Animated slipmat

 

Creating an animated slip mat is not dissimilar to early forms of animation such as zoetropes. The difference being that with zoetropes, each frame is viewed individually through a pinhole or gap which allows you to see one at a time. Other methods I have seen used are strobe lights which flash in time with the animation

The technical term for the animated slip mat is stroboscopic disk, meaning that the viewer sees each frame of the animation simultaneously. In my first test, I used a 24 frame animation oriented at each 15 degrees of the circle to have them evenly spread around the slip mat.

When spun on video, the images represent the walk cycle effectively moving forward. However, in reality the naked eye would not be able to see the moving image but rather all the frames spinning. I have been reading about the spatial relationship between frames which can be manipulated in a way that is not required in screen based animation because the frames are played one at a time in the same linear fashion.