Assessment 1 - The Zoetrope!!!!

Zoetrope

 

Second is a Good one!!!!

 Now I'll admit, I never knew What this animation was called! but as soon as I was told my eyes lit up! I've seen this animation in several forms of media! All sorts of movies! (Horror in particular) and its such a damn good animation! Now for the beginnings! It's a pre-film animation, coming from the Greek words "Zoe" which means life and "Tropps", which as I said before means turning, so a rough translation could be seen as "Wheel of life" kind spooky eh? This is a bit more complicated than the Thaumatrope, as in it uses several images and a cylinder to make the illusion for the animation. The cylinder itself would have small slits going round the side of the cylinder, with the images going around the inside of it. Say for example its a group of images of a man waving, going from left to right, each picture building up to him waving, once the pictures are inside, get yourself looking through these slits and spin the Zoetrope! the images start coming together to create the illusion of motion! How awesome is that!

How to make a Zoetrope!!!

Okay this time before having the video above my little gab, I'm gonna go into the details of what you need first of all, then a little guide video! so first off you'll need,

• Empty Tin Can (baked beans etc)
• Electrical Tape
• Ruler
• Tack Pin
• Marker
• Utility Knife
• Zoetrope Template ( which I found a good'un for you!)

Now, id recommend having a friend near by those cans and knives are sharp you know!

Ups and Downs

Now onto the good and the bad, the great points, yeah I said great, are that its an awesome wee animation! and you can change the size of it, so you can have a couple ready to go! don't need to have a big massive cylinder! The bad points though, are that its a lot more complex to make than the Thaumatrope, and you are using a tin can and a utility knife to make it, so you can injure yourself if your not careful!

The Coming Of!!

Now for the history of the zoetrope, I'm gonna go on for a bit cause....wow this little thing has a lot of history! I really wanna cover as much as I can, since its helping me to spread the word! The good word of animation history! There is some stuff I'm gonna leave out since there is accounts of different versions of the Zoetrope through out history but no clear cut examples of what it was can be found unfortunately. So to begin, the first.....idea of what could be a Zoetrope shall we say was 5000 years ago! In the style of an earthen bowl from Iran, the reason this is a contender is that on the inside of the bowl there are several images that as the go along the inside of the bowl the images ever so slightly change, to show movement. Though how they would spin it to create the illusion, God knows! They Could have spinned it on there hands quickly, or even a potters table! 5000 years old though, wow! Though a man called Simon Stampfer made a published idea about the zoetrope to be used for either a cylinder or a looped bit of paper in 1833, there has been a few variants over the years but the basic model always holds strong! The last history tid bit I want to touch on is something I personally find amazing! In the 1970's Sega (yes that Sega!) used a mechanism similar to an ancient Zoetrope in order to make electro mechanical arcade games! This would lead onto The first kind of First person shooter games! How crazy is that? If Sega didn't use the Zoetrope games today might not be what they are!

Gimme some Examples!!!

I didn't need to search for my first example, cause its one that's always haunted me since i seen it, its the reason that to this day I always associate the Zoetrope with horror is, House on Haunted hill (1999) one of the house guests gets trapped in a life size Zoetrope and the images are haunting! (excuse the pun) I couldn't find a video that should him entering it, but its shows the images that he see's and pulls out to show the size of it! I'd recommend skipping to about 1:13, when the lights start flashing that's the sign that the images are going by!

Extra!!!

I was debating with myself wither to add this in or not, but its just too good not too! So, I've went into details about where the Zoetrope came from the idea of it, how to make one yourself and even a spooky example of it, but did you know that there is also a 3D Zoetrope? Ayep my dear readers there is! Its the same principal, though replace the 2d image with a 3d model, and boom, Bob's your uncle! the best examples of this can be found in the greatest place on earth, that's right you guessed it! The Ghibli museum in Japan! The 3D Zoetrope has models of characters from my neighbour Totoro. Disney not wanting to be out done by Studio Ghibli done the same thing in Disney land California adventure park! using Toy Story characters! just gives me more of an excuse to travel!