Editor’s note: In 2021, ATEC organized a Halloween Decoration contest around the theme “Spooky and Funny.” Our lab participated and won second place, thanks to Kirstin’s vision, creativity, and effort to make it happen. Hopefully, this is the start of a Halloween tradition at the lab.
The text contribution below was written by: Kirstin Stevens-Schmidt
Going into this project initially was a bit of a challenge, especially when it came to drafting ideas. With the theme being “spooky and funny” you’d think there’d be a lot of opportunities for real winning ideas there, and there are, but my sense of humor is a little more immature than most. There was also the issue of working around the space we had. There is the door to the lab itself which is a fairly decent amount of space to work with, but there’s also the window next to it. It’s tall and narrow- only a foot or so wide- so any designs in that space would have to either continue into the design on the door or would have to look good by themselves in a space that narrow.
Quite literally the first idea in my head was doing monsters in fishnets, or just generally making classic Halloween monsters sexy. An invisible man on a stripping pole seemed like a funny idea; a way to be promiscuous without breaking any rules. From that stemmed the idea of making our decorations an interactive peep show, giving the window next to the door a functional purpose. In theory, we’d cover both the door and the window to the lab in black paper, cut out holes for viewers to look through, and on the inside we could have a scene of classic monsters putting on a little provocative show.
I settled on doing simple neon-inspired signage for the exterior- which, upon needing approval I was told to make it more PG. “Less ‘peep show’ and more Halloween” as some put it. The original design has a couple of “XXX”s and said “LIVE PEEP SHOW” instead of “LIVE CREEP SHOW” which was honestly a change I wasn’t upset about making. I appreciate the pun. For the interior, I decided to craft three different scenes for viewers to peep into, each with different monsters, and one dedicated to showing off the Halloween animation the experimenta.l. lab had done.
To make the project happen, I spent nearly one full day working on the boxes, pulled an all-nighter cutting out the paper lettering for the exterior, and spent another full day assembling everything with the help of Dr. Veras, making for a total of almost 30 hours of pure work.
I had to take some shortcuts here and there when it came to the construction of the boxes, like the monster figures lacking decent detail and the stage assembly in the burlesque box looking slightly sloppy. In hindsight, had I had more hands to help work on this the finishing on everything would have been way better than it was. But regardless, this was an overall enjoyable experience. Having been the only person to work on this in the span of two days (with some much-appreciated help), I’m pleased our decorations did as well as they did in the contest.