On Monday I finished a collaboration with the jewellery department at the college. We were to create optical toys. I currently have no pictures of these optical toys however I will be filming them and taking pictures very soon. So I'll update this post later with those. I have described bellow what we were making so have a look at that in the mean time.
I didn't just make this post to bore you with stuff you already know though I made it so I could show our phonotropes. I am so proud of my group for these. They are fabulous.
So they are both circus themed and cyclic, as is the nature of a phono trope. It's like creating a physical GIF... No seriously it is. Basically phonotropes are pure magic. Well ok phonotropes are pure maths but that maths makes magic! Here's the tech. You get a cd player and get that playing at 45 rps (rotations per second) Then you get a disc shaped piece of card and divide it into 33 slices. This is where you will put your animation. One cell per section, however you have to make sure your beginning and your end are the same (cyclic remember). Now I know exactly what your thinking, this is not a zoetrope so when you put your disc onto the CD player you will not see any animation. You require something to break up the disc in order to see the animation. Which is why with a zoetrope you look through slits in the frame to see the animation and not at the images itself. It is also possible to make phonotropes with the use of strobe lighting to the same effect. The way we do it is by setting up a camera and putting the feed through a computer. The thing that makes this work is the camera will be seeing translating the phono trope disc into the computer at 24 fps (frames per second) that magic animation speed. This is what allows you to see the animation happening. It really is magic!
Ok so the best thing for animators about these phonotropes is that they get is really quick results and they produce stunning movement. But for the more ambitious of us we can create some really magical things with ours. We didn't get a single complaint about ours. Other than my seal confused Jared because until he saw the physical disc he couldn't tell if it was 2D or 3D but I personally take that as a compliment.
https://vimeo.com/110772100 - This on here was made by my the rest of my team. The jewellers made the hoops and added the flames while the other animator added the lions. She also added the big top which was added after the filming of the trope. I myself contributed nothing more than my support, advice and general direction. It turned out awesome.
https://vimeo.com/110772099 - This one was entirely me. I have made a decent amount of phonotropes before, enough to know what I wanted to mess about with this time around. A part of me is interested in the way the eye interprets the entire phonotrope rather than just the section where you focus to watch the animation. I had tried it out before to minimum effect. I was also interested in messing around with the colours of the circus and all those eye sore effects that come from the circus. So this was my end creation. I really want a physically beautiful phonotrope that's magic came from its movement and it's static appearance.
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