The Kid Should See This.
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There's just so much science, nature, music, art, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...
But we don't underestimate kids around here.
Kid-friendly not-made-for-kids videos for all! Collected by Rion Nakaya and her three four year old co-curator.
Tip Jar: Curating this blog takes work! If you like the videos on this site, please support the science education projects that we've picked on DonorsChoose.org.
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Created, drawn and colored by the director David Wilson, this “how to” about the making of a music video is an excellent primer for how the praxinoscope works.
A flip book video by paper engineer, TEDx speaker, and artist Matt Shlian, who also makes paper sculptures and videos of his intricate flip books and small paper installations. A few favorites are here, here and (don’t miss this one) here.
The thaumatrope is among the simplest of the “persistence of vision” toys that were introduced in the early 19th century. In its basic form it is a card with a different picture on each surface and string attached to each side. When the string is wound up then released the card spins rapidly merging the two pictures together.
Another super clear example here. Check out the details, or make your own!
This video (which picks up at about 40 seconds) is by the fascinating Jim Le Fevre, “a BAFTA and British Animation Award winning free-lance film maker mostly working in animation” who experiments with (what he calls a) phonotrope, a camera and a record player. From Jim:
In March 2007 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London we hosted an evening of animation related events which I took as an opportunity to make some more examples of my Phonographantasmascope (which he’s since renamed a phonotrope), an extension of the Zoetrope principle.
It is all live action and works by using the shutter speed of the camera rather than the rather irritating stroboscope methods other 3D Zoetropes use.
The co-curator loved the little guys passing the cube around, as well as the red and white pins “kissing.” Really brilliant. Be sure to check out Jim’s site for more videos.
This is a praxinoscope.
It was invented in France in 1877 by Charles-Émile Reynaud. Like the zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned. Someone looking in the mirrors would therefore see a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the zoetrope offered.
There are other lovely examples here, here, and here (paired with a music box from the Museu del Cinema in Girona, Spain). Then watch (or read about) a praxinoscope getting built from a kit!
An introduction to the zoetrope from the team at Pixar, who wanted to show exactly how animation works.
The zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion.
