For this week, our assignment was to create something using any two materials that were NOT plywood or acrylic. I had had this idea of an inverted zoetrope for a while, so decided this was the time to pull to the trigger.

I decided to buy a lamp shade to use the bones of my wheel, and veneer to cut out the design for the animation sequence. I found the perfect lamp shade on amazon, but the veneer was near impossible to find. I then decided to just use construction paper as my prototype, and oil board for the actual shade cover.

The thing that took the longest time was finding the animation sequence that 1) I liked, and 2) worked. I searched for hours and tried around 5-6 different animations. I needed to find the images, edit them, vectorize them and laser cut them. The design might seem simple but the process certainly wasn’t!

After I was done getting the image sequence I liked, I moved to the laser cutter to test out whether or it would actually work. Although the vibrations of the table were causing the paper to shake, the construction paper cut beautifully. I rigged it a little bit by taping the edges to the actual laser bed so that it wouldn’t shake. From there I moved to the oil board… and that unfortunately did not cut that well. It didn’t cut as cleanly and as much as I tried to rig it, the finish just wasn’t as clean as the construction paper.

Also, once that was done, I couldn’t figure out how to attach it to itself without making a big mess. I tried glue to no avail, and when I went to tape it I realized that no matter the tape I used it would pull apart layers of the board. No bueno! I don’t want to tape it to the shade as I want to flexibility of being able to interchange it with something else later on. For now, the design worked! Now I need to mount it on a rotating base so that I can get a projected animation on the wall.

Onwards and upwards!