Regardless of what theme you go with, I don’t think you grasp the full use of projection. While there is whole house mapping which sounds more like what you have in mind from the outside, “projections” for home house halloween use started by using your home windows and doorways and putting up a white shower curtain and projecting video files onto the “screen” from
Inside your home. It's called rear projection as the projector is behind the screen and viewed from the other side of the screen from the projector. Unless the kids break into your home, nothing to steal! The beauty of it. No worries about keeping the projector away from the elements either.
Not sure what’s available to you in the UK but most projector “kits” here come with a plastic or tightly woven fabric screen. My first projection screen was a Walmart cheap white plastic shower curtain recommended here on Halloween Forum and used with a borrowed office projector connected to our DVD player and playing the first DVD title from Mark Gervais’
Hallowindow. The animated Eyeball video from that BTW is still a ToTer halloween favorite around here. Simple, fun to watch, and catches kids’ and adults’ eyes each time we run it. I ran it on Halloween night the first year we did projections, and didn’t the second, and had requests for it. Most kids don’t get to see this kind of fun stuff so really find it fascinating that someone in their neighborhood no less would do it. I find that running it during the week before halloween will help draw in kids to your house on halloween as you get noticed and kids tell their friends what they saw and what the friends must see too. Best advertisement for your home if you want traffic on the big night. Here’s the website for
Hallowindow videos. The Green Eyeball was on
Hallowindow II. Everything now for the most part can be paid for and downloaded from your computer, where as originally you had to buy a DVD to get them. Some projection videos are still sold that way and what’s convenient for you may depend on the equipment you have available to you.
http://hallowindow.com/
The Eyeball video in someone's house that started it all for me!:
BTW that Walmart shower curtain I mentioned is still in use today as a screen. In our case it’s thin enough to display the image and thick enough to not show the concentrated light source — bulb through the material (think this is called a hot spot and takes away the “magic” of the projection if visible).
I’d suggest watching this video from TotalHomeFX on how you can use projection videos in your house for viewing outside. BTW I believe they also are still selling some of Mark Gervais'
Hallowindow videos fitted to their screen size if you use one of their projectors.
https://www.totalhomefx.com/product-demo/
There are other ways beside lighting your outside house with video mapping projectors too. AtmosFearFX has 3D forms you can buy and set up inside your home for example (maybe in a garage or entryway of a doorway) to project onto. Pretty cool too. You do need to have some distance in front of the form to throw the image to the height you want it to be ultimately. So depends on your own setup situation. But it makes it appear a person/creature is before them with the rest of the room around them perfectly normal and not a projection. The 3D form projecting would be different but similar idea behind the Disney talking spirit ball or talking ghosts. Check out some of the instructional videos on AtmosFearFX’s website on what are digital projections and their how-tos for more ideas:
https://atmosfx.com/
