talkmagic.co.uk

i wonder if there is a use for this......

http://www.videobash.com/video_show/ama ... sions-7449

Yes it could be an image of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, or maybe pulling the correct playing card from a deck.

Say if you had three of them in a pile together you could introduce the character in the picture by showing the first one so that he waves at the boys and girls, then go to the next one down and he pulls the correct playing card from the deck, then the next one he takes a bow.

I reckon it must be complicated printing them though.

These are called parallax barriers, they are the systems used to make 3d screens on the Nintendo 3Ds and such (without glasses) 3d. I had a go at making one a while ago and succeeded in making one of these to make an image on my computer 3d, and my friend made an animation.

As far as I can remember they were fairly simple to make, once you had a good system (algorithm?) to make them. I can sort of remember how to make an animated image, once you have your set of images and the stripes it is relatively straight forward.

As for uses... Maybe revealing a spectators chosen card?

Hope this helps,
Tjex

Love it...
Bottom video here explains a bit how it works...

http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/12/ ... -your-own/

If they are fairly simple to make then maybe you could take a set of stop-frame photographs of you yourself producing a chosen card or mental prediction or something along those lines, then slice it up and glue it/print it so that it works correctly. Then you would have a small animated image of yourself revealing something. It could provide some good novelty value to a run of the mill prediction or mentalism trick.

I guess you could call it the Mental Mini Me.

Not sure it would be all that good, you are severely limited in the number of frames you can put into your animation. Given that CardToon is essentially 50 o
r so frames, and this is 4 or 5 on a loop, just doesn't seem practical to me.

I disagree, when I used to make films using Super8 I was able to get an acceptable motion picture at 9 frames per second. This doesn't require an entirely fluid motion, just a jerky flow of motion as an audience pleasing novelty. A bit like the motion in those flicky books people used to make in the olden days.

You seem to have misunderstood what I have said. I am not talking frames per second, I am talking total number of frames. All those images that you see are simple loops of the same four or five frames. The size of the gaps in-between the black bars, relative to how thick the black bars are (ie how many frames they hide from view) is what denotes how many different images you can use in order to "animate". So if you want to use nine different frames, your black bar has to be eight times thicker than the gaps in-between them. This will give you a one second animation at nine frames per second.

Agreed, it appears I misunderstood what you wrote, the animations have to be simple and short.
But a character turning over a card could be represented though, and then another plate could represent the character introducing himself and a further plate could show the character taking a bow.
There could also be another plate representing the character responding to some comedy, or doing something to establish himself as a character. If the plates are all in a stack then the magician can animate each plate, go to the next one down, animate it, then the next one down, then the next one down etc. Somewhere towards the end is the character revealing the prediction.

I am sure if you wanted to use this there are probably programs on the internet which would take several images and merge them into one that would work with the black bars, if you were feeling lazy...

I bought a couple of childrens books using this principle. They make different animals move as the pages open and close.

Rob