Videos 4th of July Stars and Stripes Forever Star Spangled Banner Christmas Carol of the Bells Queen of the Winter Night Wizards in Winter Charlene & Tim's Light Display We are located at: The Timbers Apartments 23333 Ridge Route Dr #65 Lake Forest, CA 92630 < < < < Watch Our Videos! How Does it work? We have special controller circuits boards which tell each strand of lights when to turn on and turn off. These signals come directly from the computer. So we can control the exact timing of the lights going on and off and sequence it to music. The hardware and software are both very easy to use (and addicting). The system is called Light-O-Rama and is available from www.lightorama.com

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Imagineering Christmas 2006
A Tale of Two Trees

Since this is our first christmas with a Computer Controlled Lighting System, we did not have much to start with. We each decided to build our own display element for the show. We both chose trees. Being in an apartment complex there were several limitations, and we have designed most items to be expandable for when we get a "real house" (still hoping for The OC housing bubble to burst). The great thing about our unit is that it is located at the front of the complex and everyone sees it when driving in. Incorporating audio is a bit of a challenge as we do not want to disturb our neighbors, so we keep a small speaker on the fence that only plays music for 1 hour, and it can only be heard from within several feet. This means people have to walk up to our display to be able to experience it properly.

Mega Tree vs. Flat Tree

Tim built a 3 Dimensional Spinning Mega Tree. It has 800 green lights, 100 multicolored lights in the center, and the star at the top. It takes up 9 channels. It is 13 feet tall and 8 feet in diameter at the base. It sits in our yard behind a 5 foot tall fence so the bottom section cannot be seen at all.	Charlene built a flat tree incorporating the stars we built for the the 4th of July show. The stars and snowflake take up 10 channels. The green lights which make up the tree take up another 6 channels. There is a total of 1100 Lights on the Flat Tree. It is attatched to the side of the building facing the entrace of the complex for all to see.

Color-Changing Gift Boxes This is the most creative aspect of our Christmas Display. We knew we wanted to do a color-mixing effect using RGB color addition properties, but if the individual bulbs are visible it does not acheive the right effect. So we built these giant gift boxes out of Acrylic Lighting Panels - White Colored (individual bulbs stick out if you use clear). Inside each box are three strands of mini-lights (red, green and blue) which have been taped together along the strand to form clusters of red/green/blue bulbs (this helps with the color dispersion). By letting Light-O-Rama control the 3 channels we are able to turn our boxes red, green, and blue. by having two channels on, we can create maroon, cyan, and yellow. All three on creates white. And by adjusting the intensity levels of each channel, we can create any color imaginable. For example, here's purple!

Red	Green
White	Purple

Fireworks What is a 4th of July display without fireworks exploding over your head? Well that was the effect I wanted to create - even if they were only 7 feet off of the ground! I am so proud of these, even though they turned out to be very easy and inexpensive to make. I got some long wooden dowels from the hardware store and lashed them together to create wagon wheel type spokes. Then the mini-lights were woven around them and taped in place to create what looks like a giant spider web. I knew those old Girl Scout Lashing and Basket Weaving Skills would come in handy someday! There are 50 clear lights at the center, and 200 colored lights around the outside. These are put on different channels so that the Light-O-Rama can control the bursting effect! Check it out in the Videos at the top of this page!

Stars My original plan with the stars was to make 12 of them and then sequence the 12 days of Christmas, but at some point during the year that plan fell apart and I instead decided to incorporate them into the Flat Tree. We built 6 early on to use in the 4th of July show and 2 more later for Christmas. These are great for sequencing and we've been able to do alot of chasing and spinning and growing effects with the Light-O-Rama. The star itself is a cutout of Corrugated Plastic and we used a drill to make the holes around the perimeter and hot glued the lights into place.

The Indoor Tree

As long as I'm creating a Christmas Display webpage I just have to show off my indoor tree! It is covered in Disney Princesses. Every year disney comes out with a new set of ornaments for each princess. I have been collecting these for 5 years now and I have about 12 ornaments per princess. photos coming as soon as I find them.....


The Timbers Decorating Contest History

2006 - 1st Place!	Our First Computer Sequenced Lighting Display! 5,000 lights! the prize was yet another DVD player...
2005 - 3rd place	I blame this loss on Tim - just kidding :) We had just started dating and so I was preoccupied and didn't create anything new for the display this year.
2004 - 1st place	I got the giant snowflake this year and then I stapled gift wrap to the side of the fence on both sides of the giant pine tree, so it kinda looked like there were presents under a giant christmas tree when you drove in :) - I'll see if I can find an old pic
2003 - 3rd place	My first year at the Timbers and all I put up were the obligatory icicles lights - I probably only had about 1,000 lights total but it was still a lot more than most people put up.