Eadweard Muybridge has played a big part in my project and ideas. At the beginning of the project when researching animation I looked into Eadweard Muybridge’s work. I came across his designs for a phenakistoscope and got onto the idea of a zoetrope. Once I had this idea of a zoetrope, I didn’t take the time to look at other ideas in case this didn’t work.
So I was stuck when my zoetrope idea didn’t work. I looked back though some research I done and when looking at Eadweard Muybridge I remember an idea I had when I first saw his work. I came across stop motion, he was the first person to use stop motion animation. I liked the idea of using stop motion but I decided not to research this way of animation further, I can’t remember the reason why however I wish I did.
Seen as I have worked a rather long time on my zoetrope idea, I am quite away though this project and close to my deadline. So I have got straight onto researching around stop motion.

Stop motion is an animation technique to give an impression of physical movement in a series of photos. The object that is being photographed moves slightly in-between each photo frame, therefore giving the photos a continuous sequence when played frame by frame.

I have been researching around stop motion and artists that work in this way. When looking through the book ‘Vitamin D’ I came across the artist Robin Rhode. He uses stop motion in his work and the work I saw in this book links to how I should be working.
The piece work I have been looking at is ‘He Got Game’ by Robin Rhode. I looked at this for inspiration because it’s easily linkable to my work. As this work is about sports and I’m going to link my work to the cultural Olympiad I found it helpful.
The piece I’m looking at is series of photos of a man flipping and slam dunking a basketball into a hoop. The background of the photos have been drawn on the floor with chalk and with each photo taken a man moves across the floor, giving the impression of movement when all images are played in a series. I like the way these pictures look and the unique style it has, so I have choose to produce my outcome in this way.

This is Robin Rhodes ‘He Got Game’ that I have taken inspiration from.


I now have the way I want to work I just need an idea for my designs. I have researched Olympic sports looking for a suitable sport to use for my design. I have been thinking of sports that will be easy to work with and looks good in this style of work. Here are some example I have come up with up,
- Diving
- Weight lifting
- Archery
- Swimming
- Table tennis
These are a few sport ideas I have been looking at from the long list of Olympic sports there are. I wanted to keep to the same style as Robin Rhode, basically I want to keep the background the same a just move one element of the work. When looking for an I idea the main thing I was thinking about was, if I could keep the background in each photo the same. I have choose a few ideas I liked the best and made them into a stop motion design, this is to see what design looks best and to see if I can actually work in this way.

Here are the outcomes of my experiments using stop motion on some of my ideas.




After seeing how my experiments have turn out, I am happy with the way my designs look. The three designs I produced were the three favourites I had, so I will be choosing one of them as my finial piece. I think the making of them where easy as well, the only thing is having patients to do it.

I started of by simply laying a long row of plain paper down to use as my background. Then I choose the sport I wanted to use for example diving, so with diving I drew a simply outline of what I thought a diving board would look like. I used an artist mannequin to represent a human and moved it as I thought someone diving would move. When looking at how people actually dive the board moves up and down, so I have added this in by simply rubbing out the diving board and re-drawing it up or down. Each time I moved the mannequin I would take a photo, I ended up with 19 photos and when played as a series of images it gives the impression of moving.

After looking at my experiment and showing others to get feedback, I think the best idea to use for my final outcome is the diving design.