GHOST MUSEUM
Video Collage with Narration and Music, 2019

Words & Collage: George Petros
Digital Processing, Music & Video: Robert Lund
Photos, Archives & Museum Voice: Christine Snider

When the first human being died, the first ghost was born. It's been downhill ever since, as a who's who of spooky spirits scare us to death. Throughout history, terrifying apparitions ruled our imaginations. So when a loved one came back from beyond the grave, what else could we do but make a video about it ???

Ghost Museum presents true stories of famous American hauntings. The ghosts appear chronologically, starting with the Headless Horseman. When we reach the 1980s, the line-up shifts from the general to the personal as we come upon a ghost we know. From there, we speculate about the future. Who knows ???

Collage of spooky landscapes and portraits plucked from cyberspace. Assembled in GIMP 2.10 on a Mac Mini running MacOS X 10.13. Archival photos and video clips provided by Christine Snider. Robert Lund shot the staircase video segment and the Ghost Museum wall design (actual wallpaper from the haunted Kreischer mansion in Staten Island). Your Boxes Of Stuff adapted from a 2003 illustration by George Petros.

The collage and various graphics were combined into long strips, which were processed with Robert Lund's PHP script to create successive 1920-pixel-wide video frames with increasing horizontal offset, combined into the component movies which panned across the screen. Ghostly portraits were overlaid, and the entire video assembled using Final Cut Pro 10 on a MacBook Pro running MacOS X 10.14. The musical track was created using GarageBand 10, comprising selections from their extensive Loop library, with Lund's melodic compositions overlaid using a Roland EM-15 keyboard.