Lenticular (changes When You Tilt) Movie Art

Just so you all don't think I am limited to just making food for kids...

I have a good friend who is an awesome artist. She has given me all sorts of great paintings in the past few years. I wanted to give her a piece of art that would really stand out as different.

I wanted to experiment with lenticular sheets because I have always been amazed by them ever since I dug the first one out of a cereal box as a kid. These are the sheets that make an image change whet you alter the angle you are viewing it at. To learn more about lenticular lenses - wikipidia

We both have the movie "fight club" as one of our top 5 all time movies so I decided to use this as a theme.

Please note that the animated gif below is a composite image because my camera takes horrible images of the picture with the lenses in front of it.

Please check out my other instructables and I also have a diy podcast called mechanicalmashup.tv

Step 1: Getting Images

The first thing I did was watch the movie "fight club". I was looking for usable screen captures that I could use for the picture. VLC media player has a snapshot feature. I took the best photos and used fireworks (I don't use photoshop) to crop them and clean up the backgrounds.
For the backgrounds I wanted for my picture I found two panning shots from the movie. I took several screen captures and stitched them all together to create an extremely wide screen image. One of the narrators apartment with his IKEA like catalog descriptions floating in the air. The other was the debris outside his apartment after his stove blew up. Note the ying yang table in both images. I was having some trouble finding a second good shot of Tyler Durden (aka Brad Pitt). All the screen captures that were good were to dark. Luckily I found a promotional photo that was just about perfect.

Step 2: Creating the Images

Once again using fireworks, I assembled the images how I wanted them. I also put in my own text like the floating IKEA text, but on the image with the debris. For this I used a few quotes (clean ones) from the movie.

At first I tried to experiment with some lenticular sheets by trying to peel the plastic off of some novelty ones I had but they are glued on very well. I found a place in California that sold the sheets. They had a minimum order and with that plus shipping, handling, and customs it cost me about $60. The positive side is that I will never run out of the sheets in my lifetime. I used 30 lpi (lenses per inch) sheets.

I then downloaded a trial version of some software that "interlaces" the images. There are a few programs available, some pay and some free, just google it. Set up takes a while and calibrating your printer can take a few sheets of paper. It took me about 20 test prints to get the spacing perfect. You eventually end up with the last image in this set. It doesn't look like much but the lenticular sheeting will focus one part of the doubled image at a time, creating a clear and clean picture.

It took a bit of playing to get the image lined up right. I just used tape to hold it in place because I was going to sandwich the image and the sheeting between a piece of glass and a piece of wood. The people who sold me the sheets strongly advise using a spray adhesive but you would have to get the image lined up really fast and carefully.

Watch out for text when creating lenticular images. It is hard to read if it is not a decent size.

Step 3: Mounting the Image

I cut a piece of glass from and old window to the size I wanted. On the glass I chemically etched a border leaving it a little rough to match the theme. To further it I created a border using electrical tape. It makes a pretty cool look. I cut a piece of wood to match it and just used the electrical tape to hide the wood edges. I bought a picture frame from the dollar store with the little metal hooks of it (pictured below) and pillaged the hooks from the frame. I had to cut four slits in the back of the wood for the hooks to grab. I did not have to many tools that cut thin slits into wood so I used my angle grinder with a thin zip cut blade. Be sure to do this outdoors if you are going to try. These grinder disks were not meant to cut wood and it gets very smoky fast.

Also pictured below is the best :P shot I could get of the ridges in the lenticular sheeting

Step 4: Finish

There are at least a half dozen metaphors in the two images. If you are also a fan of the movie I hope you will appreciate them. I know my friend enjoyed the unique piece of art I gave her.

I also included a real photo of the picture here. Like I said the camera does not do it justice. Just enjoy the composite animation again.