Inside Out

For the next zoetropic disc designs, I chose to steer away slightly from treating them just as a series of frames, and instead opted to design it with the whole disc in mind. A viewer who approaches this piece is going to see all frames at the same time, so it makes sense to incorporate that into the animation itself. This led me to the idea of animating shapes originating from the centre of the disc and gradually moving to the outer edges.

One unexpected and displeasing outcome of these designs was that the prominent translations from the centre of the disc to the outside make it much easier to tell that it is a spinning disc. One unexpected a pleasing outcome, however, is that I unintentionally stumbled across a new technique that I’ll definitely be exploring further. In the second animation, it takes one full rotation for the drip to start and hit the water, but for fun I kept animating and added a small splash afterwards. This has afforded me 28 frames of animation even though the disc is only divided up into 14 sections. For some of the future designs, I will try and exploit this trick and lengthen the animations even further.