#Mean jack o lantern faces how to#
#Mean jack o lantern faces full#

You need to find a way of spinning your pumpkin (I feel that should be a euphemism for something, but I'm not sure what). This is where you'll probably have to use a bit of ingenuity. What you need: Printed or drawn images of each frame in your animation, scissors. Of course, I'll also provide the animated bat template I used to carve my own pumpkin, meaning you can move straight on to step 2.

#Mean jack o lantern faces full#

If you'd rather skip this step, the internet is full of short animated gifs just waiting to be stolen and turned into Halloween decorations. If you want to carve your own design into your lantern, it will require a solid understanding of frame-by-frame animation as well as the ability to draw a coherent animation in a very limited number of frames. This could be an evening project or a whole weekend project, depending how you feel.įor me, this was by far the most time consuming part of the project. There are four stages to making an animated jack-o'-lantern, but you can optionally skip or at least dramatically shorten some of them. That really depends how much effort you want to put into it and what materials you already have to hand.

#Mean jack o lantern faces how to#

Now! Keep reading for full instructions on how to make your own. The blurry video here doesn't do it justice - the effect really needs to be seen to be believed! This means that it requires no fiddly electronics or separate mechanical shutter mechanism it will flash exactly as fast as it needs to flash when you spin it by hand. One of the neat things about this design is that it automatically syncs the flickering light with the animation, regardless of how fast you spin the pumpkin. As the pumpkin rotates, its insides are only lit whenever one of the slits aligns with the flashlight, causing it to flash in time with the frames of an animation carved into the pumpkin's skin. Unlike a normal zoetrope, where you have to look through a series of slits to view a moving image, my jack-o'-lantern shines an external flashlight up through the slits to illuminate the pumpkin's innards. The mechanism for this jack-o'-lantern is very simple, falling somewhere between a zoetrope and a film projector. I think it should be a good conversation piece at any Halloween party, giving the guests something interesting to play with in between eating horrifying foodstuffs and awkwardly seducing masked strangers. I wanted it to be hand-carved and I wanted it to be made from a real pumpkin. This Halloween, I wanted my jack-o'-lantern to stand out from the crowd without drifting too far from tradition. Breathe some life into your Halloween decorations by making an ordinary pumpkin play an animation! No electronics, no strobe lights you just need a lamp, a pumpkin and something to spin it on.