My first attempt at a 3D(ish) strobing Zoetrope.
To actually see this effect on video as it actually looked in real life, I had to shoot this on a 3 CCD Sony Z1 (and then deinterlace before upload), since all other cameras I had access to these days are CMOS and therefore suffer from the dreaded “rolling shutter” issue ( http://bit.ly/nbN471 ). That means that you cannot use strobe lights with these CMOS cameras because you get harsh line glitch errors caused by the rolling shutter as the frame is recorded so slow from top to bottom that the strobe ends up only being on half the frame. Glad I still kept my CCD camera :)
So here’s Rage Guy giving a big FU to the CMOS chip makers ;-)
http://bit.ly/pNhgfP
It’s 12 styrofoam balls on toothpicks, on an old Fast Times at Ridgemont High vinyl LP that I didn’t mind destroying with blu-tack. Running it at 78 RPM gives me an effective framerate of 15.6 fps.
You can see in the 2nd half of the video (with the lights on) that I’m messing with the Strobe rate until I can get the figure to appear as still as possible and not rotating - giving us that classic zoetrope animation effect.
Btw, the bit of digital dropout is not YouTube, but rather some HDV dropout because I used an old HDV tape. Remember, always use brand new tapes when shooting HDV, fellas!
Will have to build my own motor since this USB turntable can’t go fast enough and isn’t big enough to have many frames/models…
