Beginning of the End: Thaumatropes

Hello, this is my animation blog and I am probably at least two weeks late making this post, so I should probably just get on with it.

As a warm-up introduction for the class to our animation unit, we were all briefly taught about thaumatropes and then told to make some for ourselves. Thaumatropes are an incredibly primitive, early form of animation which involved having two related pictures on different sides of a piece of paper, then spinning the paper round really fast to give the illusion of these two images coming together.

The most culturally prevalent example would be the bird and cage, which when spun gives the impression of the bird being stuck in a cage.

Image sourced from: http://arenamalleswaram.com/a/animation_facts.html

 If you're as incredibly lame as I am, your primary recognition of that might come from how it was used as symbolism in the disappointing 2013 video game, Bioshock Infinite.

Image sourced from: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/110650/does-it-make-any-difference-if-i-choose-the-bird-or-the-cage-brooch

So anyway, I had to make my own thaumatrope. Good news for everyone hoping I might sink yet lower into the pit of lame, and bad news for anyone hoping to see something artistically interesting, because it is HORRIBLE. I'm just gonna throw the pictures up first, and then try to explain myself after if you still have the stoumach for it.

 

Mhm.

 So briefly, to try and explain myself, I was so desperate not to just do a bird and a cage that I somehow thought it would be less henious a crime against art to take all the unspoken brilliance of 2001: A Space Odyssey's opening 20 minutes, and then smash it against the twin rocks that are my lack of both subtlety and artistic talent. Yes, that is an ape holding a bone juxtaposed against a man holding a gun. By the time I was done, the message didn't resemble Kubrick so much as a 17-year old try hard activist saying "War's like really bad, yeah?"

Yes, I did cry myself to sleep that night.

 

 See you next time for more amazingly disappointing adventures, only next it'll be in the world of cutout animation!