What is a Zoetrope?
A zoetrope is a device that produces the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of static pictures. The zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner suface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks trough the slits at the picture across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion.
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| A Classic Zoetrope. |
Here are some classic examples of strips used inside a zoetrope...
Although with mine I am going to use photographs that I've taken.
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| Changing Moon |
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| Running Horse |
Ideas for my zoetrope.
Me and Jess are going to create a zoetrope together, but instead of using a ready made strip from above, we are going to go out and take pictures to create our own using photographs instead of drawings. One idea that we had was just a person walking across he front of the camera, for a practice idea to see how well it worked. We thought that this was quite a simple idea, inspired from the 'running horse'. We figured this would be hard to go wrong.
Once we where actually out taking the pictures we came up with a few different ideas, just testing out how things worked. We ended up skipping infront of the camera to see if this was more interesting to watch than just walking, because the horse was running not walking. We also tired burning a dandelion and photographed what happened on burst mode, we weren't too sure if this idea would work for sure, but we said if not we can always change it into a gif instead.
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| Contact Sheet |
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| Contact Sheet |
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| Contact Sheet |
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| Contact Sheet |
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| Contact Sheet |
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| Contact Sheet |
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| Contact Sheet |
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| Contact Sheet |
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| Contact Sheet |
Now that we have images to use, me and Jess need make our zoetrope.
To do this I took a template offline and loaded it into photoshop once it was uploaded I added my images on to it so when its printed it will be ready for use straight away.
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| Before |
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| After |
Now that the strips have been made they need to be printed, cut out and then stuck together making sure that the pictures are facing in.
Once I had glued these strips together I showed it to my tutor just make sure I had done it correctly. Only to sadly find out that the pictures we had used aren't going to work very well. And told me that me and Jess would be better off taking pictures of something simple with a white background so its easier to see what is going on.
So now me and Jess need to go and take some more suitable pictures before we can continue with our zoetrope.
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