Saturday, November 08, 2008

3D Animation

[Earlier today, I received a stern talking-to from Red Vera about the posting frequency here at David Scrimshaw's Blog. I am telling you this so that if you were thinking you should bring the matter up with me, it has been covered and you can use your time and energy instead to write a letter to one of your elected representatives about an issue that matters to you.]

I am happy to report that the first prototype of my latest project is exactly the freaky success I had hoped it would be.

Back in the spring I bought a strobe light kit at Active Surplus in Toronto. Two weeks ago, I finally soldered it together. Surprisingly, at least surprisingly to me, it worked. Over the next few days I did the following:

  1. Hung the strobe light inside the stereo cupboard above the working, but never used, turntable.
  2. Cut out a 12" circle of cardboard from a pizza box and cut a little hole in the middle.
  3. Made 8 little purple cylinders from Fun Foam microbead crafting compound [purchased at a dollar store, made in China and almost certainly poisonous, toxic or hallucinogenic.]
  4. Put the purple cylinders on the edge of the cardboard circle so that they are equal distances from each other.
  5. Attached yellow Fun Foam to each cylinder in a slightly different way for each one.
  6. Turned on the turntable at 45rpm.
  7. Turned off the lights in the room.
  8. Turned on the strobe light.
  9. Adjusted the strobe light until it flashed 360 times per minute (360=8 x 45).
  10. Freaked out.

I got this idea from Make who got the idea from Instructables a long time ago.

If you are viewing this in IE, try left-clicking the image and selecting "properties". This makes the animation work properly on my computer. Don't know why.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well thank you for the new posting. That's a dandy one. You've outdone yourself.
redvera

Anonymous said...

you are hilarious.
and you shop at active surplus?

Anonymous said...

I think you should add Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on the turntable for this one.

David Scrimshaw said...

Red Vera, thank you.

Anonymous, are you sure "hilarious" is the word you meant? and not "ingenious". I make a point of shopping at Active Surplus whenever I am in Toronto. Don't you?

Other Dave, that is an excellent idea. I just have to modify the tone arm so that it doesn't knock all the foam pieces off the record.

And I have to find Dark Side of the Moon on 45.

Anonymous said...

I had a seizure but it was totally worth it.

Anonymous said...

Reminds me of a Styx song... what was it??? Oh yeah:

" Too much time on my hands, its ticking away with my sanity"

Love the purple/yellow colour scheme, and the markings on the side of those turntables were just made for strobe lights!

Great work.