Playboy's Photo Flicks

For a Few Minutes, just put your records away, you vinyl junkies. If you've got a pair of scissors, a roll of cellophane tape and a turntable that will move at 78 rpm, you're ready to start building your own zoetrope (illustrated above). So what's a zoetrope? It's what Martin Scorsese would be using if it were not for Eastman Kodak, that's what. Basically, it's a slotted cylinder lined with little pictures showing different stages of an action. See those little picture strips at the right? When you rotate them inside a slotted cylinder, the little pictures appear to be a single picture of something in motion. Voilà ! Animation. Everyone wants to make movies nowadays, right? So here's a low-budget home production for you. We've updated the zoetrope with a little modern technology and socially redeeming art. Just cut out, assemble and place it on your Garrard. For full assembly instructions and diagrams, turn to page 194.

Produced by Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson

Instructions for Assembling your Zoetrope

1. Fold the opposite page (the heavy black paper with the slits in it) along the perforation near the fold in the magazine. Tear the page out along the perforation. With scissors, cut the page in half lengthwise along the white line. Now you should have two pieces like the ones above.

2. Aligning the first slit of one piece with the first slit of the other (as shown above), tape the two pieces together at both ends to form a cylinder. Center the new object on your turntable. Now you're ready to work on the movie strips.

3. Find the movie strips with Annie Fanny on one side and the flasher on the other (pages 193--194). Cut out the strips along the heavy black and white lines. Overlap the last full images (they're marked with a plus sign) and tape the strip in place. Do not make a cylinder. You'll want to flip back and forth between Annie and the flasher, we assure you. Do the same thing with the Femlin/Steve Martin strips on pages 197--198.

4. Now you're ready for the show--movies without movie lights. Place one of the picture strips inside the cylinder, flush with the turntable, bending the strip to conform to the cylinder's curve. Now position yourself in front of your movie cylinder. Set your speed control at 78 rpm and let the turntable spin. Look through the slits and see Annie Fanny jog, the flasher flash, the Femlin kick and Steve Martin get small. Ready? Go!

We don't want to push the panic button, but it seems once you start fooling around with the immutable laws of physics and the secrets of the universe, strange things start to happen. You saw The Time Machine? From the days when Icarus crashed to the sea in a molten heap (hence the term molting), man has investigated with trepidation the hoary wonders of science. The same holds true for man's attempts at animation. It wasn't all Mickey Mouse, you know. In the 16th Century, long before 70-millimeter film and Sensurround, tinkers tried to make images jump with little flip books or paper rolls that showed a person dancing when they were rapidly flipped or unrolled. Anyone caught with such entertainments was accused of deviltry and worshiping graven images and was punished accordingly. It's no wonder animation didn't take off until the early 19th Century, when a guy named Roget delved into persistence of vision, known as the stroboscopic effect. All of that refers to the process wherein the brain retains an image of an object for a fraction of a second after the object is gone: The vision persist, Another guy, named Plateau, produced a simple animation device--but, unfortunately, became partially blind while testing his theories. He stared at the sun for 20 seconds; his vision did not persist. We told you this wasn't kid's stuff. Baron Franz von Uchatius, an Austro-Hungarian artillery officer, concocted a sophisticated contraption for animation involving projection. Gleefully, he sold the patent to Ludwig Döbler, who amassed great wealth and bought a castle. Uchatius tried to get recognition for his work but concluded his failure with suicide. A messy business, no? A fellow in France conjured up images of dead French Revolutionary heroes. When he tried to bring back Louis XVI, French authorities shut him down. In 1834, when Englishman William Horner came up with a device similar to ours in concept, Britons dubbed it "the wheel of the Devil." Typically, the French later named a similar device the zoetrope, or "wheel of life." The French and English zoetropes required a hand crank and produced somewhat jumpy animations. Ours has been streamlined for use on a modern record turntable and includes more frames than the traditional ten, giving smoother action. Traveling at 78 rpm, our strips are nearly as smooth as real movies, which pass before your eyes at 24 frames per second. By the way, the dark side of animation tried to smother our project, too. Cartoonist Jay Lynch and Playboy Associate Art Director Skip Williamson, boy wonders behind the scenes, muddled through countless technical snafus, gauging just the right amount of distortion to make the image work realistically. Just when the work seemed to be on the right track, Lynch returned home one night to find his apartment destroyed by fire, his book on zoetropes swallowed by flames. Lynch says he's now ready to settle down, have a family and forget this gadgetry, once and for all.