Stop-motion animation (2)

For this session, we focused on stop-motion animation again. Our first task was to create a Thaumatrope. The Museum of the History of Science defines a Thaumatrope as a Victorian toy constructed from a simple disk or card featuring a different picture on each side and attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled rapidly the card rotates on its axis and the two images appear to combine, creating an animation. Here are some photographs of the creation of this Thaumatrope:

I found this task quite difficult. At first, I could not get the pictures to match correctly. It took some time for me to think about how the drawings needed to be, to create the animation. Another problem that I encountered was with the hole punches shown in the pictures. It would seem that the hole punches have to be in a certain place for the thaumatrope to work, which I did not realise at the time! This then led me to create the whole thing again, making sure the hole punches were in the correct place. After a lot of time and patience, I eventually managed to get the thaumascope working. The photos below show the difference between two Thaumascope's I made. The one on the left is my final Thaumascope which worked correctly. As you can see the holepunch marks are more equal and central than the one on the right, which is the one that did not go to plan. They are clearly too high leading to the Thaumascope to not work correctly.

Here is a little video of how the Thaumascope worked showing the two images creating an animation.

 

References

Thaumatropes - Museum of the History of Science. 2015. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/exhibits/fancy-names-and-fun-toys/thaumatropes/ [Accessed 29 January 2015].