Halloween - Eye Animation for Car Windshield

In the past I have decorated my garage to look like the mouth of a monster Garage Monster Teeth - With Template : 15 Steps (with Pictures) - Instructables. And I used to tape giant eyeballs to the windshield of one of our cars and place it in the garage to look like the car was being eaten. The trick or treaters really got a kick out of it. So, this year I decided to try and improve the display by making an animated version of the eyes. I tried searching online for something I could use but I didn't find anything that looked the way I wanted so I made my own version. I am not an animator, and this is a pretty crude attempt but I am really happy with the end result. It is far from Pixar level of animation but, I think it fits my needs perfectly.

The first half will cover the drawing portion. As a reference, I will upload all the individual frames I created as jpegs in the last step of the animation portion of this Instructable just in case someone would like to use my images to make their own animation. The second half will cover the setup.

PC

Projector

Flash Drive

Tripod or Mini Tripod

Extension Cord

Shower Curtain

Marker

Cutting Mat

Razor Blade

Electrical Tape

Heat Gun

PC

Projector

Flash Drive

Tripod or Mini Tripod

Extension Cord

Shower Curtain

Marker

Cutting Mat

Razor Blade

Electrical Tape

Heat Gun

I did a few hand drawn sketches to figure out how I wanted the eyes to look. I settled on oval eyes that are slightly tilted inward, I felt they looked just a little more expressive.

I have an old version of photoshop which is what I used for this portion. This could potentially be done in MS paint but that requires a lot more patience. I used a black background because during some tests using the projector this gave the best result. The white background was too bright and washed out the line work.

These eyes are three shapes, the white oval, and the two circles. First, I created one eye using the shapes tool then I just duplicated it and flipped it horizontally to match the other side. This is the starting point or what will become Frame 1 of the animation. I saved this image as a jpeg.

I wanted to make the eyes look like they were blinking as part of the animation. On a separate layer I created two large black circles that I moved down the eye at different levels to give the appearance of eye lids closing. As I moved down the 'eyelids' I saved a jpeg to create that frame. I did this for each stage of blinking. The final part of this section of the animation will be a black screen signifying closed eyes.

The next part of the animation I wanted the eyes to look like they were shifting left to right and then up and down. So, I selected the pupils of the eyes and moved them according to the action I was looking for here again making sure to save a jpeg version of each frame. I realized later after putting together the animation that the pupils didn't go down far enough to look like there were looking up and down, so I created a separate jpeg to get the look I was after, I pushed the pupils further down. Here again I am saving each frame as its own jpeg.

The nice thing about photoshop is having the different layers and being able to add or make corrections later if you are not seeing what you like or what you expect. Once you have the initial drawings adding and manipulating frames is a lot easier at the editing process.

The last sequence of the animation is of the pupils growing in size to simulate fear/surprise and then shrinking down to tiny dots. In order to do this, I just selected the pupils and expanded them and saved a jpeg at that size. Then repeated the process of selecting the pupils and sizing them down bit by bit to create the proceeding frames of the pupils shrinking down to dots.

These are all of the frames I created to make my animation. There are a few extra frames that I didn't describe making which are of the eyeballs moving to the left or right. I decided to add a little more movement once I started to create the animation. I felt stiff so I added those frames to my final video.

I used Movie Maker to edit the jpegs into the animation. I uploaded all the different jpegs in the order I wanted then I started to manipulate the duration of each frame. After some experimenting, I decided to have the blinking repeat three times, then the eyes shift left to right then blink three more times and then the eyes shift up and down then the iris of the eyes grow large and shrink down. And then I just copied this sequence to make a 10-minute video that would loop over and over.

Animation is all about good timing to make each movement look fluid and flow into the next. It is as much an art as a science. I adjusted the frame duration for each frame anywhere from 0.08 seconds to 0.24 seconds. For the blinking I thought it looked better going faster so the frames only last 0.08 seconds each. For some of the transition frames from blinking to eyes opening I chose 0.24 seconds. There is a proper method to do this where you have the length of the different frames worked out depending on how many drawings you have per frame, but I couldn't really get it to look right. Ultimately, I just changed the timing and experimented with it until I found what looked right to me.

Once I was happy with everything, I copied the 10-minute loop to my flash drive.

The victim is going to be my wife's Mini Cooper. Part of our other Halloween decorations include window projections and I have found that a "frosty" or "frosted" shower curtain works really well as a projection medium. As without window projections I will be projecting the eye animation from the rear. I experimented with a white shower curtain, and it didn't look as good as the semitransparent frosted shower curtain.

I laid the shower curtain over the car's windshield and then used a marker to trace the outline. I left some spare material at the bottom that I could shove under the hood of the car. Next, I used a razor blade and cutting mat to cut out the pattern of the windshield.

I checked the fit on the car, and it looked good, but it was wrinkled. To remove the wrinkles, I used my heat gun set a lower temperature and went over the creases. The heat relaxes the material and the wrinkles disappear. be careful to no hold the heat gun in one spot or you may melt the plastic, or it might start to deform and pucker.

Now, for the setup. I have a small projector that I got second hand; it came with a small tripod. It has a HDMI port and USB port in the back; I will be using the USB port with my flash drive. My wife has a storage box in the back of her car that is almost the right height for the projector. I added a 2x10 board to get a flat surface for the projector which also gave me just the right height. I plugged in my flash drive and tested the animation. You may notice there is a dark spot on the lower right corner, that happens to be the headrest of the driver seat. For the actual day of the display, I will put that seat down, so it doesn't block the projector.

This is what the final display looks like with the Mini Cooper setup in the garage monster mouth and the eye animation projection running.