Having finished with the dome zoetrope (see Part 3), I was keen to try out some other form that the technique might lend itself to. I can't really remember why I decided to try out hanging objects, but I guess it was an attempt to get away from just making marks on some sort of surface, and to build something more sculptural and truly three-dimentional to animate.
The main challenge for me for this one was to overcome the problems my massive hands present when trying to do anything even mildly fiddly :D This is the second attempt at getting the hanging 'frames' to work, the first one was far too messy and didn't really work properly...
The reason it didn't work the first time (and didn't quite work above) was because I hadn't accounted for the fact that the hanging objects would swing out due to the centrifugal force applied to them while spinning, and therefore go beyond the radius at which they would animate properly with the record player set up. I got the placement pretty much right in the next video though, so I was able to go on after that and create a more complicated version.
You can see the working out of the frame spacing and the mess of threads on the top of the disc in that video. This is the final piece I made with the hanging beads, a bit more complicated, I was pretty happy with this but probably could have filmed it better, I was still getting my head around what to actually do with the final pieces...
