2010 Alibaba and a Cave
This was a big and slow suspension-building project. A week before the Halloween I covered a whole wall and my office door with black plastic sheet. It was hard to even find the entrance. Every morning I'd add a bit more to the wall: tree, leaves, animals, rocks ... People would come in the morning to see what new things I added to the setup and tried to guess how is the final thing going to look like. For actual Halloween, I dressed like somebody from '1001 Nights', (pants material is sheer, but on top of my sweatpants, look very Arabic - I think). When enough kids got together in front of the door, I'd start my salesman pitch about 40 thieves collecting treasure from all over the Microsoft and putting it in the cave behind me. Can any kid guess secret words to open the cave? As soon as somebody yelled "Open Sesame", my office door would open on their own, nice and spooky, almost like I was pulling the cord from behind the plastic sheet to make it happen. My office was very dark, but they could see the blue bottom corridor to the well lit spot with gold and silver chocolates waiting for them and protected by leopard. That blue bottom was crackly tarp on top of the sponge to make it like they are walking on the water. Everybody was going very slowly toward the 'treasure', and when they slowly reached to grab a handful, I'd trigger my camera and flash would light up the scene with them. It was a lot of work, but effect was great as well. Fun setup!