Just A Second

This is one second. Twenty-four paper frames on a crude make-shift paddle wheel. Making this analog paper device a working movie machine gave me a great feel for animation timing.

The story behind this started with a recent contributing post over on Jaime Zollars' famous paper fan blog called Paper Forest, check it out...

Chris Ware's comic book (on left) has this teeny miniature cinema on its last two pages. (second from left) I got my copy and blew it up to make it easier to put together (seen assembled, second from right). I wanted to a.) see whether such a contraption could work and b.) whether I could understand its mechanism enough to develop my own model that looks more like an antique theater (along the lines of this artist paper piece, seen on right). Not only did it work, it was completely non-mathematical and easy!


I was so stimulated by this new movie making power, I had to go further. Mr. Ware's clever little model contained just 12 "frames" of one of his popular black and white comics. For my next step, I printed out a 24 frame image sequence of an already-made short animation sketch of Halfland's main character, Rana smiling and winking. For such a rough animation method such as this, I see it would have been better to go with broader, more obvious, character movement/action, but I learned the principles involved in its working just the same. I placed each image of Rana onto a single pane of my, now twice as large, paper paddle wheel. A custom cardboard box made in excited haste--and voilá! Showtime...



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