Rising to the challenge of Halloween-inspired creativity, Google pulled out its big (and little) knives and saws to create six giant jack-o-lanterns, recording the event on a time-lapse video for its latest Google doodle.
As doodler Sophia Foster-Dimino explains on the official Google blog:
To celebrate Halloween this year, the doodle team wanted to capture that fascinating transformation that takes place when carving a pumpkin. Instead of picking up a few pumpkins from the grocery store, however, we decided to work on six giant pumpkins, specially delivered from nearby Half Moon Bay (some weighing well over 1,000 pounds). What you see is a time-lapse video of the approximately eight hours we spent carving in the middle of our Mountain View, Calif. campus.
And in the 41 seconds captured in the video, which you'll see if you click on it on the Google.com homepage, or here (above), you'll see costumed Googlers also stopping by the all-day project, doing the YMCA dance, lots of group poses and looking like they're having a great time, in general. For the video, they added music by Slavic Soul Party!, composed by Matt Moran.
And here's the behind-the-scenes video, which shows you how they did it and why they decided to do it, rather than just stick with the illustrations and candy click-throughs of the past — and how each doodler infused their own vision into each pumpkin:
And while the biggest of the pumpkins was 1,298 pounds, it still is several hundred pounds shy of the world record for the "largest jack-o-lantern" which was 1,689 pounds, carved in 2007.
Google doodles consistently show off the doodlers' imagination. Some of the more outstanding ones in the last year or so that come to mind: the Freddie Mercury birthday video, the dancing Martha Graham-inspired piece, the animated interpretation of John Lennon's "Imagine," and the playable/recordable Les Paul guitar.
More stories:
- See what Google doodle can do today: Gumby!
- 'Don't stop' Google doodles now, or ever, with Freddie Mercury
- Not just for fun, Google Doodles drive traffic, too
- Google doodle: Alexander Calder's moving mobile
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