Today was a fun day in class -- I brought in a small Praxinoscope that I had purchased, and talked about how animations are made up of individual frames. I found a marvelous resource about the pre-history of cinema, which I highly recommend to everyone. Be sure not to miss the contributions of Leonardo Da Vinci, as well as all of the crazy contraptions of the 1800s (there's a Zoetrope and a Thaumatrope, as well as a Praxinoscope, you see...)
Then we whipped out the cameras, tripods, and modeling clay, to do some good old fashioned "claymation" in groups. I know at least one of the groups posted their claymation creation to their blog, and hopefully the others will as well.
In addition, I discussed how to create movies of 3D scenes using raytracing to take individual snapshots, and then compile them all together into a video. Here's an example video, ray-tracing an evolving scene from NetLogo's Flocking 3D Alternate model.
In case I haven't mentioned it recently, my strong affections for POV-Ray have not dimmed...
That's all for now, since we have to be off bright and early tomorrow for our museum field trip day.
Shouldn't it be cinematics? The praxinoscope sounds awesome though. Enjoying the blog.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, of course. The praxinoscope is kind of fun, though it would be much more awesome to have an old antique one. Here's the new fangled variant that I purchased on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Toysmith-4M-Animation-Praxinoscope-3474/dp/B000P02HYC
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