Paper gifs: homemade scanimation

 

Apparently Scanimation was invented by a Rufus Butler Seder and patented in 2006. Don’t worry, mine aren’t for sale.

Scanimation is a sort of special-case Moiré pattern. Moiré patterns are the interference between overlaid patterns with some transparency. You’ve probably noticed some crazy lines and shapes moving around when two mesh things (window screens etc) are overlapped. Scanimation is a combination of patterns engineered to display an animated sequence when moved across each other in a specific way. The concept is pretty simple – imagine dividing a sheet of paper into vertical columns and covering every other column with a black bar. You can then draw something in the visible spaces: frame 1. However, when you shift all of the bars over you’ll reveal a whole new set of blank columns! These can be used for frame 2. In this way, you can display two frames alternately by sliding a set of bars over the paper. What I’ve done above is make black bars which are four times wider than the space between them, allowing for a total of five frames.

This effect relies on your brain’s ability to fill in the missing parts of each frame (where the bars are) so if your gaps are too large it will eventually fail. You can how this works most easily in the gif I produced below (mspaint whoo) with red bars covering a black drawing. Even though the actual drawing has very little information for each frame, your brain fills in the missing pieces and you end up seeing a complete black bar shape for each one.

To make this in paper, I printed out a bunch of black bars and carefully cut out the spaces between them. I then laminated the resulting bars to form a durable transparent screen.

Packing tape works fine if you don’t have access to lamination.

 

I then used my monitor as a makeshift lightbox to see where the blank spaces were, and draw in the parts of each frame as necessary.

The final trick for playback is to fold a lip into the bottom of the illustrated sheet, perfectly perpendicular to the lines. The screen must also be properly squared. Then it can be slotted into the lip and slid back and forth slowly to reveal the animation! Voila, homemade gif.