VISUAL NEWS: Forget all the GIF animations you’re addicted to, and the conventional computer ones too. This wild new music video for the Japanese band SOUR’s single Life Is Music uses rotating CDs to bring a vintage style of animation to the modern day.

A phenakistoscope was a nineteenth-century animation technique that used still images marked radially around a disk. When spun and viewed through a small slit, the image was visually prevented from blurring and created the illusion of movement. Designers Masashi Kawamura (of creative agency PARTY) and Kota Iguchi (of design studio Tymote) have updated the phenakistoscope technique, using animations precisely synched to both the shutter speed of their camera and the beat of the song.

“The idea came from the lyrics,” Kawamura told Dezeen. “The song is about life and the way it cycles like the rhythm of music. That made me think of using CDs as the surface to create animations on.”

“The slits on a phenakistoscope simulate flashes of light and create a kind of strobe effect called persistence of vision,” Kawamura explained. “In our case, we used the frame rate of the camera to recreate this effect without the slits. We shot the film at 15 fps and filmed 17 frame animations to synchronize with the 105 BPM of the song.”

Read more at the Visual News.

Animation created using spinning CDs…

And the making of…

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Here’s a wonderful zoetrope animation using paper discs mounted on bicycle wheels by Katy Beveridge as part of her 3rd year dissertation project at CSM in London. Beveridge mentions being partially influenced by the technique of Tim Wheatley who has also explored the ideas of bicycle-wheel animation. Read more at This is Colossal.

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Oscillate is a thesis animation made by Daniel Sierra for his MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. While essentially an experiment in animation, Sierra says the project was an attempt “to visualize waveform patterns that evolve from the fundamental sine wave to more complex patterns, creating a mesmerizing audio-visual experience in which sight and sound work in unison.” Make sure you view it full-screen, headphones on, you know the drill. I could have watched this continue for twice as long. Hope he got an ‘A’. Read more at This is Colossal.

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