During the Easter break I've been working on my experimental project. I've always liked the idea of zeotropes so I wanted to do something along those lines and I decided to use a bike wheel as the spinny bit thing. There are a few animations online that use bike wheels and I wanted to try and do something a bit different to what was already out there.
I covered the wheel in strips of black tape so you couldn't see the spokes and attached it to a turbo trainer so that it was up straight. I then set it up against a black sheet so you couldn't see anything in the background. This was I hope it would look like anything on top of the tape looked like it was in mid air...
Next I started adding tiny coloured dots on top of the black tape. At first these were completely random but after I started spinning the wheel I could see patterns emerging they became more thought out. I spent hours adding new stickers then removing ones that didn't work. I have no idea exactly how many stickers I used in total but I know it was over 2000! Here was the result.
Next I set the camera up so it only saw the top half of the wheel so that the turbo trainer was out of shot. I set up a small lamp between the camera and wheel and switched off the main light so that just the wheel was lit up. This brought out the colour of the dots against the black background and I was happy with the neon look it gave certain colours.
To control the wheel I used a bike chain wrapped around the cassette behind the wheel. This meant I could speed the wheel up without touching or nudging it with my hand. To slow it down I just ran my finger along the rim.
I had the music track that I was going to put with the animation playing while I was shooting so that it started and stopped at the right times as this needed to be done in a single shot. It took a few takes to get that right and I spent a while playing around with speeds as the dots moved in different directions depending on how fast the wheel was moving so I wanted to get a variety of speeds in the shot. Here it is before any post was done on it.
I hadn't planned to do any kind of post production on it as I wanted it to stay exactly how I shot it but I thought I'd try out a couple of simple filters in FCP to see what it looked like. The results were so cool I couldn't resist using them! I incorporated the original shot so the viewer can recognise that it was created by hand and not all done on computer but all that was done to the shot was a simple kaleidoscope filter. No speed changes or extra color or anything like that. Here is the final film.
I covered the wheel in strips of black tape so you couldn't see the spokes and attached it to a turbo trainer so that it was up straight. I then set it up against a black sheet so you couldn't see anything in the background. This was I hope it would look like anything on top of the tape looked like it was in mid air...
Next I started adding tiny coloured dots on top of the black tape. At first these were completely random but after I started spinning the wheel I could see patterns emerging they became more thought out. I spent hours adding new stickers then removing ones that didn't work. I have no idea exactly how many stickers I used in total but I know it was over 2000! Here was the result.
Next I set the camera up so it only saw the top half of the wheel so that the turbo trainer was out of shot. I set up a small lamp between the camera and wheel and switched off the main light so that just the wheel was lit up. This brought out the colour of the dots against the black background and I was happy with the neon look it gave certain colours.
To control the wheel I used a bike chain wrapped around the cassette behind the wheel. This meant I could speed the wheel up without touching or nudging it with my hand. To slow it down I just ran my finger along the rim.
I had the music track that I was going to put with the animation playing while I was shooting so that it started and stopped at the right times as this needed to be done in a single shot. It took a few takes to get that right and I spent a while playing around with speeds as the dots moved in different directions depending on how fast the wheel was moving so I wanted to get a variety of speeds in the shot. Here it is before any post was done on it.
I hadn't planned to do any kind of post production on it as I wanted it to stay exactly how I shot it but I thought I'd try out a couple of simple filters in FCP to see what it looked like. The results were so cool I couldn't resist using them! I incorporated the original shot so the viewer can recognise that it was created by hand and not all done on computer but all that was done to the shot was a simple kaleidoscope filter. No speed changes or extra color or anything like that. Here is the final film.
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