Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Animated

Thanks to my friend Pearl, who sent me this video: more bike art! And this one's quite gorgeous . . . The artist's idea was to create animation that could be filmed in realtime (for a dissertation project - he's studying animation.) So he turned a bike into a Phantakistoscope (I just learned that word! It's like a zoetrope, but flat.)



While it's also just plain beautiful (and I like things that make art with bicycles; it reminds me of how simple a machine, and how elegant, a bike is) it's also making my brain boggle with the design of it. Apparently you have to film this to be able to see it: the human eye just sees a blurry mess. Once you add the frame rate of the camera (25fps) the separate parts of the image resolve into the animated image. And only (as you can see) when the wheel is rotating at a particular speed.

How cool is that?

2 comments:

  1. Cool! Kinda like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-VkYWymJmI

    or this

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOeHUAlkCcM

    The 2nd one was even powered by 8 bicycles.

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  2. Those are very cool. The strobe sort of serves the same function as the fps of the camera... very neat. Now I want to build something like that!

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