated community. Which was an interesting thing to bring forward because everyone was so scared about it.
Mike ended up programming a really smart thing that it was a private and it was done like a speakeasy.
So you had to message us via text.
And then you would get a message letting you know that you need to tell us how many people, what day you're thinking about coming. We did it three days this year.
And the day up, you would get the address and your time.
And the neighbors loved it. Yeah, it was sort of a dual thing.
One was like, hey, you know, it's a private exclusive thing, right? So we were like, send us a text message to get the details.
You get the details today of.
But, you know, on the back end, right, like the real reason why was so that I could generate a guest list to give to our security people and know who was coming.
And beyond that, all the pearl clutches, the freaking pearl clutches.
The community outreach part of it, you know, the people like, oh my God, it's going to be, these are Halloween people, they're going to destroy everything.
They wanted me involved with the children's coordinating events and stuff.
Then it was the children's coordinator that came and was like, you can't have outside people on Halloween. like that's our biggest day.

[18:10] They were afraid that the Pled people would get the gated community kids candy.
That was what it was all about. That's basically it. And all the old parts in our community really, really wanna see the trick or treaters. Hey, hey, hey, we live in Florida.
They're all old parts, so.
We're out there too. You know, and I'm glad y'all were able to make it work.
I know when we were picking, cause I remember when we bought the house we have now, we bought it with opening the home haunt in mind.
So it's like, here are the requirements, large garage and no HOAs, no neighborhood associations, none of that. We wanna be left alone.
But making that peace with your neighbors is so important.

[18:52] Because that's what kills home haunts is when they become bad neighbors. Here's a perception.
I don't know, it's sort of like, I think somebody at Transworld said it best, right?
Like this community is basically the same sort of perception as like the tattooing community, right?
And then like, and the thing is, is it like there's this perception that, that there's gonna, that it's just gonna be kids or like teenagers running amok, destroying everything.
And it's, you know, it's, it's like, gonna be like a, like an open air biker bar or something.
And it's like, well, first of all, bikers are really cool people.
Second of all, you know, they're pretty chill.
Second of all, you know, you're giving them something to do.
They're coming to an auto house. They're not gonna destroy your property.
No, like the kids want to be involved. The teenagers want to be involved.
They want to talk to their friends. They want to bring their friends.
They're not going to be doing anything else. They don't want to ruin a good thing.
They know that it's a good thing.
And they know if they do something wrong, they're going to screw it up for everybody else.
And unfortunately, where we live, it's nothing but like tons of planned communities and some grocery stores. There's nothing for the kids to do.
So, and that just drives you crazy, especially the teenagers.
Yes, there's a children's coordinator, but like there's no events for anybody above the age of eight.
Yeah, I was gonna say, I don't see over 12 getting much from a children's coordinator.
Yeah. The title alone indicates... Yeah, it's one of those things where the perception is wrong.

[20:16] Yeah. So you did the speak easy thing where you had people text you and say how many people were coming, what their names were, and so you could drop that off as a guest list.
How did that change in your mind the experience for the people who did come through?

[20:32] It ended up being really spectacular. They thought it was the coolest thing ever because they thought they were something exclusive and it was.
And so that elevated the whole scenario for them coming through.
It also worked really well because people weren't waiting in long lines.
Oh, yeah, that was the other thing. So because we were giving back the, we were sending back information, you know, to say, hey, you know, the day of, right?
That was, okay, there's a little trick here, right? So there's a little bit of a little bit of fun.
Of fun. There were a certain non-zero amount of people that could not get the concept of, you were going to get the details the day of. So they'd be like, I still don't have the address. I'm like, you're going to get the details the day of. But this was like, a whole automated system. So it wasn't like, I'm sitting there trying to deal with text messages all day. But most people got it. Most people understood it. It was pretty clear. But then- You had a few.

[21:30] And then there was but but at the same time, we decided like, hey, we've got this list, we have a running list, we knew how many guests we were going to have right per day. And so we, split that list into two separate sections, right? So like an earlier section and a later, a later section. And then we just pre assigned it, we didn't ask people like, which one do you want to go at? Because it's it's kind of like reservoir dogs, everybody wants to be Mr. Black. Everybody wants the later one, right? So we sent it out and said, you're in the you're in this this time block, and then you're in this time block, you don't have to show up.
I literally said you don't have to show up in that time block.

[22:08] But it would, you know, we would appreciate it if you could make that work sort of thing, right? Like you can still show up when you want. And a lot of people generally sort of stuck to their time blocks. So we didn't really have like, this is the first time, first time in years that we didn't have like a congestion of people. No. And I even like for the old funny duddies in the community, I ended up putting out chairs on my driveway too. So people could just sit and talk to each other while they waited because it would also be you get your turn in line and you get your ticket and and then you wait to be called.
So you could sit- Yeah, that's the thing. We're not a conga line, right?
No. We're a three in, three out sort of thing. So, give them a ticket.
But the chairs were a waste. Everyone was so excited.
They were up talking and they were just making a line through it.
I was like, well, so much for that. We live and learn. You know? Yeah.
Well, I mean, I know that our neighbors tend to sit outside and listen to all of the screams.
So maybe next year you could offer them to your neighbors.

[23:09] Yeah, I mean. Observation deck. Exactly.
The guy across the street is awesome. He lets me park my car over there for Halloween.
And I had my cousin that was coming too.
So we had two cars on his driveway. I'm sure if you had like the little three-year-old twins were looking out the window every day trying to see what's changing, what's going on.
They were having a blast. They came by every other day. They're like.
Because they had to go come pet the spiders and stuff. It was cute.

[23:42] Yeah, no, I'm really glad you got that relationship though with the neighbors, even though it was complicated by the gated community. Yeah, yeah, it worked out pretty well. The funny thing was is, you know, where there's a will, there's a way.
You know, I was in, we have not only, not only do we have an HOA, but we, we, we have like, like, our gated community is 1,500 homes. It's a small city.
And- There's a commercial district in the center of it with restaurants and like the honey bae cam guy, tattoo shop, massage therapist. We live on a cruise ship, basically.
It is. It's a land cruise ship. But we have like a HOA general manager, we have a head of security and whatnot. And I went to them like well beforehand and like they were all aware of what was going on.
It was the community, right?
1,500 homes, there's no way they're all gonna know. community that didn't know, and I'm getting funnels like phone calls from them like, hey, by the way, just letting you know, so like somebody called me, you know, don't worry about it. But yeah, people were calling there. But it's sort of like, you know, put your ducks in a row. Get you know, go talk to everybody, make sure that the people that are in hands kiss babies, you know, try and smooth things over before you do it.
Don't kiss hand shake babies. That's a different problem.
Well, I'll say what has worked well for us cookies.

[24:59] Yeah, sweets bribes and any neighbors that are like immediately close to you, especially we've Yeah, Ellie is really up to our neighborhood game. We do this here?
Yeah, she's our neighborhood liaison. I gave like the people who are going to be affected like the little kids across the street.
They got like these little shaker like pumpkin lights with the candy corn underneath so they could play with those. Those are three.
We do stuff like that all the time. But the thing is, my neighbor who bought the property next door to me, which is a vacant lot, actually came and got upset with me because she didn't get to see the haunted house yet.
And she was so excited. She's super supportive. So good. The people who are going to build are supportive. The second thing she got really upset that I took down my skeleton. She wanted to see it.
We had something similar though. We had a family that loved our skeleton display when and bring the kid around regularly. And yeah, same deal.
We took it down rather than Christmas-izing it this year because we just didn't have a good idea really.
We wanted to, but we were bone out of ideas.

[26:09] So we ended up taking it down. But yeah, no, that's always sad when you take it down and someone comes and goes, oh, I wasn't gonna leave it up for 12 months.
I mean, it had to come down at some point.
They're gonna have heartbreak next year. Since next year he's gonna be in the center yard with like all those, we'll probably do the puffers and stuff behind him, but it's just gonna be coming next year, because we're just planning on actually taking a year off.

[26:35] Going and meeting with all of these people that we talked to at Transworld, gathering ourselves to launch hopefully the coming year, but we're going to, instead of doing a haunted house this year, we're building our booth for Transworld.
So our neighbors are gonna come and play with that and give us feedback.
So it'll be even better.
And we're also, you know, we've been doing this for over 10 years and we've never really got to go see any of the other places.
True, like we just decided like last after last year, I had gone so hard.
I joke about in this industry, you sell out or you burn out.
And I went so hard that I was like, I can't do this again next year.
Like people were coming in and saying it was better than in what Universal was doing.
We live an hour from Universal Studios and we get a lot of people from over there, a lot of people that go there.
People were giving us really great compliments on sort of the theming and the animation and all that stuff.
I mean, I had all the neighbors coming to us and like, oh, you need to get with the community.
We should be a stage builder. Oh, you need to do this and that.
Like everyone was just so excited.
But it's one of those things where we put.

[27:46] Because we recently moved here in the last few years, right? Like if we don't have the help we had before So I did I did a record amount of carpentry this year, We did a lot of work and she was just like let's sweat and tears I did find one person trying to find anybody to do webbing or that other stuff but this one person came and like was, Rotting apples with me. So what I do for apples for a little orchard get the foam apples and apply heat gun, Yeah and then you just like dab them with a little bit of the brown paint here and there, or you can do a little moldy spot or whatever super fast. When you heat up one of those foam apples it just shrivels up like a like an old like rotted apple like like naturally with a heat gun it just uh you shouldn't breathe it by the way.

[28:30] But yeah so that they got so excited about that and they ended up working those front of the hawn telling everybody about that that they did that so they took pride and then they came afterwards to help us tear down. Oh my god, I had help with tear down. It was great.
So long story short, right, this next year is going to be sort of the first year we take a year off in over a decade and we are going to go tour all everybody else's haunted houses, as many as we can. But we're going to get the crew together and because they've signed up afterwards that they want to help build the next one. So we'll take this year to plan out what we want want to build for next year. And it should be great.
Cool. That sounds really great. Earlier you were talking about how, you had some technical challenges that as an engineer you were able to overcome.
So I think you know where this is leading into. Would you like to talk about what you're developing?

[29:26] We could talk a little bit about it. We have a lot of stuff up in the air right now.
Just to preface it with like, we have like IP attorneys and patents and all kinds of stuff in flight, but I'm happy to talk about as much as I can.
So, yeah. Sorry. Where do you get your foam apples?
Great question. I originally got them from the Dollar Tree. Those do much better at melting.
The ones I got from eBay, I ended up using a float torch, just letting you know, but yeah, if you can get, the apples are pretty good. You can find them in green and red at the Dollar Tree, I don't know if they still have them bulk.

[30:05] This is why Haunters can't leave reviews for things. Five stars melts really well.
It's not a review you would pull on a foam apple. These didn't melt like the ones at the Dollar Tree. What?
Three stars did not melt like the Dollar Tree. Exactly.
Okay. Sorry. Back on topic. Stay on target. Stay on target.
No. They own target. No. So we, um, but anyway, so we were talking, oh yeah, we're talking about Ego Box. Right. So, so again, we, we've been doing this for, for over a decade and it started out with, Hey, can you build this thing? And, and being, being an engineer, right? Like, yeah, of course. I mean, anything can, I can, we could do anything. Um, yeah, he originally like had come up with the Ego Box, but he wanted to make it something like the Boo Box. And so we didn't realize until years later, because we didn't have time to work on it, it had come out and that was cool.
We're like, oh, that's great. Yeah. And then it became something much more.

[31:07] So, so the, the, the challenge that we have, uh, is we actually gave it, I actually gave a talk on this, uh, yet, um, I think HauntCon in 2017.

[31:19] Um, we both gave talks at that one. And, uh, the, The challenge that we have was more of like, how do you program, like custom program, like larger props, right? Like this is where the whole thing stemmed from. So like you get these, big props, right? That have tons of pneumatic actuators or servos and all kinds of stuff going on how do you program as a DIYer, how do you program this stuff?

[31:48] And you can get an Arduino and program it. You're going to run out of outputs pretty quickly when you're doing those big ones.
Also, the code gets really complicated really fast. You want to turn on one thing or you want to turn on a light, whatever, that's fine. We start getting into coordinating a bunch of movement.
It turns into a nightmare even for somebody who is good at code.
I'll tell you all about my nightmares.
So I gave a talk about how to use multiple smaller microcontrollers and how to get all this stuff kind of talking and working together to run a particular animated prop, a larger, more animated prop, right?
Moving fingers and stuff.
Years later, we're continuing to on our path to better things, working with infrared stuff and everything else, trying to figure out home things.
Yeah, you get to that point where you get the passive infrared sensors and they constantly false fire and you just get something over here that's doing something anyway.
So this past year, I built up a bunch of stuff. We did.
We'd used it as another testing ground because every year we're testing another new thing.

[33:03] So this was like four new things just because and we were trying to get the feedback from that and it ended up working really well.
And then we had the realization technology has finally cut up to what we actually want to build. Yeah. Technology in the last couple of years has finally caught up to, to like this grand vision that we both had in terms of like, how...
Because he wants me to be able to take his job with making things go and be able to run the show myself.
I want her to be able to design the animation, but I don't want to sit there and poke around and code. Because he's tired. It's like, Oh, I want to change the lighting.
Oh, I want to change the sound. Oh, I want to change this and that.
And so now it is the build for the master control to do all of that.

[33:45] So the Igor box was sort of spawned out of this idea that, oh, we should also mention, like, we went to Halloween Horror Nights, we're obviously big fans, and we did the Behind the Screams tour, we got to talk to a lot of people there. Yeah, we realized we were doing a lot of the same things they were doing, and then we had to think, you know, it's like, why is it not possible for home haunters or anybody, a business, it doesn't matter, to be able to run their show from one location, like one centralized thing to run the whole show.
Right. Like your animations, your animatronics and animation stuff, your sound, your lighting, right? You should be able to run the attraction, right? Whether it's a garage with one room, three rooms, or an 80,000 square foot facility.
Or even people with their Christmas lights that go out of control with that. And they want to put some home depot animatronics in or something. They should be able to be in.
We don't know anybody who does that. No. No idea what you're talking about.
So we were pretty inspired after going to Halloween Horror Night this past year and realizing, yeah, we are doing things differently than I think most haunters are doing things in general.
Because again, I sit and tweak with this stuff constantly. We get frustrated.
And I'm like, honey, fix this. And he's like, no, it's more than that that needs to be fixed.
And so you go there and you see, oh, they're actually doing stuff more like the way we do it rather than the way the rest of the industry does it.

[35:09] I'm like, we should democratize that. 100%. We want to bring that magic that's missing from another big park and make it available to everybody. Because there's no reason, like there's so much creativity out there. People are just brilliant, but it's hard for them, like for me, to be able to get it out there without his help.
So we're trying to build. Yeah, you basically have to hire an engineer. We're not cheap to do this stuff for you, or we could put our heads together together and take what we took, what we did this past year.
And productize it and bring it to the market and get people to give people something that makes it easier to basically be their own imagineers. Right? Yeah. And that's really what it's about. At the core of it, there's a lot of details and whatnot that you probably shouldn't talk about. We're still kind of wrapping up with the lawyer trying to get something that's patented and stuff. But we're trying to, if you can ask some questions, we're able to like, we'll be able to kind of weave around it.
But it's born out of frustration. And honestly, it's at the end of the day.

[36:19] The coolest thing about going to Transworld, we talked with so many people and it was- They're so excited for it. They understand that there's the need there.
You know, you want to be able to truly take control of your show and not, like we don't want to make it where you have to buy all new stuff.
We want to work with what's out there now so that you can fully enjoy it and not be breaking the bank, getting a whole new system.
Yeah, it's not a replacement to like, you know, fried props, controllers, stuff like that.
It's more of a higher level construct that works with all that stuff. But, you know, talking with prop builders, talking with haunt owners, talking with all these people that were escape room people. Super excited about this stuff. And that was obviously very inspiring.
Cran's World was amazing. It really, I forgot how warm and welcoming, it's been a few years since I went to a convention and how absolutely warm and wonderful the community is. Like it really took us back for a minute because they were so excited and they're like there's a couple of them that were how can I help? We really need to bring this for everybody. How can I help? And that's what we were there. I had my crazy backpack trying to sign up people for beta testing and we got a response. And you know at the end of the day like the whole point of this is it's not about like it's not about profits or it's not about the business side of it. Like we're both artists, right? You can sort of see like we're sitting in a music room right now. I went to school for music. But like we're both artists and this is more of like.

[37:45] A community effort, right? Like we want to like, we want to release this because we want to see people run wild with it and build their dreams. Right. So it's much more, it's much bigger than than us just sort of like, here's what we do, buy our stuff, it's more of.

[38:01] How can we together collectively raise the bar of our art in Home Haunting?
And that would be really useful.
You were going to say something? No, go ahead.
Because I've kind of shied away from most animatronics and things like that.
We like to jokingly, I don't know if you've seen the show Kids Next Door, But we refer to ourselves as two by built with two by four technology, the same concept because we're very much carpentry and people power.
But yeah, but it's not that we're not.

[38:38] It's not that we're against it. Not that we're against it.
It's just we all like that's built that seems to be happening and everything else.
Like most of the time the people are exiting the room while you're waiting for the stupid spirit prop to go off.
You know what I mean? It doesn't.
It's not that immediate feedback and actors are great for that.
And some you have to build in some real even for the animatronics to work.
Yeah, because if that real tactile thing isn't there, like the tree shaking or this or that isn't going to mean anything.
Right. You know, they're not going to see it.
They're going to be running through the room out the door. Right.
So, but yeah, exactly. Right. Like the point is, is I always joke about this, right?
Like I always say that like, you know, the point of all of this is, is it needs to be, it needs to be programmable by mere mortals, right? Like you should be able to think about, you should be able to take what's in your head and just go, I want this to do that.
Right.
So that's, that's really what it's about. And, and, you know, be able to do it in a way that you don't have to worry about like, Oh, I messed up everything that we had worked.
Like you get it just perfect tweaks, right? and then all of a sudden you make a change and everything blows up, you shouldn't have to worry, right?
Like you should be able to go back to the previous version of it and all that fun stuff that comes with having a central control system.

[39:59] Yeah, yeah, I agree and that sounds very appealing. Yeah, it does. I mean, it might actually, you know, inspire me to to put in some animatronics and stuff if I know that I can control them fairly easily.
Yeah, and might rethink our current sound design practices too, because that's one of the things that helps run is the sound design. Yeah, so no, this sounds really, really interesting. And like you said, making it for mere mortals, I think is a big part of the challenge, because let's be honest, it's not.
I've noticed especially like contours are artists and they don't like like they they get technical about certain aspects But there aren't a lot of people who do code in the Honda industry that I've noticed They tend to be the guys that are doing the the marketing and the ticket sales and all that other kind of stuff They hang on that end. Yeah, but I think you said it best right most of the people we met at Transworld were theater Artists, like theater kids, and it's awesome.
So we just need to make a palette that's easy for them to play with.
We have to transition that, so it's just- I mean, I went to a lot of the talks at Transworld this year, the technical talks and whatnot.
I just kind of wanted to hear what other people were saying.
And one thing that I did learn was, haunters are very- Oh my God, you guys are the most forgiving people ever.
Like the entire industry- They just deal with pain. We all just do.

[41:22] Believe me. I mean, we're going to have more on that later, but yeah, we're very, industry, um, with our suppliers, with companies that are hot based, we take a lot of crap sometimes and maybe we shouldn't talk about DMX for, for 20 minutes and say nothing nice about it, but say it was the only thing that they could use, right?
The only, the only often out there. I'm like, yeah, DMX is a little bit complicated, especially if you're not coming from sort of that side of the world, like theater lighting and whatnot.
But listening to this person speak for 20 minutes about how terrible it was and then tell everybody to go do it.
And I'm like, yeah. We're an industry of people that are used to sitting for hours on end in uncomfortable costumes and terrible masks that are probably choking the life out of us and hailing God knows what chemicals.
So yeah, we can be a little patient with the lighting infrastructure.
We do it for fun. This is supposed to be fun. God damn it. Like we do all of this for fun.
Like what kind of masochist are we? Let me ask you this question.
How many days do you keep your haunt open? Three. Three. Three.
So we did three, right? But you know, if you did the...

[42:40] You always get that like, like you did all that effort for only three days.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. We did. Right. Because honestly, the effort to have it for longer is way worse. Yeah. I mean, okay. Yeah. A lot of work goes into building it and setting it up, but that's work you spread out over the year where the work of being open is basically 24 hours of sheer insanity dumped on you at once. Oh, you guys keep it in your garage all year.
Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. No, like right now it's our garage. I have like two walls that I made him keep up because I just loved them so much. And I was like, we can use these for videos, you know, trying to sell it. The rest of it was completely gutted. So for his electronics lab to build what we're using. So Lisa had the most genius theming idea this year that like, I absolutely love. She went to Amazon and she bought like photographer like backdrops. There are some that are like old, you know, like forest backdrops and stuff. And then we use those and I built a window on top of it and kind of thing. But like they're still up in my garage because they take up no space and they just look cool. Yeah. Right. So don't get them wet though.
As we discovered. Don't get them wet. Yeah.

[43:56] But yeah, as a background, there's no reason, if you don't wanna sit there and paint forever in a day, these realistic scenes, those backdrops are great for you to build on top of.
Yeah, and we built stuff on top of it, so then you sort of can't see where the two transition.
People were literally touching the backdrop.
Like, is that real? That's not real.
Yeah, we found that putting in those little details really helped.
Again, people don't realize how much detail goes in, but at the same point, they know when the detail's missing.
Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that's the thing. It's like people, because we are a fear-based industry and what we're doing is trying to help people have fun through fear.
It's kind of a lizard brain response to everything, which like you said, they may not seem to notice or actively observe or make note of the detail, but it activates that part of the brain more.
That makes it feel more real. That's the thing. You're always trying to sell the scenario.
You know, you're selling this idea of being on an orchard or in a witch's room or whatever it is.
And if you don't have that engage, and especially like with younger generations, they've seen like so much so soon.
Like they're a little jaded. They're jaded Gen Zers. So you've really gotta go a little over the top to make that world real.
I sort of look at it as like, you really want them to feel like.

[45:19] They are legitimately part of the show. Yeah, you are immersing them into their own horror film.
The best haunted houses I think have ever been to view every aspect of their haunt as legitimately like a live show. And the guest is immersed inside the live show.
They're on stage with everybody else, but they don't have any lines. And that's sort of the best ones I've ever been to, right? I think those are, that's when magic happens, right? It's a show.
Every aspect of it is a show. What people say, what they do, where they move to, what the people that are working, like the volunteers are acting, the guests are, whoever you're paying, whatever, they're all part of this collective show. Even the guests are, when they go in and they're screaming and they come running out scared, right? They're part of the show, right?
They're the protagonist.
They are the protagonist in the show. Yeah.
They're literally the star. That's the whole point.

[46:20] They're the hero. They're the good guy, quote unquote. You know, they're the they're the conquering hero.
Yeah. Even if they're doing it in 90 miles an hour, they run straight through the haunt.
I mean, it will take whatever conquering we can get.
Straight through the black plastic wall that you put up the first year.
Well, that was the first year.
Yeah, that was not good. Then we learned that there's the fire retardant black plastic, and we've gone quite a ways from the original. But at the same- Everything is bolted now.
Like, you want to run into a wall, you're going to hurt yourself on the wall.
Oh, yeah. I have the unfortunate job in our haunt of wall tester, which usually entails me running and slamming my full weight against the wall to make sure it doesn't move.
That's what we've been doing, because for years we had people going through, even when it was drywall, we're like, what's going on? I like somebody in my whole life.
Somebody run through drywall.
Yes. They ran through drywall. Yeah, I can imagine that. We had someone who had a 2x4.

[47:17] And it was built every 16 inches with studs. They just managed to go through.
It's a legit real wall.
Yeah, I don't doubt it. Drywall will never hold up.
We've switched entirely to plywood because we've got it.
Yes, a lot of we have bare our scars with pride on these learning tales.
Like our journey has been tough. Somebody asked us for some consulting time on helping them with their haunt.
The first thing we were like, look, it's a lot more complicated than you think it is.
If you want to build it and have it stand up for any length of time, yeah, it's more complicated.
Yeah, it's more complicated. And I love that it's like all the neighbors and everybody who wants to throw their parties, wants you to bring your stuff so they could have a party so you don't do your thing and they don't really want to pay you. They just want you to talk to you.
Does that happen to you? Yes. Does that happen to you or is it just us?
Like, I feel like it's just really, yeah, you guys should come over, bring all your stuff.
I don't know. You want me to bring 30 panels and set it up? What's the plan here?
Transport alone is gonna be a lot of money. How tired are you about, with the question about storage?
Like of course it's gonna take up space. Where do you store it all?
We just leave it all.

[48:37] You know what? It all folds down into a suitcase. It's pretty amazing.
Why do you even spread your gadget, right? as hard as we just throw it all in there.

[48:47] God, yeah, of course it takes up space. Yeah. I mean, there's a reason we leave most of it up year round.
Yeah, I don't blame you.
I really don't. I just can't afford to do that right now. But otherwise, well, and, you know, for your year off, it totally makes extra sense.

[49:05] You know, I kind of wish that we hadn't had ours up for the three years through the pandemic.
Yeah, because we were closed in 2019 because we had no road.
Yeah, they tore up our road. We had no roads. So no road, no hawn.
And then 2020, 2021, we all know what the fuck happened there.
We don't need to have a conversation about that. And then 2022 was the first year back. And yeah, yeah.
But we're tearing out significant portions, significant portions. Yeah. Yeah.
And rearranging, we're actually doing a redesigning the layout historically.
Go ahead. Sorry. Anyway. So with your year off, you mentioned that you're going to go and visit some haunts.
Which ones are you looking forward to the most?
The one that was most excited to work with us. So Fear Factory is something that I am so excited about.
Oh, yeah. We had a we had a chat with Spencer, Spencer Terry about about the Igor box, actually at Transworld.
Like he lit up. And he was like, what size of area do you want to try out?
You want to try versus a large room? I got everything. A whole section.
Do you want to do just an escape room?
Like, where do you want to try? Are you want to try all of it?
And I'm like, yeah, bring it. So we want to go see that haunted overload up in.
That's been on my bucket list. Oh, my dear. Bye, Mark.

[50:23] Well, I work a lot with natural materials constantly. So rotting orchards, kind of a given.
The fact that they're on old orchards property and they've got everything else and it is a lot of it is like if you're going to see a haunt that is most like my style that's done by a professional, it's definitely haunted overload. And so I have to go see it in person. We have a list of like, like, cannot miss from Alex from Winnhenge's Creek.
Yes. We told him that we were doing this this year.
And believe it or not. And he was like, I'm going to send you a whole list.
You got to go to all of these.
And I got like a whole list of like, ones I've never heard of that I'm like, OK, sounds like.
There's a lot of great ones. But like the one that I can't believe I kept missing out on, for whatever reason, I was never able to make it in Hell's Gate, even though I grew up in the Chicago area.
And we lived in Chicago for four years together. a lot like most recent place we lived in.
Yeah, we never got to go. Yeah, Hells Gate, I'll highly recommend.
And if you can get the behind the scenes tour, do it. Definitely.
Okay. Definitely the behind the scenes tour. John LaFlambeau showing us how he designed Hells Gate literally changed everything I think about haunt design.
It literally was revolutionary for me. I mean, that was a better education than I think just about anything I've had at a conference.
Because you actually see how the pieces fit together.
I mean, you just can't get that with a talk, even with good diagrams and things. So yeah.

[51:50] But yeah, we're running slowly out of time, real fast. Tell all the nice people where they can find you and where they should be subscribing and liking and Facebooking and doing all the stuff.
And where we can look for news about IgorBox.

[52:05] Yeah. Yeah, sure. So we have igorbox.com, like exactly how it's spelled, IGORBX.com.
There's nothing really there right now other than sort of the basic like splash page, like very, very vague.
If you wanna get involved or possibly be a tester for anything, you can contact us on that page.
There's a form in there. When you fill it out, it comes straight to my phone.
And that's where we sort of collect everybody who's interested in beta testing and getting all this stuff.
But that's where we drop all the news. risingorchards.com is sort of the corporate website, I guess.
Real fast, while we're on this though. And of course, Facebook.
I'm sorry, we got a question in. Do we have a, do you know a timeline for Igor Boggs?

[52:51] Oh, that's a great question. Actually, I can't believe we didn't cover that.
And Greg. So we are planning on we are planning on launching it like officially, generally available, launching Igor box at Transworld next year at Transworld next year. And we've already been talking with, with Richard Transworld about about sort of the like the greater sort of launch idea with Transworld. So we're trying to partner up with Transworld for the actual launch.

[53:17] For testing. The beginning of testing is going to come probably late summer.
Yeah, so we're starting our beta testing. We'll be reaching out to people that we haven't already reached out to, probably.
Sometime in June is when we should have...
Okay, so, preface this. That's early summer. As people say, supply chains are bad.
They're still bad.
So, we do... There's a lot of custom electronics involved in this, and there's a lot of custom manufacturing.
So we're relatively hopeful that we will have at least prototype beta testable boards.
I have prototype boards, but we're not putting those in anybody's home.
Testable ready to go prototype boards sometime.
That's actually in a box and not just hotch-potched together.
Not just a bunch of wires and like, oh, don't knock that. Let me just hot glue that down.
If the Igor box is not a box, I would be very disappointed.
I have to admit. It's gonna be it's gonna be a fall no.

[54:22] The so that'll be sometime in summer will be contacting people so So yeah, egorbox.com and where else do we find you?
Rising Orchards.com is sort of the electronics company and consulting company that we kind of sort of umbrella all this stuff, right? It's actually kind of funny because, usually you end up with like Rising Orchards and then Rotting Orchards is like a play on the company name. It's the other way around. Rising Orchards is a play on our haunt name.
Rotting Orchards is our Facebook page. If you type in RottingOrchards.com, it'll take you straight to Facebook and you can see what we've done. And if you like YouTube, then it's just Mike and Isa and it's two E's and SNA. And that is more of our personal life and our crazy community and everything else. So yeah, you can all of our stuff, all of our social stuff is on Igor Box and Rising Orchards. To find out about Igor Box, just go to Igor Box. Yeah.

[55:20] Fill out the form. Like, seriously, if you're a single, like if you're a garage haunted house, Please fill out the form, give me some information.
We, you know, we want it to be usable by everyone. So the best thing, best way of doing that is have everybody every from every level, test it and make sure we get that feedback.
So we build a product that you want.
So yeah, egorbox.com.
If this sounds like something you're interested in, go. Yeah, check it out. Just check it out.
Well, on that note, everyone, thank you all for joining us for the past hour.
To Mike and Lisa for educating us on so many wonderful things and sharing some of your stories.
It's so nice to be able to talk to other Haunters like this.
Please though, if you are new to Haunt Weekly, check us out at HauntWeekly.com, Haunt Weekly on Twitter, Haunt Weekly on Facebook. Subscribe there definitely because that's where we do the live stuff.
Yes. We will also, once we get fully set up, be doing it on our YouTube channel too, YouTube.com slash Haunt Weekly.
And you can also find us wherever podcasts are distributed because we're pretty much I pay someone to take care of it for me because screw that that's a lot of work and I'm not doing it, On that note everyone, thank you again for joining us and we will see you all next week.