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Zoetrope Animation Ideas
Transformer
This is an idea I had because of a previous personal project I did - a transforming VW Beetle. If I were to go ahead with this idea, I would make the transformer in the style of the 1980s G1 Transformers as the shapes are a lot simpler.
Pros
Nailing the animation is a really fun challenge
Very complex and a lot of moving parts - great way to show off my skills
Very ambitious idea for a zoetrope - I've never seen a zoetrope quite as complex as this
Cons
Complex models - makes 3D printing and painting very difficult and tedious
A lot to fit into what's got to be about an 18-24 frame animation
Unsure how to make the animation loop
Star Wars Lightsaber Fight
This idea came around from looking at lightboxes and seeing a Star Wars themed one. I then wondered if I'd be able to make a lightsaber fight into a zoetrope animation
Pros
Easy to loop the animation
Good challenge to make the animation look 'correct'
Cons
Don't have loads of experience with making characters and I've always found armatures and weight painting a problem
Character design takes a lot of time - getting the proportions right as well as clothing for the character
Would be difficult to paint the small details - eyes, hair etc
Development Ideas
One character who is fighting does a backflip (animation restarts) and then starts fighting the other character
Projection Mapping Zoetrope
I just had this idea when I was thinking about the Star Wars zoetrope idea and how I might be able to make the lightsabers appear as if they were really turned on. I then thought about just playing a video onto the zoetrope and I then thought about projection mapping a video of the entire animation onto it, that way I wouldn't have to worry about colouring the individual models as the projection of the video would take care of that - I would just have to make the materials in blender.
I can probably trace the roots of this idea back to a video I saw while researching for my unit 12 research project, and I came across something called a light zoetrope. Each 3D printed part shows a 2D character, and when a light is shone at it, you can see the outline of that character. I've provided some links to some examples below.
Pros
Means I don't have to paint the models as the video projection would provide the colour
A realistic but still ambitious project, again showing off my skills
Something unique - I doubt anyone really has ever thought of doing something like this
Cons
Don't have much experience at all with projection mapping
Might be too much work to do in the timeframe given
Mario Jumping in a Green Tube
The idea for this is to have to tubes - Mario stood on top of one, with another floating above him. He jumps into the bottom tube and then falls from the top one and lands back on top of the bottom tube, creating a loop. I've attached an image of a sketch below to show you what I'm thinking.
Pros
Would appeal to a large audience - Mario is something that appeals to younger kids but is also nostalgic for an older audience
A fun challenge with rigging and character design and animation, plus there are likely lots of references I can use online which would make it a lot easier
Slightly different to other zoetropes as this one would have to have a 'roof' on the zoetrope - makes it stand out more from others
Cons
Not sure how I would develop it if I end up having more time at the end of the project - not sure how I could introduce animation multiplexing
Adding colours could be a pain
Mario Kart Race
I got this idea from the other Mario idea. The idea is to have a Mario Kart race that consists of 2 karts racing each other. The animation could be one kart overtakes the other, and then the other kart overtakes the other again.
Another idea I have had is again to have 2 karts racing each other, but one of them throws a green shell to the kart in front. That kart then spins and falls behind the other kart before regaining control, and so the animation restarts creating the loop.
Pros
Again, would appeal to a large audience
Less character animation needed compared to the other Mario idea
Easy to develop - could add more to the animation e.g. animation multiplexing
Cons
Again, adding colours could be a pain
Lot of animation to do in terms of weight painting and character movement (more on this below)
My skills in simple modelling in blender are absolutely fine and modelling something like a go-kart from Mario Kart doesn't bother me at all. However sculpting a character is already a little bit intimidating, and then having to weight paint it so that it can be animated is a lot more intimidating. The problem is I would have to animate the character in the kart throwing a green shell, then the character in the other kart throwing their hands up after being hit with the green shell and potentially the character in the first kart throwing his fist up as a celebration. I've added a video below to show this animation in the Mario Kart game.
2025-03-18 10-13-51.mp4How To Train Your Dragon
The idea for this is to have a simple animation of the main character - toothless - flying through the air, gently flapping his wings. I got this idea after I 3D printed a file that someone else had made of toothless.
Pros
More experience with character design, plus there'd probably loads of reference images which makes the modelling process a lot easier
As the animation would be fairly simple I could also do some environment design - clouds, mountains etc
Colours are pretty simply, just green for the eyes and a bit of red and white for the tail
Could later experiment with animation multiplexing
Cons
I don't feel massively confident with modelling and especially sculpting an entire dragon - a lot to do, very complex and if it goes wrong I won't have loads of time to change it
Development Ideas
Have Hiccup (his owner) riding toothless on his back, and he gets blown off backwards by the wind and lands on the dragon that's behind (animation restarts)
Eljah VS The Prophets of Baal
I'm a Christian, and as with any college project I'm always wondering if I could make the brief fit something Biblical. One idea I've had is to make a short animation of the account of Elijah vs the prophets of Baal, which can be read in 1 Kings chapter 18. The story goes that Israel were serving a false god called Baal, and the prophet Elijah wanted to put an end to it. So, he got the 450 prophets of Baal and told them to prepare a bull, and the prophets of Baal would call upon Baal to set their bull on fire. Elijah would do the same. The God who answers by fire, He is God. To no surprise, the prophets of Baal's bull wasn't set on fire, however when Elijah called on his God, despite having drenched the bull with water, "the fire of the LORD fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood and the stones and the dust, and it licked up the water that was in the trench."
My idea is to animate fire coming down from heaven and consuming the bull and then the fire extinguishing to loop the animation.
Pros
More simple animation - only one moving part to start off with
Easy to develop - could later experiment with animation multiplexing
Centred around my beliefs - means I can focus on the most important things in my life as well as college at the same time
Preaching opportunity
Cons
The colours could be hard to get right on the fire - if I had a gradient going from red to orange to yellow for example. However there could be ways around this - the fire starts off as a solid red colour and eventually fades to yellow.
Development Ideas
When the fire hits the altar a man standing by the altar gets blown backwards, before standing back up next to a different altar (animation restarts) before getting blown backwards again.
A Big Problem
Colours. The main issue I've already got is how on earth I'm going to add colours to my project - as fun as it is painting models that I've 3D printed, I'm definitely not good enough to achieve the quality I want in this project. However I have thought of one or two ways I can still make it look aesthetically pleasing while still only having one colour.
Dry Brushing
One option I've got is a technique called dry brushing. The way you 'dry brush' is you get a tiny amount of paint on the brush, then wipe the brush on a cloth so that almost all the paint is gone. Then you gently brush the model so that a tiny amount of paint is deposited on the model. This method is a great way to exaggerate details as well as darkening shadows and lightening highlights. I've added a video below to show the effect of dry brushing.
2025-03-18 10-13-51_1.mp4Bronze Effect
This is something I came across while talking to my tutor about his neighbour's business, modelling and painting realistic models of characters from the horror genre. You can see from the image on the right that there's no colour painting involved, yet it's a lot more interesting to look at because of the bronze effect which gives the model a lot more shape and definition (similar to the effect given by dry brushing).
Washing
Washing is a painting technique that uses diluted paint that flows into recesses and crevices, using model's natural shape to create final effect. There are paints specially designed as washes, however you can also achieve the same effect by diluting regular paints with water. There are a few washing techniques that follow the same principles;
Pre-Washing
Washing
Controlled Washing
Lining
From what I can tell by watching a couple of videos (which I linked at the bottom) the way you 'wash' a model is that you, instead of using normal paints, you use diluted paints or a wash paint that's the same colour as the normal paints you would've used (as shown on the right, which hopefully helps that makes sense). There's also another option - you paint the model with normal paints in it's normal colours and then, once that is completed, add a black wash over the whole of the model to create shadows. As I mentioned earlier I've linked some videos down below to show the effects of this techinque.
Just as a quick sidenote, it's also very possible that I could double this up with dry brushing as well - I could either dry brush the model and then add a black wash, or I could start off by washing the model and then dry brushing it afterwards.
Solid Colour
Something else I thought I could do is just simply paint a character or subject one solid colour. I was watching the videos linked below about colour theory, and it got me thinking about how I may use colours in my zoetrope. Sure there won't be loads of detail in the actual colouring of the characters, but I could potentially tell 'more story' just by using certain colours for a character depending on the colour they are painted. Again, I could use either dry brushing or washing (or both) combined with this technique as well.
Colour Theory
Just building on the idea of a solid colour, I thought it would be worth having a look into colour theory too. Different colours can make an audience feel a different way. For example, red is always used to show anger or love, deep passion. Below I've provided some screenshots from a video (which I've also linked) showing the different colours and what emotion they tend to convey.
Warmer colours tend to be more happy, while cooler colours feel more serious and calm. The point of this image is that you can get any colour and either make it warmer to convey a certain emotion or feeling, or you can make it cooler to achieve the opposite.
Mario Kart Idea Development
I've chosen to go with the Mario Kart idea which I discussed earlier. I'm personally quite a big fan of Mario and really enjoy playing the Mario Kart games on the Nintendo Switch, so this is something that will spur me on and give me motivation to complete this project.
Character Design
Because this is FMP, I don't just want to take Mario and slap him on a zoetrope and call it done, because it's not very original. Instead I'll try to make it more unique to me and more personal, something that stands out.
Although the animation will only last a second or so, it is still a short story. There are many ways to tell a story - character design, facial expressions, animation and colour. Because I will have 2 characters - one throwing a shell and the other being hit by the shell - I want to make a distinction between the two. Something I've noticed usually with evil characters in films is that they have jagged, quite harsh edges, whereas the 'good guys' will be more soft and round. Evil characters tend to make use of darker clothing as well as predominantly red features, whereas good characters have lighter clothing and have predominantly blue or green features. One example I can think of is the characters in the Star Wars films.
You can clearly see from the darker colours and the jagged edges on animated character's beards or horns on the head, they're easily identifiable as evil characters.
Whereas the good characters have much lighter clothing, softer edges and blue, green, purple and yellow features.
Because of the reasons above, I'm currently thinking of having the evil character in my animation (the one throwing the shell) in a more low poly art style, as well as in a darker colour. I've added an image below of what my evil character could look like. Whether the character ends up being Mario or a different character from the franchise, I still love this art style below.
I really like how you can see the outlines of individual squares on the model, but the squares themselves aren't completely flat - they still provide 'roundness' to the character. I'm not entirely sure how I would go about achieving this effect in 3D modelling, so it could be a good challenge for me.
I loaded the above image into photoshop and changed the colour of the character to see what it could look like. I've obviously chosen red and black as they are the main colours that evil characters are dressed in.
Vehicle Design
There are a range of karts available in the Mario Kart games, and I need to choose one that will still be obviously from Mario Kart, but also easy to 3D print.
The obvious choice would be the standard kart from the latest Mario Kart game, Mario Kart 8. In the game you are also able to drive on the side of walls and even upside down in some cases, which is why the wheels in this image are sideways. Looking at the wheels in this direction gave me a thought though - I could 3D print my karts with the wheels sideways. If I can get them to be touching the kart then there would be no need for supports on the 3D print in that region, I also wouldn't need to print the wheels separately and then attach them later. If I 3D print my wheels sideways attached to the kart, it will make my life a lot easier, save a lot of time in both designing the kart in software as well as assembly, and it will arguably look cooler anyway.
When the karts in the game have their wheels sideways, they hover above the circuit, so I would have to make my karts hover too. However this would be really easy - I could place a small stick or mount underneath the kart to prop it up a bit. This wouldn't be visible unless you were really trying to look for it, another positive to having sideways wheels.
Because this is a much newer looking kart, it gives 'mean' vibes. I'm not too sure how to describe it, but if you've ever watched Cars 3, this standard Kart is Jackson Storm compared to Lightning McQueen - the new guy is really fast, but you have respect for the older racer because of his past success and feel bad for him. Because of this, I think that this kart would be good for the evil character to drive - the one throwing the shell at the victim. I also think it would be good to have the kart in black (linking back to my earlier colour theory research) to make it more obvious that this character is the villain in this short story - a red character driving a black kart.
Another kart I was thinking of using was the Pipe Frame Kart. I really like the design of this kart, it's still easily recognisable as something from the Mario Kart games, but I wouldn't choose this model because of the small details. There are a lot of very thin pipes which would be difficult to 3D print, would also require a lot of supports (and with that comes the risk of snaping the pipes when removing the supports) and I also can't guarantee that the model would be very sturdy, and could potentially snap.
Just for reference, the things highlighted in orange are the supports, and they give a platform for the 3D printer to print on top of, otherwise it would be trying to extrude filament in mid-air.
This particular kart is called the Quick B Dasher. I like it's retro F1 throwback style look, and I feel like it could catch the eye of classic racing enthusiasts too, while the big M on the front still keeps it easily recognisable as something from Mario Kart. If I were to 3D print this kart, I would again likely choose to have the wheels sideways just because it makes the printing process a bit easier and means there wouldn't have to be as many, if any supports.
Continuing my Cars 3 analogy from earlier, this car is the Lightning McQueen to the standard kart. Because it's older, you have more respect for it and care for it more because you're aware that you have to be very delicate with it. I think that's a good basis for this car to be the car driven by the victim in my animation - the character that gets spun round. I think I will keep this kart white - it is a pure and innocent colour.
I've also added this reference image just so I can see what this kart looks like with sideways wheels.
Animation
Because of the way zoetropes work, it will appear as if there are like 32 karts in the race because of the amount of 3D models of individual frames. This means that I have 2 options with where the character throws the shell. I've added a simple sketch I did of the 2 possibilites I've got at the moment.
Idea 1 is on the left and idea 2 on the right. 1.1 just means that that is the first thing that happens in the idea 1 animation, and 1.2 means it's the second thing that happens in the idea 1 animation.
So in idea 1, the red kart throws a shell to the blue kart directly in front, and then the blue kart would spin round and fall into the place where the red kart was. There's also a dotted arrow at the bottom of the image - that's there to show that because of the way this animation would work, the kart that throws a shell would also get hit with a shell from behind.
In idea 2 the red kart throws a shell to the blue kart in front and to the right. The blue kart then spins out and falls into the empty space behind.
The issue with idea 1 is that there's no distinction between good and evil - the evil character would throw a shell to the innocent victim in front, but then the evil character becomes the victim when it is hit by a shell from behind. So that would make choosing a colour for that character very frustrating.
The beauty of idea 2 is that that isn't a problem - there's a clear enemy, and a clear victim, which makes choosing the colours for the characters very easy. Because of this reason, I'm leaning more towards idea 2 at the moment.
Thinking more about the animation of this idea - as I'm going to have my kart wheels sideways so that the kart is hovering, I could potentially have the kart 'swinging' in mid-air. I've provided a very very rough idea of what this could look like.
Mario Kart Rough Animation Test 10001-0100.mkvShould this idea not work, a backup I could do is to have 2 karts racing, and they bump into each other but carry on driving forward. It's not as fun or technical or challenging as having the kart spin around, however if I can't figure that out at least I have a backup idea. I think the real challenge of this project is just getting the zoetrope to work and getting all the models painting and arranged on the platform.
Scene Design
I've been thinking a little bit about creating some assets to go in the background of the zoetrope too. Because Mario is something that appeals to both older and younger audiences, I want there to be some nostalgic aspects of the background. One idea I've had is to add a pixelated 8-bit style green pipe in the background like you had in the old Super Mario Bros game (only difference being my green pipe would be in 3d, not 2d).
Viewing the Animation
Something I thought of while writing this up is how the animation is going to be viewed. I talked in the research section of this google sites about the different methods used to achieve something called the strobe effect, which is absolutely essential to my project. The problem I've got is that at the moments I'm thinking of using mirrors to achieve the strobe effect. What mirrors do is they show only the current frame of the animation (see video below) whereas with the idea 2 animation, the red kart would be throwing to the frame in front, meaning that using the mirrors would show only the current frame and the kart throwing the shell, but not showing the kart that gets hit by that shell.
An easy way around this though is to simply make the mirrors bigger - rather than having them wide enough to show only one frame at a time, I could make them wide enough to show 2 frames at a time. That way I still don't have to use any technology to achieve the strobe effect, the animation is still well lit and you'll be able to see both the kart throwing the shell and the kart that gets git by the shell.
Another problem I noticed though is that you'd only be able to watch this animation once - after that, the kart that gets hit by the shell would fall out of frame after just 2 loops, and by the second loop you wouldn't even be able to see the kart that threw the shell at it. Also half the fun of this Mario Kart idea was watching the same kart fall back a place again and again and again. If I use the mirrors, I'm just now realising that that wouldn't be possible. I might have to think about other ways to achieve the strobe effect. The only other method I could think of that could work would be the camera option - pointing a camera at the zoetrope and watching the animation through that. I did a test on my phone using a camera app that allowed me to change the shutter speed. I then pointed the camera at the animation toys I have at college and these are the results;
ScreenRecording_04-01-2025 11-58-33_1.mp4ScreenRecording_04-01-2025 11-59-14_1.mp4You can see how, for a brief moment, the frame rate and the rate at which the animation toy is spinning match and you can watch the animation. Of course when I have my zoetrope finalised I'll have a way to make it spin at a constant rate, so I don't have to worry about that.
Inspiration
https://youtu.be/xc3rwxSmegM?si=kka-CS_qKJV5SVnQ - 3D Mario zoetrope
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-1edkQaGg9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqEVTfGqo8M - 2D Light zoetrope
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