Curio: Handmade Movies
Tuesday, March 10, 2015 at 12:00PM 
Alexa here with your weekly arts and crafts. In a sort of continuation of last week's episode, here's an odd little obsession I've had brewing lately: making your own paper movie machines. I've always been into early cinema (TCM Silent Sundays were a must until my cable bundle dropped TCM) and reading up on the Lumiere brothers and all the strange optical toys that preceded the advent of photographic moving pictures. (Yes, Hugo was a thrill in this regard.) I went as far as to buy this book on etsy, which has very interesting instructions for making your own thaumatropes, kinematoscopes, rolloscopes and lots of other tropes and scopes I had no idea existed.
At one point I had a ridiculously analog notion to make strips from screencaps of my favorite films so I could watch them with my daughter through a zoetrope, until I realized this would totally make me a Portlandia punchline. I promise, I have no other steampunk leanings.
Various optical toys that replicate the wonder of the earliest moving pictures are being made by many, and antique machines are a collectors item. Flipbooks, praxinascopes and thaumatropes are after the jump.
Illustrators are also doing flipbook tributes to their favorite movies, which if I had the skill I'd totally be doing myself, nerd that I am. Now if someone would make Hitchcock strips to watch though a paper zoetrope I'd be as happy as a little kid with candy...
Zoetrope toy available here.
Praxinoscope toy available on ebay.
Alice in Wonderland thaumatrope available at this etsy shop.
Phenakistoscope toy available here.
Curio, silent films
Reader Comments (2)
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