Making a Traumotrope and Zoetrope

Last week we began talking about stop motion animation and looked at a few examples. In today seminar session myself and few other group members had a go at making a few of the simpler, earlier examples of stop motion animation in order to find out what kind of skills might be used or developed during the process.

The traumotrope was a popular 19th century tot which consists of a single paper disc with a picture drawn on each side. String is attached to either side of the disc and is then used to sin the disc back and forth, creating a sloid image out of the two images on either side. The Traumotrope demonstates persistance of vision and simple toys of this nature are recognised as important antecedents of cinemantography and in particular of animation.

Here is my attempt at a traumotrope:

It seemed like it would be a simple task, but i found myself using skills id not used since school.






While the task essentially started as a creative process, it required both mathematical and scientific undertsanding to make sure the traumotrope worked.



Being given a task and left to complete it allowed us to develop problem solving skills and required patience, reseacrh skills and interpersonal skills, for finding out where other people had gone wrong so you didnt need to make the same mistake




As you can probably see, im no artist, but the task still allowed me to focus of areas of strength, for example the technical side.

But once it was alltogether, did it really work?

Stop Motion Animation

Today in education futures we've been discussing stop motion animation. Stop motion animation is a cinematic process, or technique used to makes static objects appear as if they were moving. It is a technique is commonly used in claymation and puppet-based animation. The objects are brought to life by breaking up the figure's motion into increments and filming one frame of film per increment.

The first thing that became apparent when asked to give examples is that across a seminar group whose ages span from early 20 into the 30's is that we all have different ideas of what stop motion animation is. some of the more recent examples offered by younger members of the group included Tim Burton movies such as 'The nightmare before christmas' and 'The corpse bride', while slightly more dated examples such as Morph; a plasticine character who first appeared on our screens back in 1977.

Stop motion animation has a long history in the world of moving images and in its early stages was often used to mkae an image appear as if it was moving by magic. You may remember experimenting with stop motion animation as a child, expect you probbably wouldn't have known that is what it was called. Remember these?

other early examples of stop motion animation include these contarptions:some of which you may recognise or have experiemnted with at school:

Zoetrope:

Thaumotrope:



The use of stop-motion animation grew throughout the 20th century. if you like to know more about the history of it, maybe watch this history of stop motion animation:



History and evolution of Stop Motion Animation... by mistersexybuzz

The advantages of using stop motion animation is that you can create something cool and animate inanimate objects. The effect can be acheived with very little costs and almost anyone can give it ago; its accessible to all ages. The disadvantages however is that it can be incredibly time consuming, if wanting to do it well. Also, if a creator wants a smooth image they must create a huge amount of images and set the speed right. 

As you can see the use of stop motion has evolved considerably over the years, so lets have a look at some of the more modern stop animations. Nick park, the creator of the infamous Wallace and Gromit duo, spring to mind as a great example of the success of stop motion animation.