This week I'm going to start my in-school workshops. I want the kids mainly to work with their hands.

To get them started I thought it would be nice to learn about the technique behind animation. I don't want to teach them but I'd like to show them how it works. Philosopher John Locke once said,

Nothing is in the understanding, which was not first perceived by some of the senses.

(though I always thought this was an quote of Aristotle, but anyway).

Photograph ©Andrew Dunn, 5 November 2004.

For this purpose (and because I wanted to do it for a long time) I built a Zoetrope. I'd like to do a kind of How to build a Zoetrope here. So:

How To Build a Zoetrope

If you'd like to do it the same way I built mine, you'll need the following materials:

• an defective record player (seen at ebay.de from 1€ plus shipping)
  

• chipboard in the desired size of your stand (mine was less than 0,04 m2 and costed me exactly 0,35 €)

• wood glue, spray mount

• acrylics

• black cardboard in required size (depends on you record player)

• long paper stripes (again, size is derivated from the size of you final cylinder)

Helpful tools:

• screw drivers and whatever you need to disassemble the record player carefully

• a drill and appropriate boring heads

• a brush, a cutter, a ruler

• pencil, eraser

• a calculator (unless you're brilliant in mental arithmetics) to calculate the size of your cylinder

• thick felttips

Please always keep health and safety in mind! Work slowly and concentrated.

I wanted to keep it simple, that's why I took a short cut: I got an old broken record player from my future parents-in-law and completey disassembled it. I just needed the turntable and its mount to make the table again turn smoothly. By the way, there are plenty of mechanical pieces left which I'll keep for future props... You'll never know.

The next step was to construct a stand where I could lay the hinge in. For this I bought chipboard. Bigger DIY stores may cut it to your preferred size and it's very cheap. I decided to make a box of 12 x 12x 11 cm.

First I drilled a hole into the top side with a range of 4,5 cm in diameter (it depends on the size of the parts of your player). This is because the lower part of the hinge needs to move freely. Then I started glueing the chipboard pieces together. Wood glue does a great job here.

I painted the box with black acrylics to hide it a bit and then screwed the bearing on the top of the box.

Then came the trickiest part: Calculating the size of my cylinder and where to place the slots. I cut 12 of them which will be enough. Later, you'll have to draw the same number of pictures on a paper stripe. The space below the slits should be same height as the gaps theirselves.
As you can see in the picture, I cut out tabs on the bottom at the cylinder to fix it to the record player later.

Then, finally, I glued it together with spray-on glue and fixed it to the plate.

Very last step is to draw a stripe at the same length of the inner circumference of your drum. I took mine and divided it into 12 frames of the same size. My "story" is a jumping fish. It's very helpful to draw a tiny storyboard here, and the last frame has to be followed by the first one again. Every cycled animation of 12 frames could do a great job here.

Keep the drawings simple and use a thick pen. You won't see delicate lines.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

This is my strip as an animated gif:

I want the kids to experience how we perceive moving pictures generally, and to do their first steps in animation without a camera. So they're going to draw single frames on paper stripes. I'll let you know how it works.

Had anyone build a zoetrope before? What are your experiences? If anybody did by the help of this, I'd love to see how it works for you.