History of Animation Part two

The Zoetrope

The second task that was carried out in today’s session was the research and creation of a Zoetrope. The zoetrope was invented in 1834 by William George Horner; it was an early form of a motion picture projector. A zoetrope comprises of a drum enclosing a set of motionless images that is rotated in a circular fashion to produce the illusion of motion (Zoetrope and Praxinoscope, 2010). 

According to Hayes (2011), ‘the Zoetrope is the wheel of life’; when you place a strip of drawn images inside the Zoetrope’s drum or circular spinning object, the images come to life when you look through the slots. This illusion is again due to the persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon. The persistent of vision is a stroboscopic effect; the images must be disturbed by periods of darkness for the illusion to take effect. For example, if you spin a zoetrope and look over the top of the cylinder (instead of through the slots), the images will become distorted and the illusion will be non-existent. 

Moreover, the Phi Phenomenon occurs as a consequence of human nature; the brain attempts to make sense from what is seen, therefore when the various pictures are close together our brains rapidly interpret an association between them (Wikipedia, 2014). 

The various 19^th century animations, namely the, zoetrope, flipbook, thaumatrope, praxinoscope and phenakistoscope were all stages leading to the development of film and television. Media technologies today appear different at a glance however they share mutual properties to these optical toys from the 1800’s (Hayes, 2011). 

The question now arises as to how to create a zoetrope......?

Here is a step-by-step process of how we created a zoetrope in our groups:

Step 1: We found a circular lid for the base that could also be easily spun.

Step 2: We measured the circumference of the circular lid and cut a piece of black cardboard to the same length, to wrap around the lid. We also cut a piece of paper to the same circumference as the lid however the height of this was smaller than the black strip.

STEP 3
(Wikihow, 2014)

Step 3: We chose our images and decided that at this stage simplicity was key and a focus on the measurements was what was important; therefore it was decided that a bouncing ball would be a good example of an Illusion. We measured the length of the paper and divided it into 12 (as we wanted 12 images) and then measured the same distance between each image.

Step 4: The images were drawn and coloured and designed as a loop effect, so that the last image was similar to the first.

STEP 5

Step 5: Slits were cut into the black paper strip as shown in the demonstration to the left <<<<

Again each slit was measured to the same distance as the images.

Step 6: The paper comprising of the images was then sellotaped to the black strip and the black paper strip placed around the outside edge of the circular lid.

Step 7: Finally, the animation was placed onto a spinning drum and viewed through the slips. 


Here is a video demonstrating our animation: couldn't upload this either 

Reference List 

Hayes, R (2011) Retrieved 12th November 2014 from Random Motion Animation. http://www.randommotion.com/html/zoe.html

Wikipedia (2014) Phil Phenomena Retrieved November 12th 2014 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_phenomenon

Zoetrope and Praxinoscope (2010) Optical Victorian Toys Retrieved November 12th 2014 from http://zoetrope.org/zoetrope-history