A Barrie man has levelled up his house for Halloween by blending his passion for entertaining people and his experience as a mechanical engineer. If you make a stop at 17 Marjoy Avenue in the city’s north end, you’re in for a show. Zac Cutt has been putting on a Halloween show for neighbours using technology called projection mapping, which creates visual effects to give various optical illusions. With his mechanical engineering background, Cutt built a projector, which makes video appear on his house. It’s weather-resistant with sensors inside to check the temperature and humidity levels. Depending on what it needs, the projector can be heated up or cooled down. In a 20-minute show that’s been running on a loop every night for nearly all of October, neighbours are invited to take a walk or drive by the house to take in the show that features visuals, which give the illusion of gigantic spiders crawling up and down the house or monsters lurking in the windows. There’s also blood streaming down someone’s face and slime dripping down the sides of the house. Not all the visuals have a scary or creepy theme though. There are moments in the show that offer a bit of humour or levity, like aliens jumping around and dancing, or a merry-go-round. “I like to do really creepy, Halloween-themed stuff, mixed in with fun songs,” Cutt tells CTV News. “So, there’s a mix of stuff for everybody. Whether you’re a kid or an adult, you’re going to find stuff that’s really engaging.” He says his songs are mostly generated using Artificial Intelligence. Cutt creates the show by tracing his house and then formatting different videos based on the trace. He uses a combination of video editing programs, such as Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects, taking him a total of around 30 hours to complete. So what drives him to put on such a large-scale show like this year after year? “The fun of entertaining people. Visual effects are my jam. I want to entertain people with visual effects.” Cutt has had an interest in the audio-visual work ever since he was a kid, acquiring a passion at a young age for things like lighting, pyrotechnics and video technology. “This is really just a spin-off of all of that,” Cutt says. He says he’s been getting excellent feedback from the community over the past five years that he’s been creating the shows, with this year being the biggest yet. “The neighbours all love it and evidently, the rest of Barrie has found out about it, so it’s just been growing,” Cutt says. Families have been pulling up and parking their cars in front of the house to take in the show, while others are gathering on the sidewalk to watch. He’s been running the show every night for three weeks, with the final night being Halloween on Saturday. Cutt’s passion for visual holiday displays began in 2004 when he created animated Christmas lights at his parents’ house in Holland Landing. By 2013, he had 25,000 Christmas lights all programmed to music. He even got a radio transmitter kit that he built so people could tune into a station on the radio dial to listen to the music in their cars, which he uses in this display as well. A peak moment in the show happens when the projection mapping makes it look like the house is crumbling or falling down. “You’re essentially taking the original footprint of the house and translating it into a 2D image and trying to make it a 3D like falling away effect,” Cutt says. Even though he’s been at this for years, no two shows are the same. For Cutt, his next steps are to open a manufacturing company in Barrie that makes projector enclosures, like the one that he made, something he says would be a first in Canada. He says he’s already getting interest in purchases. If you enjoy Cutt’s Halloween show, he also does a show for Christmas during the entire month of December.
