Zoetropes

Zoetropes are quite an old way to make images appear to be moving or animated, they were first made in the form that we recognise in the 19th century, however the idea goes back to ancient china.

we wanted our Zoetropes to tell a story, it was a story of going to get some food, and the animations would relate to the three different ages.

Andy and Dave had made some examples and a zoetrope made from lego, two old CDs, a CD stack box and some card.

Here is a drawing of the zoetrope

The drawings for the zoetrope animations were made on strips of card that Dave and Andy had made, because there were a lot of them there was also a template that we could use to mark where we should do our drawings or "Frames".

The zoetrope has slits in the drum. There are the same number of these as there are frames on the card strip. The frames and slits line up on opposite sides of the drum. As the zoetrope spins the slits "switch" the image on and off very quickly, so that it looks like the image is staying still apart from the changes that have been made to it which appear to move. This is similar to how a movie camera works.

The images and slits line up in the Drum.


Before we started making the Zoetrope animation we had a go at another very quick way of making things appear to move, using Flipbooks, this gave us an idea of how many frames we need to make to make the animation smooth. Here is a quick way to make a flip book, you can use scrap paper to make this:



You make lots of drawing each slightly different on each page, by pressing on quite hard you can see roughly where the last drawing you made was on the next page, once finished you can flick through the book and watch the animation.

Once we had done the flipbooks, we started discussing ideas for the zoetropes, our usual groups were divided up into people doing the start middle and end of the story. We were going to film the zoetropes using flip cameras so that they could then be put into one long film which would tell the story.
This is an idea of what we ended up with:

The story board helps to plan the story before you start doing all the detailed drawing for the animation.

Once the drawings had been made we filmed them all in turn.. we edited them later...

Here is an example of one of the films