Creating a Phenakistiscope with Adobe After Effects

hello everyone this is evan abrams and in this video we're going to be creating something called a finicky scope a little help from after effects a few expressions and a little bit of math this is a kind of proto gif or i guess maybe an ancient meme uh the first ones we start to see at the start of like the 1800s as people were drawing these little images around the outside of a disc and giving it a spin and things seemed to animate you imagine they had to draw these things with their hands on papers however with the power of technology after effects all these great computers so we can create these kinds of physical optical illusions a lot easier these days this is a little bit of a deeper dive than we usually do so there are chapter markers in the description if you're ready to get crafty then stick around and since that's a very tired ancient pun you know it's time to start the tutorial much of the footage you'll see me working with here has been lovingly provided by our sponsor 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up some excellent assets from yellow images so a finickystoscope is a kind of old-time gif or an ancient meme it dates back to 1832 and was a disc with images around it that you spin and the movement of the disc plays the animation it's kind of an optical illusion the phenikistoscope took off as a kind of novelty toy and along with later technologies like the zoetrope flipbook zooprax's scope paved the way for film animation and eventually where we're at right now and while the phenekistoscope isn't in high use today it did have a bit of a resurgence on another rotating media the vinyl record and while this might feel like a bit of a holdover from groovier times musicians like bonobo kate bush and alan madsen have been using this technique to great effect even today this intersection of art and science can make some really fun results but can take some fiddly work so how does a disk of pictures turn into animation our brains are constantly trying to make consistent patterns out of what we see it's easier for us to think of these images as one continuous movement than as many moving pictures so that's how we get the illusion of animation now at a certain point there are not enough frames to complete the illusion or it's not spinning fast enough and the illusion breaks for most people that threshold is between 10 to 12 frames per second so we need at least 12 frames around the circle and then we just spin it at one revolution per second right well kind of there's some math that goes into the stuff and getting this to move at the right speed you want can take some fiddling but we can see by some historical and contemporary examples there is a lot of variety in how these things can be put together we can start by simplifying the process and locking down some variables in this video we're going to assume a rotation speed of 45 revolutions per minute which is 0.75 revolutions per second or 270 degrees per second so if i want to have a 30 frames per second animation uh very smooth that means i need one frame every nine degrees and the total duration of the animation then for all the way around the disc would be 40 frames but all that can be a lot of math but that's why we have computers right so we can let them do all the math and we can be more creative so that's where after effects comes in our goal in after effects is to take an animation and display its frames around a circle offsetting each frame by a number of degrees this process starts with building a large comp that we're going to call the plate it's a whole frame long and really quite big it's like a massive circle let's go with maybe 2000 by 2000 pixels this plate will be filled with copies of our animation comp the thing that will hold whatever excellent animation we're going to be using this animation holder comp that we've just called animation will be longer and thinner maybe than you're used to seeing and that's because it has to run from the middle of the circle to the outside of the circle here's a lovely little example animation we've got this one set to be a 40 frame loop of this spinning space man he's made of an image sequence from yellow images and we're using time remapping to have him spin thrice around but we'll talk more about designing animations after we've got our system locked down for now we just need to see something in here and he's down here at the edge because he'll be along the outside of the circle so back into the plate how do we get this 40 frame animation to array around the outside of the circle well it's expressions specifically we're going to put one on the rotation then we're going to put one on the time remapping here's the one on the rotation variable i at the top is looking at the index value of the layer and subtracting one from it that means that variable i is going to be zero for layer one and then on layer two it's gonna be one then a layer three it's gonna be two and so on like that at the end we're going to multiply that i value by the number of degrees between each layer and that's going to be 360 degrees divided by the duration in frames of that animation comp we can find the number of frames in that comp by dividing the duration of that animation comp in seconds by the duration of the frame of that comp in seconds and that's what's happening here on the second line this variable f that we've set up and this final little bit at the end multiplying by negative one will cause things to array anti-clockwise around you can leave that out if you want slash need it to array clockwise around just remember that we're going to put this on a record player and record players tend to rotate clockwise so if you want your animation to play forward then we need to array our frames anti-clockwise then we move the anchor point and start duplicating this thing all the way around classic stuff let's undo those duplicates and get offsetting them in time now after we turn the freeze frame on for the layer here with layer time freeze frame then we can set an expression on the time remapping property this starts with the same base creating that i variable that will then be 0 and then 1 and then 2 and so on then we just multiply that by that frame duration in seconds of the animation comp because the time remap property is expressed in seconds and the frame duration is also expressed in seconds this will always return to us the next frame in that comp regardless of the frame rate of that comp so now we can duplicate the animation comp and each copy will be offset in rotation and offset by one frame compared to its neighbors now we can load in pretty much any animation into that animation comp set the frame duration and everything will update see what happens when we change this to be 16 frames long see how it updates then we just have to shut off the excess copies or duplicate more as needed with this framework in place this core of the piece we can focus on creating interesting animations let's begin with a simple loop this may be old news for many viewers but loops are a good choice for this kind of thing so it feels irresponsible not to cover how to make them in a loop we want the end of the animation to flow into the start it's a common mistake to make the first and last frames exactly the same frame but i would make two of the same image right next to each other around the circle in this loop in this very simple example of an eclipse-like movement we can see one circle moving over the other if both the first and last frames were this full circle that's not quite right so we push that last keyframe one frame off the end then the end the final frame flows into the first frame rather than being duplicates now here's another example using an image sequence as with any footage we can time remap it going layer time enable time remapping and then you can see the frames that make up this footage represented here in this property so if we want this to loop over the length of our piece we want to make sure that the last frame frame 16 happens on the last frame the end of this animation and see that this keyframe is the last frame because this is the frame just before we want to come back to frame number zero it's a little bit different but is accomplishing the same thing visually so when we watch this back this makes a simple loop if you're interested in more looping techniques let me know in the comments and we can get into more advanced looping solutions in other videos next up is spirals loops are nice but how about a nice trippy spooky spiral this takes that looping concept and takes us one step further and it starts with creating the the travel of the object if you can imagine a spiral being drawn by the movement of something moving outwards or inwards well the angle the vector that that's on is going to be changing over time so first here is that moving element this is a skull that appears to be rotating because it's an image sequence and we've time remapped that and then looped the time remap property using the basic loop out expression and then that skull is translating down the frame here and it's really taken its time much longer than the 40 frame loop it's meant to become and that's fine because this is just a building block that we need to remix we're also scaling it up as it goes so that skulls will be smaller in the middle of the spiral than they are on the outside now for the tricky part we're going to take that travel and bring it into that animation space that's going to be replicated around and then we duplicate it and offset it to make this thing starting this process from scratch would go like this we plop one down we bring the playhead to the end we command shift d to split off that last frame extend that original frame so you don't have a little gap here at the end then we're going to drag that layer back to the start now you can see that the start and end frames are the same but as we know from looping it should follow so we bump this by one frame and now it seems to follow repeat the process split extend move bump and watch the magic as a stream of skulls just drifts on by repeat as needed for more as you can see we have two such lines of skulls offset from each other to make this denser spiral let your earlier setup deal with the arraying and you've got this lovely spooky spiral now the last technique we're going to talk about is traveling but it's less about what happens in the animation itself and more about layering on multiple animations in this illusion you can see the middle space people the astro folk they seem to be spinning still whereas one row seems to rotate one way and the other row seems to rotate the other way i call this a travel the phase of the animation is off so that they can seem to spin around you know the whole disc is spinning around but these parts seem to spin in different speeds and directions so this seemingly stationary ring has 40 frames around but the others have more or fewer frames that's what causes the illusion of this travel just remember you'll need to combine multiple plates over each other if you're making many plates with corresponding unique animations be sure the expressions inside those plates are referencing the correct animations so plate 1 references animation 1 in the expression and is filled with instances of animation one plate two references animation two and so on if you keep it organized you're gonna be fine but we need to get physical if we wanna pull off this party trick in person to print this out we want to move our disk comp ultimately into somewhere like photoshop this is as simple as going up here to the menus selecting comp save frame as and then file and then we're going to choose photoshop down here in the render queue as the output module and best as the render settings then we open up the psd and go to image mode and change that color mode to cmyk that's the color space for print graphics as opposed to rgb mode for screen graphics if you notice anything strange happen to the colors you might need to adjust and tweak them here or change the profile that you're going to be changing to you may want to go into image size and adjust from 72 dots per inch to something nice and dense like 300 or 400 dots per inch so things will print much cleaner that means your massive 2000 pixel cop is actually only a few inches large when you're printed out but that's why we made it very large to begin with this is also a good time to add in little cutting marks around the circle or maybe a little hole in the middle and then finally just go up to print and print it out i'm going to recommend that you print on really hard cardstock a nice firm paper can really absorb some ink then you are ready to enjoy once you have this printed out cut out and it's rotating on the spindle of your choice in this case we're using a record player set to 45 revolutions per minute we can observe this effect now if things look blurry you likely need more light in the space so having strong sunlight it's going to help or just move the record player outside i guess this is weird and if you're having a more indoor basement vibe you can goose this effect with a little strobe light get yourself one of many free strobelite apps on your phone and set it to 30 hertz which is 30 flashes per second and the effect materializes filming strobelights is very difficult on camera so uh sorry if this footage looks weird and actually one of the easiest ways to see this thing is what we've been doing this whole time which is uh having a look at this through a camera because of how cameras work if you set your recording device to 30 frames per second uh then you'll see the effect on your screen much clearer than you may with your own eyes so if you're having trouble seeing your fenekie fenechistoscope really fan out then give those methods a try if you have any questions about any of the stuff we talked about here please get at me in the comments i try to answer them all when i'm able try to get you through this stuff i hope you've enjoyed talking about this weird little bit of motion design there's a little bit of animation history right here if you like what we do on this channel then please subscribe we got lots of great plans for some interesting content coming up i think you're gonna love it we usually talk a lot more about uh after effects and technology things so this is a little bit of a departure but i hope a welcome one if you end up making something cool with this stuff and i know you will i would love to see it please tweet it at me or tag me on instagram i'm at ec abrams on those places but that's it for me thank you so much for

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 79,928

Keywords: adobe after effects, after effects, adobe, after, effects, fx, mograph, motion graphics, motion, graphics, vfx, visual effects, instruction, tutorial, tut, how to, how, to, help, tips, tricks, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, vfx tutorial, phénakisticope, phenakistoscope, phenakistiscope, craft, circle, record, spin, flip book, zoetrope, irl, real life, spinning, disk, historical, classic

Id: zJqJL3DG908

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020