Thursday, August 28, 2008

Record player animation

The slowest setting on my record player is 33 1/3 RPM.
My friend's digital movie camera records at 30 FPS.

RPM means revolutions per minute.
FPS means frames per second.

One revolution is when the turn table rotates 360°.

360° * 33 1/3RPM = 12,000° per minute

12,000° per minute = 200° per second

200° / 30FPS = 6 2/3° per frame.

360° / 6 2/3° = 54

What all this means is that if I come up with 54 drawings placed at 6.6666° intervals around the edge of a turntable and set it playing at 33 1/3 RPM then video tape it at 30 FPS I should be able to turn those 54 drawings into an animation.

i.e. I should make this.


What you should see in this next video are three scenes taken while running the record player seen above.
In the first take you see it running in standard office lighting.
In the second take we figured that the shutter speed was too low so we brought over some more lamps and tried again.
In the third take we sped the player up to 45RPM just to see the difference.

6 comments:

Valerie A. Heck Esmont said...

That is a really great way to make an animation! Thanks for sharing.

Alan Parekh said...

Looks like a great way to make some simply animation. You need to make a walking person next!

Anonymous said...

http://www.swankola.com/psf/gimmicks/redraven02.gif

http://shallowrewards.blogspot.com/2006/04/red-raven-magic-mirror-lot-of-78s.html

Nick O'Leary said...

Great stuff Doug.

You should check out the work of Jim Le Fevre - http://www.jimlefevre.com/?page_id=200. He has played with this stuff as well.

Mike Rhode said...

Cool. Now make it a dancing monkey!

la_sale_bete said...

really cool!
i'm really interested in these kinds of animation, and have noted a few examples (including Jim Le Fevre's work) here:
http://mabak.wordpress.com/