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Tag: pumpkins

  • The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze: The Best Use of Pumpkins You’ll See This Halloween

    The reinvention of the common Jack O’Lantern was kicked into overdrive with the explosion of social media. Pictures from people eager to share their stencil-powered carved gourds that pay homage to everything from video games to favorite sports icons. And this is a good thing. Jack O’Lanterns are pretty damn awesome and so is the creativity and craftsmanship involved. However, every so often, something comes along and blows pretty much everything else out of the water, and like a viral snowball, the popularity grows as social sharing takes over. Take The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze, which is appearing in the Hudson Valley area of upstate New York.

    As the name implies, the event is simply an incredible explosion of Jack O’Lanterns–over 5000, in fact–which are used to create various monsters, dinosaurs, and various other Halloween themes. There’s even a tunnel of Jacks that needs to be seen to be appreciated. Thankfully, this is where social media kicks in nicely. The sad truth is, most of us won’t be able see the Jack O’Lantern event in person. Thanks to the power of Joshua Bousel’s Flickr account, we can live vicariously via some fantastic photography.

    An example of what The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze offers:

    Jack O'Lantern Blaze

    Jack O'Lantern Blaze

    Jack O'Lantern Blaze

    Click to enlarge images


    You owe it to yourself to pay a visit to Bousel’s Flickr page, especially if you’re fan of Jack O’Lanterns. The craftsmanship and creativity is pretty breathtaking, and it’s easy to see why people are making the trip to see these displays in person. Thankfully, social media allows those who can’t make the trip to connect to the event, if only virtually.

    [All images courtesy of Joshua Bousel’s Flickr page]

  • This Slow-Motion Pumpkin Smashing Video Ups the Ante, Considerably

    Smashing pumpkins is fun. Smashing pumpkins in creative ways is more fun. Smashing pumpkins in creative ways in slow-motion is the most fun.

    This short comes just in time for Halloween, from director Ross Ching for The Thrash Lab. Earlier this month he had a viral hit with this popsicle stick bomb video, shot at 1000 FPS.

    Check out the top 10 ways to smash a pumpkin, at 1500 FPS:

    These are some pretty good ideas for pumpkin smashing. I guess I’m obligated to tell everyone not to try this at home – or at anyone else’s home. At least wait until after Halloween. If you smash any of my intricately carved pumpkins, I’m going to go all Liam Neeson on you. I’m sure others feel the same way.

  • Pumpkin Carving Embraces The Future With PunkinBot

    I love carving pumpkins for halloween. There’s something timeless about carving a silly grin, or an awe-inspiring Predator face, into a pumpkin. The only problem is that its time consuming and rather messy for relatively little pay off. It’s about time we drag pumpkin carving into the future.

    Brian, Eric and Alex VanDiepenbos must have had the exact same thoughts when they built the punkinBot. It’s a CNC machine that carves pumpkins instead of metal and other materials. In a way, it’s similar to 3D printers, but these machines create objects out of an already existing piece of metal, or in this case, pumpkins.

    Here’s a video of the first carving done by the punkinBot at the Maker Faire in Detroit.

    For a first run, it’s pretty impressive. It’s obviously a little rough around the edges, but the concept is solid. It’s still very much just a conceptual piece for now, but this could be a thing in the future. Talentless pumpkin carvers could bring a pumpkin into a shop to have a custom carving job done for them on a machine.

    Even better, when will we able to just 3D print pumpkin-like material to create even more elaborate designs? It might be a little abstract, but what about a carve of the Eiffel Tower made entirely out of pumpkin-like material. The pumpkin carving masters might consider it cheating, but it would still be amazingly awesome.

    [h/t: Make]

  • This Creepy Pumpkin Smashing Video Is Perfect For Halloween

    If you’ve ever dropped a pumpkin from a significant height and watched it explode into chunky, orange bits of pulpy goodness, you know that there’s something inherently fascinating about it. Really, it’s fun to smash any kind of squash or melon, but there’s something extra special about pumpkins.

    Maybe it’s because we carve faces into them.

    Anthropomorphism implications aside, exploding pumpkins are awesome. So one would infer that exploding pumpkins in slow-motion would be even more awesome, and they would be right.

    This video, created by YouTube user devinsupertramp and scored by his friend Stephen Anderson, is all kinds of creepy. It’s perfect for the Halloween season. Check it out below:

    Here’s how they achieved the effect:

    We shot the pumpkins smashing with the Red Epic camera at 300 frames per second. Then in a couple of the shots I put the slow motion clips into Twixtor, a program that adds frames to make it even slow, and I made those shots run at 1000fps, by adding frames in between the other frames.

    As far as the lighting goes, we used an Arri kit. We filmed the smashing of the pumpkins right outside my friends apartment. We dropped them off the three story building into the parking lot. To make the space look like it was in the middle of nowhere, we also drapped a black cloth/sheet. And we also covered the ground with water, and the pumpkins so they would shine/glisten in the lights that we had set up.

    Neat, huh?

    I started thinking about other odd uses of pumpkins, so here are some other great pumpkin-related videos:

    First, this is a fun, grotesque use of science –

    Pumpkin catapult, anyone? –

    This pumpkin cannon destroys everything in its path –

    And finally, the smashing pumpkin video to rule them all –