4D mini project

'Hypercube'- a hand drawn animation by myself about the 4th dimension

When I heard we were going to have a mini project at college about animation/moving image titled '4D' I got very excited; I have been interested in animation since I learnt how to bring life to lumps of plastecine and lego using a camera and computer. The 4th dimension is another fascination of mine and I have made work based on it before (See animation above). There's quite a few animations on this blog already and there are many .gifs on my website!

               

In the first week we were shown examples of traditional animation: Flipbooks and zoetropes. I'm quite familiar with both due to museum visits and a general interest in animation. We were asked to research other early forms of animation. I remembered seeing an article about a digital museum of 'Phenakistoscopes' and other optical tricks from the 19th century that I thought would be very suitable. I manged to track down the article and carried out further research.

What really fascinated me about Zoetropes, Phenakistocopes, praxinoscopes, electrotachyscopes and other disc based animation techniques was their looping nature. They're actually very similar to animated gifs that myself and others make! Looping animation actually existed over half a decade before film. And that, to me, is really interesting, especially considering how popular gifs are today.
I can imagine a victorian staring into a spinning drum to watch small loops of kittens and 'fails' 
(wait that's actually what they did!) 



You can see the amazing collection of Phenakistoscopes and other 19th centrury animation techniques on www.dickbalzer.com which is a digital museum owned by Richard Balzer, a collector.




In the second week we had to form groups and were given cameras then asked to shoot fast sequences of photos to be stitched together into a video. This is very similar to simply taking a video with the camera except there's less frames. This didn't make much sense to me because it didn't really take advantage of what you can do if you take photos then stitch them into a video. By taking a photograph then moving objects in the shot then repeating that quite a few times you can make yourself a stop motion animation! I wanted to make a stop motion animation. To do that you need a tripod to keep the camera steady between frames. We were told we weren't allowed a tripod as those aren't required to take a sequence of photographs. I was a bit annoyed. Oh well. we made some stop motion videos anyway at much complaint from whomever was unlucky enought to be the cameraman who had to keep the camera as still as possible for a rather long time. This is what we produced:

Using the magic of animation I was able to slide around without walking!
If I were to make this again, I'd make sure to communicate with the camerawoman about where the edges of the frame are as I went off the side here.

I used an anti camera shake filter on adobe premiere pro to give this animation a smooth camera motion..

Stop motion takes quite a lot of time to make.
You can see that demonstarated quite clearly here if you look at the shadows.

These were all made in a lesson so that's actually pretty fast. They were all a pretty good introduction to bringing objects to life which led on very well to what we did in the third week...