In my last post I talked about the making of this sculpture from a sculpture point of view. But, there's more to the story. On this project I had decided that I would make a short documentary for promotion purposes and I thought it may be cool if I was able to have a moving element in the piece which could become part of the documentary and add to the sculptures meaning. That's when I hit on the idea of a Zeotrope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope(source)
What's dat?
Ok, So what is a Zoetrope? well you can think of it as the first animated GIF and it was invented in Victorian times. There were several iterations trying to do a similar effect but it took W.E.Lincoln to get it to the stage where it was beautiful in its simplicity. He patented the idea in 1867 and as you can see by this replica version all it was was a spinning cylinder with slits around edge. Inside animated drawings were placed and as the viewer looked through the spinning slits it created a shuttering effect and revealed the different images in quick succession resulting in a looping animation. You can see how it would go on to inspire the birth of cinema.
http://users.telenet.be/thomasweynants/new-replica-optical.toys.html (source)
Spining sand
But, how was I to realise this in a static sculpture. Now don't get me wrong, I didn't expect to have my sculpture spinning around at a hundred miles an hour (although it did give me ideas for another sculpture). But the audience were welcome to run round and round as fast as they could to see the effect.
The gaps between the teeth were the slits and the animation would be placed on the internal wall at the other side.
First I used my amazing skills as an animator to draw 9 frames of a man running along eating as he went, This is where the name for the sculpture came from. Eat your heart out Disney. Such fluidity of movement. These I then made stencils from so that I could spray paint through onto the sand. I thought it important to have as much contrast as possible so it would be visible.
The painting was the last thing I did in the center before I crawled out and filled in the door. I was happy with the graphic nature of the figures and using a matchstick man would hopefully help the audience understand what I was trying to achieve.
I finished the rest of the piece and tried to think, how will I see if the effect worked? After making myself very dizzy by running around I thought that there must be an easier way. So, I concocted a contraption using a bicycle wheel and some length of wood that I could attach my video camera to and it would allow me to swing it around the sculpture and film the movement in a repeatable, smooth way. Below is the result, I can see it and I hope you can too or else all my hard work was just me chasing unicorns.
I was so happy that I got the clip for my documentary, I will be presenting this to you very soon, so, don't go away.
Ps
Thanks for reading. I use Steem to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, among other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Steem blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.
Movable feast (part 1) - sand sculpture
Dragon race - sand sculpture
Circus - sand sculpture
I hope you'll join me again soon
@ammonite
[//]:# (!steemitworldmap 53.343018 lat -6.267767 long Movable feast (part 2) -sand sculpture 2006 d3scr)