Animation — in an ordinary book!
p2pnet news | Cool Stuff:- Animation in a book?
Not an e-book but a regular book with paper? And with no electronics?
That’s Scanimation.
“A few weeks ago I was shopping with my two-year-old daughter when we came across a brilliant little picture book – Gallop! A Scanimation Picture Book by Rufus Butler Seder,” says Aex Walker on sitepoint.
“Now to be honest,” he says, “the written content of Gallop! is fairly standard kids’ fare – ‘Can you see the horse gallop?’ is probably the literary highlight there. However, the little animation trick it employs is quite beautiful.”
There’s, “never before been a book like Gallop,” promises publisher Powell’s Books, going on >>>
Employing a patented new technology called Scanimation, each page is a marvel that brings animals, along with one shining star, to life with art that literally moves. It’s impossible not to flip the page, and flip it again, and again, and again.
A first book of motion for kids, it shows a horse in full gallop and a turtle swimming up the page. A dog runs, a cat springs, an eagle soars, and a butterfly flutters. Created by Rufus Butler Seder, an inventor, artist, and filmmaker fascinated by antique optical toys, Scanimation is a state-of-the-art six-phase animation process that combines the “persistence of vision” principle with a striped acetate overlay to give the illusion of movement.
It harkens back to the old magical days of the kinetoscope, and the effect is astonishing, like a Muybridge photo series springing into action – or, in terms kids can relate to, like a video without a screen. Complementing the art is a delightful rhyming text full of simple questions and fun, nonsense replies: Can you gallop like a horse? giddyup-a-loo Can you strut like a rooster? cock-a-doodle-doo
So how does it work?
Explains Walker (the horse ani is from his post) >>>
The effect works something like this:
1. Take a six-frame animation and slice it into wafer-thin vertical strips.
2. Throw away 5 out every 6 strips.
3. Re-assemble the remaining strips into a single composite image, containing parts of all six frames.
4. Cover this composite image with a black acetate sheet that contains thin, transparent lines running from top to bottom. This sheet obscures most of the image behind it, allowing only one frame to be seen at a time.
As the reader opens and closes the page, the illustration is pushed and pulled sideways behind the sheet. The result is a pretty nifty illusion of movement.
Very cool.
.
.Stumble It!
sitepoint – Warning: This Secret CSS Technique Will Surprise You!, June 25, 2008
Powell’s Books – Gallop!: A Scanimation Picture Book
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June 25th, 2008 at 10:39 am
I bet there is plenty of prior art to this patent.
June 25th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
The patent office hardly seems to consider prior art these days. If they did, how the hell would Microsoft get a patent on the “progress bar”?
June 26th, 2008 at 6:27 am
I’ve seen a museum filled with stuff like that (animation wheels, etc), so yeah, its not new, but I like the idea that people are still using this stuff.