This
project sprang
from this one little video I caught on youtube about 6 months
ago. It's essentially a 3d zoetrope
where the illusion of movement is achieved with the shutter speed
of the video camera instead of a strobe light or the slits of
a traditional zoetrope. The minute I saw these little guys passing
the parcel I knew I had to try this out for myself.
..
I decided
to email the guy who made this video, Jim
Le Fevre, to see if he could help me out and luckily,
he turned out to be a top bloke who shares my willingness to
spread knowledge. Basically, he gave me the magic formula to
get it working, and saved me having to attempt a lot of horrible
maths, so I could just dive right in with the fun stuff. Thanks
Jim!
It still took a few goes to get it working though. Below is the very first version
I made - a peice of wood, going up and down. Exciting eh? It didn't work though
because for some reason I decided to completely ignore Jim's advice and used
the wrong numbers - 30 divisions of a 25cm diameter circle instead of 33 divisions
of a 30cm circle, which meant the animation slid around the circumference instead
appearing to be stationery. I think the mistake helped me grasp a deeper understanding
of the technique though, and made me think about why it had gone wrong.
I tried this first test out with a couple of VJ-ing mates, as I thought it would
make a nice live video feed to mix up with other stuff...
I was still
srtuggling to get my head around the idea of working in 33 frame
loops though, so I copied Jim and did some tests with drawing
pins, just to help me figure it out. I had to film these with
a stills camera though as I had no access to my brother's fancy
DV camera yet, so these are stop motion.
Filming
this frame by frame lead me down a slightly different path for
a while and it got me thinking about how I might incorporate
the record player technique into a film, and how I might come
up with different applications for the spinning, rotating movement.
This explosion test was also done using the record player and is also stop motion,
but I had an idea of how this might also be developed later using the 3d zoetrope.
I made some paper mache domes and pricked lots of little pinholes in them, painted
them black shone a light from inside and animated them rotating on the turntable,
just to see what I could do with them in After Effects really...
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After
this little detour (which took longer than you might think),
I finally got around to figurnig out the 3d zoetrope properly.
I decided to keep it simple and did a really basic arc loop in
After Effects so I could just print the frames straight onto
acetate and they'd be exactly the right length for the circumference
of the disc - all I had to do was stick them onto the edge of
the wood with blutac. And it worked! Woo!
It's
a really good feeling when you get this working properly for
the first time, there's just something magical about seeing animation
happen right in front of your eyes. Although, strictly speaking,
it didn't actually happen right in front of my eyes because the
display on the camera I was using wasn't deinterlaced and was
just a big blurry mess until I took the footage into FCP. Yet
another bit of the learning curve scaled - I didn't twig that
this would be the case until I'd spent a good few hours despairing
that I'd never get the bloody thing working.
The next step was to combine the paper mache dome idea I'd done before, with
the 3d zoetrope. Construction of the giant nipple commenced!
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This is the first test run of the big dome I did, just to make sure it was working
properly. (The reason the lighting is so poor, by the way, is because I had yet
to realise that I could adjust the settings on the camera to allow more light
into the shot - the high shutter speed needed for the effect to work shuts out
most of the light, especially if it's artificial, so I had to use a torch).
And finally, this is where I'm at now. I needed to shoot this during daylight
hours so I'd have enough light to film with the high shutter speed, so the dome
had to be painted black on white and then inverted in post. Some of these shots
are layered up in After Effects, but they're mostly pretty close to the original
footage, no extra animation added or anything, just a few glow effects and some
colour correction.
I'm
pretty confident with the technique now, and I'm applying for
funding from the Scottish Arts Council to hopefully develop these
ideas further.
31/01/10 - Mock-Ups
Some
mock-ups of my next 3D Zoetrope tests (please view them in fullscreen
so you can see them properly), you just need to imagine the whole
videos printed out and joined end to end so they form cylinders.
The first is based on a grid system - I split the length of the
cylinder into the 33 frames required of the zortrope, then split
them into equal parts, each frame being 6 squares in length (although
I'm working on a version that'll be 12 per frame). Then I just
used Photoshop to colour in the squares, and sequenced them in
After Effects.
It's all a bit random and cheesey at the moment but I think it has potential,
especially if I layer up a few more grids behind it and sort out the colours,
maybe simplify the movements quite a bit. This next one is using multiple layers,
and again will be printed out to form a cylinder. I was trying to keep this one
simple, but I think I'll test out the grid one first cos it's a bit more interesting
and less fiddly to put together...
These
will hopefully lead to some sort of instllation in the near future,
and l should have some footage of it in action soon.
23/07/10 - Cloud
Test
I was just looking through some old files and came across this failed attempt
at a floating zoetrope. It's pretty close to working though, so I think my next
test will be to use slightly heavier objects like beads or something to weigh
the 'frames' down properly, and I'll need to adjust the lengths of the threads
so that they come out to the correct circumference once it's spinning... I'll
hopefully have something to show relatively soon.
12/08/10 - Zoetrope
Beads
Here's that bead test I said I'd do - and it worked! The next test is to try
something a bit more complicated with it - I'm gonna have two beads on each thread
in a spiral formation so that one set travels up and the other goes down. It
will be fiddly :D
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