🚨 WIP article 🚨
I’ve seen amazing zoetrope animations on vinyl records on the internet and wanted to design my own.
Motivation
Drew Tetz’s stuff has always been magical and a source of inspiration. His examples always portrays a sense of wonder and fun. Across the many great examples that I’ve seen on the internet, each one has something unique to it. There’s a tonne of these that have replicable elements to them that I can use in my own designs.
This blog article is not a step-by-step guide on how to create your own zoetrope animation on vinyl. It’s more of a collection of resources that I found useful in creating my own and the thought that went into it.
Exploration
Before I began, I had no idea how to go about this. I had to learn a lot of new things. Drew Tetz’s own website and tutorial for Make was the place I started from.
I wanted to keep as much of the process digital as possible, so that I could iterate on the design efficiently.
Creating these traditionally involves a trial-and-error process, with physical prints, rotations, and camera setups. Found this process quite cumbersome. Decided to create a script that would take my design and render a digital animation that I could test out. This basic script does not do much. It simply takes an image, extracts the design, rotates it and creates the frames and stitches them together into a video, but it does streamline the prototyping.
Here’s an example. Take this design called “Dice Game” for example.
When run through the script, here’s what it looks like:
Here is a link to the python script: zoetrope-vinyl, the details, steps, and all is mentioned in the README. Go have a look if it seems useful.
Reproducible Elements
Here are some of the examples that I saw and the elements that I saw in them that could be replicated and the mental models behind them.