Animation (ANI2) - Zoetropes

A zoetrope is a more live action way of animating. It involves a series of around 33 pictures or 3D objects spinning continuously, tricking the eyes into seeing a moving object/image. This is done by drawing or making 33 individual frames of your animation and placing them in a circular piece of card. This is then spun around continuously - we used a record player to spin ours.

It's quite difficult to explain without giving examples so here are a few that I watched before getting on with my own zoetrope:

Following this, people have taken zoetropes with a more 3D approach, using different spinning objects and drawing directly onto them. Here's one of my favourites:

This is an example of zoetropes being used on a wider scale, this one uses mirrors and levels to make the effect the zoetrope has even more outstanding:

My attempt unfortunately didn't turn out nearly as amazing as those. I tried something simple to begin with - some plasticine flowing in and out of the ground. However, after 4 attempts we still couldn't figure out how to get it right. I changed the sizing, the amount of frames, the spacing, but nothing seemed to work.

We managed to get it close, but it still wasn't flowing brilliantly. I hope to go back to this when I have some spare time and try to get it looking a bit neater. This video shows the 4 takes we did after changing something each time: