Camera-Less Animation

Camera-Less Animation 

Having looked at various ways to learn from animations it was now time for me to produce my own camera-less animation. There are many different ways of doing this but we chose to look at the Thaumatrope and the Magic Lantern.

Thaumatrope

The Museum of the History of Science highlight that a Thaumatrope is a Victorian toy with a simple picture on each side attached to a piece of string. The idea of a Thaumatrope is that once that image is flipped to the other side quickly the object appears to move.

However, I myself did not find it as simple as just drawing two images on either side of a piece of paper HAHA! Actually after a few attempts of drawing just a simple smiley face I realised that I was making errors on the opposite side. I found that after flipping the string the face was upside down on the other side. In order to make a decent Thaumatrope measurements must be accurate as if the picture opposite appears in a different place it can look unrealistic to the viewers.

 

As you can see from the above images the Thaumatrope was not my most successful animation piece of work!


The Magic Lantern

Using artistic skills again, as a group we then created a Magic Lantern which is another historical device which uses camera-less animation. The Magic Lantern will present images you slide and will be projected on to a screen. As a task we were given the opportunity to create our own Magic Lantern and improvised with our own materials. We tried to create the image of the changes of weather but it was important the original images did not differ too much and that the frames remained the same size throughout the slide.

 

The most crucial element of the Magic Lantern was ensuring that no light got into the box in order to project the work on to the wall. As you can see from the two images we used a lamp to try and present the images but the classroom needed to be dark in order to clearly see what our animation was trying to achieve,