Just a really minor test I wanted to try. Nothing too special. I wanted to try and recreate that classic Organ Player scene from the ride the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland in the Grand Ballroom scene. It's all a theory at this point, since I've never tried the Pepper's Ghost Effect at home. I decided to do a small mock-up of what I plan on doing.

Along with an actual picture of the Pepper's Ghost Organ Player on the ride.

Has anyone here worked with the Pepper's Ghost effect before? I read as much as I could and I have a basic understanding of it...sort of. If you've worked with the Pepper's Ghost effect before, please do respond. I want to know what I have to adjust to make the effect come out right. I must know if I need to adjust the ghost's brick colors before I spend my money on Bricklink ordering the needed bricks.

Also, the organ looked pretty neat, so that's another reason why I wanted to share this with you

Jonathon Schwartz (Sir Nadroj) has worked with it before in LEGO. He did a scene with it that is worth checking out.

I like the model though. I'm working on some Haunted Mansion related stuff myself, so I might try the Pepper's Ghost effect at least once.

Can't wait to see the results if you can get it to work!

I've been contemplating a Halloween MOC for a few years now, and I've wanted to put a Pepper's Ghost effect in it, though I don't yet know whether I'll be able to. I must confess to being a little perturbed by this thread - I was specifically thinking about using it for an organ player, albeit not so much specifically because of the Disney attraction - but I guess it's my own fault for taking so long. Ah, well.

I do know this illusion has been used in MOCs before, though, including at least a couple previously shown right here at EB, here and here.

Hopefully we'll both be fruitful with our own takes on this classic effect. Good luck!

I ran across this at MOCpages the other day... http://mocpages.com/moc.php/41642. It was the first time I'd heard of Pepper's Ghost, so surprised I remembered!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper's_ghost

Also search youtube as there are a number of video's explaining the technique

This is a neat effect. I ought to mention that it has been used in a few official LEGO Hero Factory displays. See

. It's really neat when the effect is used to blend LEGO models with non LEGO effects, but it's got to be even more of a challenge to create "ghosts" of physical figures or models inside another MOC! Best of luck to you!

I got a sheet of the hard plastic and I am doing tests with cardboard boxes painted on the inside.

I also got the idea of doing the Ballroom Dancers as well.

But I seem to have caught a little snitch: How can I make the platform spin whilst the dancers dance? I can make a spinning platform and I can make dancers dance but I don't seem to be able to do both at the same time. I tried, and failed, to create a mechanism that not only makes the figures spin but the platform they are sitting on spin as well. I'm not that great with Technic gears, so a little help? I would copy the real Haunted Mansion design, but from pictures that I've seen...

I am still confused on how to do it in LEGO. So the figures rest on motors that are attached to the main spinner thing, but how t do that with LEGO cogs... I am doing as much research as I can on the topic of gears online. Or would it be easier to work with non-LEGO parts to creating the spinning mechanism? Confound me and my brain for not being able to think

This might be of interest to you, an excellent MOC done by lego-maniac:

http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=51999&st=0&p=926232

You're pretty much on the right lines. Keep the central gear fixed in a static position, separate from the frame all the other gears are attached to. Then have some mechanism to rotate the frame holding all the outer gears. As it moves around, the fixed central gear will force the others to rotate, spinning the 'dancing' figures as the rotate around the central point.

You're pretty much on the right lines. Keep the central gear fixed in a static position, separate from the frame all the other gears are attached to. Then have some mechanism to rotate the frame holding all the outer gears. As it moves around, the fixed central gear will force the others to rotate, spinning the 'dancing' figures as the rotate around the central point.

I don't think the solution gets any more elegant than that!

A different suggestion I might add is if you wanted to be able to control the platform and the dancers separately, you can power a Technic turntable underneath the platform to make that spin, then run the axle driving the dancers through the center to a second motor. That setup would let you reverse direction of the dancers, or use a different gearing to make them spin faster/slower in relation to the overall movement. Might give you a more interesting dance!

On another note, I never had any idea this was how the haunted mansion ghosts were done before I checked Wikipedia on the Pepper's ghost illusion. I'm gonna be craning my neck searching for the rooms with the mannequins next time I'm at Disney now.

Those engineering solutions should help, but there is one other thing that might help as well. If you change the color of the tuxedo to something brighter (as you can see in the Haunted Mansion reference photo) it will cause the finished "ghost" to show up much better. (I've had to build a few full sized versions of the effect.)