I am a third-­year student majoring in screen arts and cultures as well as an officer of the Michigan Animation Club. Essentially, my project is about making an animation apparatus that is more friendly than intimidating—­that is, something anyone with an interest in how drawings come to life can pick up and put down without first having to understand the various eccentricities of an expensive animation software or to acquire the intense patience of the traditional animation process. Cinema evolved out of fun and simple animation devices like the phenakistoscope, and I would like to rekindle such elementary illusions using the convenience and authorial capacity of modern tech.

My progress on this project has been very rewarding, and I am happy to share its story from the beginning.

As a newly hired intern in September, I had no idea for such a project until I met a newly hired intern, Kevin, a student in Stamps. He recommended we get to know each other by drawing a figure back and forth on paper: I’d make one drawing, and he’d make the next. The special bit was that the figures were to be drawn in sequence, side by side, as if each drawing were a new frame in an animation. When I asked him where he learned to do this, he said he came up with this activity himself.

Kevin’s activity was a success, and we had a lot of fun. What an interesting thing to do, drawing things in proximity as if they progressed through time. Days later, it prompted me to ask myself, What if there was a way to treat these adjacent drawings as if they were frames in an animation and then project them in sequence, producing an animation, by means of some program? I told Kevin, and just like that, I had my project idea, epiphanized through friendship and collaboration.

An Early Phenakistoscope

Image from Wikipedia

I got to drawing out what the rig would look like and what it would do. There would be a tic-­tac-­toe-­esque grid of paper in which someone would draw; a fixed camera, aiming at the grid, which would photograph the whole grid at once; and a computer that would make the magic happen by divvying up the separate quadrants into frames and stacking them into a .gif animation file, the type you can place in an e-mail or a message to a friend. Aside from failing Engineering 101 freshman year, I had no experience with coding, so I knew it would be a while until I would get what I was aiming for.

Explaining to my manager that I thought I was a little in over my head regarding computers, she led me to some resources that would prove helpful in getting hip to coding again (or for the first time). My first weeks in the Design Lab were spent completing amusing projects out of the lab’s interactive Arduino Starter Kit with another intern, John, interested in learning to code. The projects were simple, but they provided a superb gateway to the interface. Now, before I would start my own project, I would need to choose and understand the most appropriate coding software, an open source program called Processing, for what I wanted to do, a venture I could not have made were it not for the tech-­savvy fellow interns in the lab; they could help point me in the right direction or be confused with me. Thank you, Duncan, Isaac, and Daniel!

Flashing forward a few months, my grid of paper had been replaced with a dry-­erase board. This is because the markers use such broad strokes, and it is so much easier to edit drawings with a finger or cloth than a pencil’s fine eraser; I wanted to make it more simplistic. My coding is by no means exemplary nowadays, but I managed to cobble together a program in Processing that has achieved all those things I wanted previously plus a few more.

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My technical goal was to make it to a 3 × 3 grid, but I had made it all the way to a 4 × 4 and now onto a 5 × 5. The only problem with this advancement is the unavoidable loss of image quality as each quadrant gets smaller. To remedy this fuzziness, my program now takes the shrunken image, blows it up to high definition, and then contrasts the image into black pixels and white pixels, sharpening the output animation, which is automated into a .gif file all with a press of the button! I will be trying to fit some colors into this limited spectrum quite soon.

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The biggest steps left in my project, dubbed “Noughts and Crosses,” as my project somewhat resembles a tic-­tac-­toe board, relate to finding a decent way to set it up. Before, I would have to point the camera at a board, trying my best not to budge it as I drew the grid out with a marker and ruler. Next, I would try to tape a permanent grid onto a whiteboard, matching it over a digital pink grid superimposed on the camera feed in Processing.

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Still, not ideal, and the smallest jostle is enough to unsync the frames. One thing I could do would be to find a permanent spot to fasten the camera. That would create a definite station for the rig. The other idea, given to me by a student working in the design lab (I believe her name was Fay), was to use lasers! This would make for a more mobile device. For my 5 × 5 grid, if thirty-­six dots were projected wherever the camera was pointed, the grid would match wherever the camera is, automatically moving with it. Just take the dots as the vertices of the boxes.

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The next steps involve testing out diodes and laser pointers in a smaller array. Wading through the screen one frame at a time, I am very proud of my progress on this project and very grateful to all the wonderful people around me in the Duderstadt Center.