This project was fairly challenging in terms of technicality and production because of the slightly more advanced code involved. I wanted to create something that I can relate to on a personal level and was conflicted between doing a 'Flying Lipstick' theme or a 'Blinking' theme for my screensaver. While I wanted to achieve the main goal of creating an almost hypnotic experience for the viewer, I also aimed to entertain and connect with them.
I created each of the images by digitally painting them on Adobe Photoshop and then put them together in an HTML file, each as a separate DIV, with a total of 13 images, the first three of which were of a normal expression of the eyes: open, midway, and closed- to mimick the fluid movement of a human blink. To create more variety and depth to my project, I was faced with the decision of either changing the color of the eye/eyeshadow every few seconds, or possibly even the expression. I eventually went with the latter and played around with Photoshop to move the eyeball in different directions to create a humorous effect.
In terms of JavaScript, I used the setInterval and setTimeout functions to time the blinks appropriately. Although at first I went with a speedy effect, I asked feedback from my peers, who thought it would be a more personal project if the eyes blinked at a realistic rate of time. This would humanize them more and allow the audience to feel as though they are looking at a real set of eyes. I struggled a fair amount with the JavaScript part of this project because I was quite unfamiliar with the workings of setInterval and setTimeout, eventually going with a 2 second interval per image.
One thing that I was unhappy with in terms of this Screensaver project was the fact that I was unable to figure out how to create an infinite loop for the animation, which would end up back on the normal expression blinking after completing just one round of the other expressions. This created a sort of inconsistency, although, all in all, I'm satisfied with the final outcome.