Zoetrope Project

An upcoming project I will be working on:

Landscape Composites is a series of stop-motion projections created by spinning zoetropes, depicting natural landscapes. The zoetropes will contain 4”x5” sheets of colour transparency film that portray gradual changes in the landscape across North America. I will be shooting these images during a road trip through Canada and the US this summer, from Vancouver, BC to Halifax, NS. I plan to isolate certain parts of the scenery: the horizon, roads and road signs, both urban and rural. I will shoot these subjects at even intervals over the course of the trip, so as to catalogue the way they change across the continent. Once the film sheets are placed within the zoetropes, there will be a light in the middle of each zoetrope, which will project the film sheets onto the wall. The spinning zoetropes will make the images blend together, creating looping animations of the changes in the scenery as depicted in each image. I was on Pender Island last month and shot a few test images on Fuji Velvia film, which I plan to use for the project:

Here is a mock-up of the three images blended together, emulating what they might look like through the spinning zoetrope: