Zoetrope Sin Waves

Here’s some footage of the finished sine wave zoetrope - I plan to make some sort of music video or VJ mix while projecting onto the zoetrope next, so it’s not really completely finished yet.

I thought I’d go into the process a bit behind this one while it’s still fresh in my head. It all started off in the computer with photoshop and after effects and the mock up which you can see above in my previous post. I w on’t go into the details of how I made the the mock up (that’d be boring), but it was used to make sure of the timings and positions of each of the pieces of wood before I went ahead and made the real thing. Each frame of each circle was rendered from the AE mock up as an image sequence and then printed out to use as reference for when I started to chop up the wood.

Each piece of wood, after it was painted, was lined up next to it’s corresponding print out, cut off and then numbered on the bottom and bagged up with all the other pieces from the same circle. After all 227 bits were done, I had to figure out how to position them on the record without permanently marking or damaging it.

After a bit of thinking, my solution was to mark the position of each piece with a sticker (pretty clever eh?). But because each of the circles was offset I couldn’t just mark out one circle, stick the wood on and move on to the next one because the previous circle would get in the way - they all had to be done at the same time. So I made a kind of guide circle with the 33 frames marked out for the record to sit in, taped it in place and put a drawing pin in the middle that I tied a piece of thread around.

I then stuck one sticker onto the thread at the required distance from the centre of the disc, stretched it out to the right frame number on the circumference and then put a sticker on the record next to marker on the thread. Once they were all done I tested their positions by filming it, and it worked - first time!

So that was it really, I just went ahead and stuck the pieces on with my trusty glue gun. I’m really happy with how this one turned out and I’m glad I kept pushing myself to keep it really precise and tidy and slick, although not perfect, obviously. My new record player has three speeds and allows me to fine tune the rpm with a slider, so I was able to change the direction the animation drifts in and mix it up a bit as I was filming which makes it a bit more interesting to look at I think. But like I say, I’m going to do some more filming with this and have a bit of a play with projection and masking off or highlighting certain areas of the zoetrope…