UNIT 7 Thaumotrope

In this workshop we focused on the thaumotrope: an optical toy that has an image on both sides which appear to join and create one image when it is turned rapidly. We were shown some examples of thaumotropes first for us to fully understand the toy, a famous example of the thaumotrope is in the Sleepy Hollow film which you can see in the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttjKbchiDXs

The first thaumotrope I made was a template provided by Kat, who managed the workshop, therefore the making was extremely simple. I had two discs with the images on that I stuck together making sure the second disc was upside down to ensure the thaumotrope would work, after I created the hole and tied elastic bands to each side. 

Here is a link to the video of my working thaumotrope:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83aw65OjNZI

I then continued to creating my own thaumotrope, this time instead of using to discs I drew the two images on both sides of the same piece of card therefore I had to use a light box so I could position the second image in the right place to ensure my design would work.

When making my own thaumotropes I decided to use different shapes to see if the shape of card would affect the animation, both my diamond and square thaumotropes worked successfully therefore the shape of card doesn't affect the animation. 

Here is the link to the video of my working kite thaumotrope:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP2vMJ6Rku4

Here is a link to the video of my working balloon thaumotrope:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FZ6DThgo24

Thaumotropes are a very basic form of time based media however the simplicity does not lessen the effectiveness of the process. The simplicity truly shows the creativity behind inventing this optical illusion and the slightly blurry result shows how old this method is, due to this method being preserved for so long gives me hope that we can continue to preserve time based art into the future. I think that thaumotropes can be cleverly created to have deeper meaning than just an optical illusion for example in the clip of sleepy hollows that I showed earlier in my blog showed a caged bird. However as a single image the bird is flying free perhaps, as a quick interpretation, the repetitive action of spinning could represent the ever ticking clock and the bird represents ourselves and all living things showing that we are trapped by time as the bird is trapped by the cage.