thaumatrope and phenakistoscope

Slightly more advanced than the thaumatrope, the phenakistoscope relies on a theory called the persistance of vision. This describes the phenomenon where you can still see an image a split second after it has disappeared from you line of vision due to the impulses in your brain being slower than the speed of light (which enables you to see things). For a phenakistoscope to work you need to view it by looking through the slits at the edge to seperate each image. I have filmed it twice, once in front of a mirror, filming the reflection through the slits and once filming the images directly to show that if you don't view it through the slits it does not work. The visibility wasn't that good as the slits were quite thin, so the actual image is quite hard to work out but if you look carefully you should see a bird flying. It is simply a series of images that all differ slightly, shown consecetively at high speed on a loop, this creates the illusion of movement. It is also very similar to a flip book or stop frame animation. It did although have many limitations, such as the fact that only one or two people can view the moving image at a time; also the amount of images you could fit around a circle is very limited resulting in very short repetative animations. Although very simple techniques, both the thaumatrope and the phenakistoscope enabled people to experience moving images/illusions for the first time, and from these came the ideas that invented the first film camera.

Thaumatrope

I drew two pictures of a bird on either side of a piece of card and by rotating it really quickly the images blurred together to make it look like the bird was flying. The outcome, however, wasn't totally successful as I think the two drawings weren't perfectly in line with eachother, resulting in a jerky image. I really like the idea though because you can see how this idea progressed into film as we know it today. This really simple version of just two images rather than 25 frames a second helps me understand how film works.

I have begun this project by researching the history of moving image. Before Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, there were other more simple inventions, such as the Thaumatrope and the Phenakistoscope, that were the first to create a moving image. I have made my own version of these inventions and filmed their effectiveness.