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World’s oldest animation found
What’s the earliest animation?
Zoetrope? No-a-trope.
Try 5,200-plus years ago in Persia:
Blew my mind.
Note the lack of intra-frame compression:-) -
4 Replies
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They only think its the oldest because they haven’t found the earlier animations by the same artist and his cousin yet.
🙂
(Pretty cool!)Del
fire*, smoke*, photoshopCS3
Charlotte Public Television
del underscore edits at wtvi dot org -
So I’m pictuting how a potter’s wheel ca be used like a zoetrope, and it seems to be missing some kind of occluder or shutter slits like the zoetrope band uses. Might make a good doco project for Myhtbusters, figuring out how an ancient Persian moviemaker would actually play this animation back properly. I guess the easiest thing to do would be to train yourself to blink rapidly as the bowl turned. Other mechanisms tend quickly to get too mechanically complicated, but I could imagine a slotted or portholed disk at 90 degrees, turning on and driven by the edge of the potter’s wheel, could be made with then-existing technology out of wood or glass or clay or thin beaten metal. Look thru that and you get a shutter effect on the jumping goat. Or a vertical shaft spinning an occluder in front of the bowl would conceal and reveal it, belt-driven from that same potter wheel. Or a duplicate wheel rubbing against it, the pot on that wheel would just be slots and posts like a cage, you’d look thru that to the bowl behind to get the effect.
Tody’s news had another ancient Av tech story in it: an audio recording system that precedes Edison’s by a wide margin, used a diaphragm-driven stylus to trace an audio waveform onto a paper strip coated and blackened with lamp smoke (early carbon paper). This was meant to visualize sound for scientific analysis but they had no way to play it back, so it was only half a system, really. Some audio experts recently found a high quality photo of one of these strips and reconstituted the wave form. Heard a sample online today, it is horrible quality but you CAN make out the French woman’s voice and even some of the words.
What I read in comments about this story was that Lincoln may have had his voice recorded by this French device while it was on a tour. If that recording of Lincoln’s actual voice waveform could be recovered and reconstituted, it would be a priceless artifact, a true “National Treasure”. Maybe the next sequel to the movie could be that.
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I wonder what the render time on that animation was….Tee hee hee…
-Nicholas Bierzonski
Editor/DVD Author/Java Boy
http://www.finalfocusvideo.com -
Thanks for the post. Being half-Iranian, finding out about this kind of makes me think that through my ghetto animations I’m somehow ‘getting back to my roots.’
Any information where I can see the actual video, though?
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