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?