Reunion Tower's annual Halloween light show is always a holiday favorite, including for the man who designs it.
London-born Daryl Vaughan is the Reunion Tower lighting director, the man who makes the Dallas landmark sparkle.
The ball atop Reunion Tower is made up of 259 specially designed light fixtures, each with three separate LED lights inside.
"Three lights and inside each of those have 12, what are called nodes, so there's 36 nodes inside one of these, 12 each of red, green and blue," said Vaughan. "Total number of possible colors - 16.7 million... the pallet in effect is limitless."
Vaughan, who has been a lighting designer for more than 30 years, started creating the light shows for Reunion Tower four years ago.
"I was approached originally in 2009, summer of 2009, and asked if I would be interested in looking at designing light shows for the tower," said Vaughan. "That's like asking a guy if he would be interested in playing James Bond!"
Now he designed dozens of shows each year.
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"I often awake in the middle of the night suddenly thinking, 'I know I could do this' and rush off to a sketch pad or something," he said.
Some shows are more challenging than others.
"Let's say the Cowboys star. But there's a challenge, you see because we can't do five points," he said. "So I got around that by doing a number of stars. You only ever see a partial star, your eyes fill in the rest."
The Halloween show is among his favorites. The inspiration for the holiday tradition is simple.
"I remember being given the brief, and I knew immediately that I had to turn the tower into a jack-o-lantern," Vaughan said. "It was just perfect."
There are subtle changes each year, but always something scary.
"We've got flashing lightning, we've got green slime being thrown around, I've put in a blood sprinkling down one year," he said. "I hope that whatever is up there will be sufficiently frightening to everyone."
The Halloween display will be shining bright Friday and Saturday night.
