Photos on a Phenakistoscope

The theme for this weeks Unplugged Project is photographs. So, my youngest son and I, went to work combining photographs, and a previous project we'd done involving persistence of vision, and a phenakistoscope.

I snapped a couple shots of him doing jumping jacks, and we printed them out six times each, in wallet size.

We, mainly meaning I, cut out around each pose, to remove the background.

Then we glued our cutouts to our phenakistoscope. We discovered, that the wallet size was a little too big. Not only, could we not fit all of our photos around the disk, but the pattern created by the legs, made a solid line, that ruined the effect of motion.

We fiddled around with our cutouts a bit, and finally settled on a combination of photos with, and without, legs attached. The effect, was not quite a jumping jack, but rather an interesting leg switching dance - still fun to watch though.

We had a little better luck on another try, using thumbprint sized head shots of all of the children. I knew they looked a lot alike, but watching them morph back and forth on the movie wheel, really brought it home.

It's great to be a homeschooler.