Harvest Pumpkin Porch
An old wooden porch after sunset: pumpkins and pots of mums, a hay bale, a rocking chair with a plaid blanket, and a candle burning in the jack-o'-lantern.
Candlelight and a breeze
A candle burns inside the jack-o'-lantern. Its light changes only a little, and slowly. Leaves and flowers move in the breeze and mist drifts across the field. Nothing flashes. Sound plays only if you start with it.
What you can do here
- Watch the jack-o'-lantern
- The candle inside is steady but never quite still. The light in the carved face rises and falls by a few percent, slowly, and when the flame leans, one side of the face is a little brighter than the other. On the boards in front the change is under one percent.
- Give the candle air
- Touch the jack-o'-lantern, or press Give the candle air. It's as if you'd lifted the lid: with more air the flame burns taller for a while, so the face brightens over a few seconds and its light reaches a little further across the boards. Then it settles back down over half a minute.
- Listen for the owl
- Touch the dark yard beyond the porch post and an owl calls from somewhere out past the field. It calls on its own now and then, too, never more than once every twelve seconds.
- Change the breeze and the mist
- Breeze moves the maple's leaves and the shrubs by the steps, nods the mums a little under the porch roof, drifts the mist along faster, and brings the odd leaf down from the maple. Mist sets how much mist moves across the field.
Use it as your wallpaper
Press F for fullscreen and M to turn the sound off and on; the volume and your sound choice carry over to every wallpaper. The sound keeps playing if you switch to another tab.
Live link
https://whitescreen.tv/interactive-wallpapers/harvest-pumpkin-porch/#wallpaper- On a computer desktop
- Some wallpaper apps can show a web page behind your desktop icons. Give one the live link above and the scene runs there on its own: no page around it, no ads and no sound.
- On a TV or a spare screen
- Open this page and press F, or use Fullscreen. While it’s in fullscreen we ask the browser to keep the screen from going to sleep.
- On a phone or tablet
- Save image downloads exactly what’s on the screen as a picture. Set it as your wallpaper from your photos; the phone will crop the sides.
A live wallpaper keeps a page running all day. Through the live link the scene draws at most 30 frames a second and stops while the screen is covered, but on a laptop it still costs some battery.
Why a jack-o'-lantern glows yellow
A pumpkin's skin is deep orange, but the flesh under it is a paler yellow-orange. The candle lights the inside of the shell, and what you see through the carving is that lit flesh and the cut edges, which glow brighter than the skin around them. The light gets out only through the openings, so it falls in a pool on whatever is right in front of them.
Where evening mist comes from
On a clear, still fall evening the ground loses its heat fast. The air touching it cools below the point where it can hold its water, and a thin mist forms in the low places, a few feet deep. It drifts with the slightest air and thickens as the night goes on.
About the sounds
Two recordings and one quiet layer: a fall evening outdoors, a distant owl, and a soft night wind that rises with the Breeze control.
If you’d rather just watch
Picture and sounds generated from our prompts. Motion, controls and mix by WhiteScreen.tv.
