Snowflake bicycle animation

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I must admit when I first saw this video (see below), I wondered if there was a new fad to put wacky designs on the spokes of your bike wheels. How wrong I was.

Those wacky designs are in fact paper cuts outs and the video below shows a series of snowflake animations that are caught when the bike wheels are turned.

The complex animations are only visible through a video camera but the technique used to produce the animation owes much to the concept of Zoetrope, which is device that produces the illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures.

Here the video is produced with a video camera with an electronic shutter which captures the paper cut outs turning on the wheel frame by frame.

What is revealed is some beautiful snowflake animations. To anyone viewing the wheel revolutions through their eyes will only see a blur.

The video was created to question whether it was possible to film animation in realtime and is part of a 3rd year dissertation project of London-based student Katy Beveridge.

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