Zoetrope

Well it’s a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures.


It consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. Beneath the slits, on the inner surface of the cylinder, is a band which has either individual frames from a video/film or images from a set of sequenced drawings or photographs.


As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures on the opposite side of the cylinder's interior. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, so that the user sees a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, the equivalent of a motion picture.


The advantage of a zoetrope is that you could easily create an animation without the use of any expensive software and its extremely cheap and simple, so all you require is a decent artistic skill.


The disadvantage is that you can only create short animations with a length of about 1 second that constantly repeats, you can't make long and meaningful ones.