Daily Archives: August 17, 2010
Optical Illusion Animations Created Using a Turntable
YouTube persona brusspup used a turntable spinning at 45RPM for several creative optical illusion animations. To the human eye everything appears to look like a blur on the turntable, but when recorded at 2 dozen frames per second cool animations appear!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope
In the video description he writes;
Watch as hidden animations come alive by using a specific frame rate and shutter speeds of a camera and RPM of a record player.
To me this is one of the ultimate illusions.
Definition of Illusion: something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality.
I used a Numark turntable set to 45 RPM and the camera was set to 24 FPS. The shutter speed was set to around 840. With that combination of settings a 30 frame animation would appear to stand still. I used the slider to increase / descrease rpms which caused the images to move foward or backward.
The sequence of the guy jumping on the blocks was the most difficult but turned out the best, in my opinion.
The images of the guy jumping is me. I recorded myself jumping in the living room then took 30 frames from that footage and traced the images in photoshop and filled with black. Then printed out the 30 images and cut each one out. I used 30 wooden blocks and glued them to a piece of construction paper then taped the images of the jumping guy to the clear sheet and aligned them with the blocks.
I also love the pac-man animation. It’s so simple but just has such a cool feel to see the mouth opening and closing.
