Fortune Teller Halloween
October, 2026
What if everything was combined? The interactivity of The Fortune Teller, the exterior environments of Haunted Mansion Halloween, and the immersive destination of Indiana Jones Halloween?
That wasn't the original plan. I originally planned to re-run a simplified Fortune Teller on the front steps. But then rain was in the forecast, so I designed a tent to shelter it. And then friends reminded me of the lines we had for Indy. Where would people wait? And there were concerns about guests wanting to touch everything. It needed to be in the garage where you could put a barrier between guests and Leota.
Well, if it's going in the garage, I need to build a room. And maybe if I'm building a room it would be cool for the room to change as she reads your fortune. And the line can't be boring.
I still have the scrim from the Haunted Mansion Halloween, so flying ghosts were in order. The projector I have available has a really long throw, so one early evening Beth and I rigged the scrim off the front of our house to figure out where we could get the biggest image. Ropes were hoisted. Steel pipe and ladders were pulled out. We quickly found that we could not fill the entire yard unless the projector was likely hung from a tree across the sidewalk, but we found we could rear project under the rhododendron tree to create a single scene.
The next day I rigged the scrim in the drip line of the rhododendron and began laying out a graveyard across the lawn. I ordered fencing and when it arrived, assembled a winding path leading from our front steps to the driveway.
To tie the entire house into the show, background audio played throughout the yard, periodically interrupted with thunderclaps. With every thunderclap, the house lights flickered, glowing out onto the street.
The original test tent was a pop up tent covered in tarps and I hoped to just move it into the garage. Our tiny one car garage proved to be too narrow when I pitched the tent, so an alternative plan was needed. For Indy, I built a room within a room, allowing the garage door to roll up above the interior set. I repeated this plan, slightly altering it to have one, single space instead of a u shaped hallway.
I assembled a basic frame that supported several large painter's tarps to form the tent. The tent's back wall used a rear projection screen, also just like Indy.
I wanted the back wall to appear lo be just part of the tent until a fortune was read. I assembled a plane of curtains and aligned the virtual camera to render from the perspective of someone standing in the middle of the room. I next modeled the location of every hanging lantern in the physical space, and lit the virtual space from the same positions. I now had a thoroughly convincing backdrop that appeared to be just another piece of canvas.
It was realistic to expect several hundred people coming through, so the original two minute fortune reading experience needed to be drastically compressed to accommodate to many guests. I moved to a single card per reading, which reduced the experience to 15-20 seconds.
With only one card per fortune, I focused on the 21 major arcana cards. For every card I developed a custom animation that accompanied each reading. These animations rendered into the virtual backdrop, but were positioned to appear to emit from the crystal ball. The curve of the ball provided amazing spherical distortion for each effect, pulling them into the physical space.
Friends came for a preview night the day before Halloween which let me run through everything and fine tune audio and light levels.
On Halloween, an entire supporting cast helped wrangle crowds. Beth and her mom dressed as fortune tellers, guiding guests to the line and holding the queue. Beth's dad and our niece dressed as gravediggers and moved through the graveyard to keep people moving.
I stationed myself in the tent to present tarot cards to draw and to retrieve them. The guest response was incredible. Many people entered unsure what they were looking at and visually moved through many emotions as the brief show unfolded. Fear, happiness, amazement, and joy passed through with each group.
I could not see down into the graveyard but Beth reported the line extended down to the sidewalk. We moved people through in small groups, each sharing a fortune to keep the line moving. Even then, many moved on with the line so long. By the end of the night we estimated 700 guests passed through with another 300 or so not willing to wait in the full line.
The tent itself surpassed the Indy show, but I think the entire experience probably fell a bit short from that high point. The graveyard was fun, but could have been more visually interesting.
Clearly integrating all varied components is reaching a new level of immersiveness that I’m very happy with.
Many people provided notes, feedback and support:
And of course my amazing wife, Beth.