Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Home made peg bar - animation and scanning

We have a hole punch at school that matches the pegs on our light boxes, so I go to school and punch 500 sheets of paper (recycled)at a time.

Last summer holidays I ran out of punched holy animating paper, so I made my own peg bar out of a plastic ruler and some sawn off paint brushes, and taped it onto the light box disc. The home made pegs matched a standard 2-hole paper punch you'd find in any office. The result isn't as stable as the 3-peg hole punch that matches the animation disc pegs, but it still worked and kept me "moving forward".

The benefit of making the peg bar from a thin plastic ruler was that I could take the peg bar to my scanner and tape it on. So when I scanned my drawings into the computer they stayed 'registered' (in place, held by the pegs). That sped up the scanning and kept the animated movements to the ones I had drawn, not movements due to the drawings being out of alignment.

At school we make registration bars for the scanners out of thin plastic rulers. We punch through some plastic with the animation 3-peg punch. Collect the punched out plastic bits. Then glue them in place on the thin ruler. The punched out bits are only a few millimetres thick but thick enough to register the drawings being scanned in alignment.

1 comment:

Anthony C. said...

Nice.

My school sucks. The instructor(s) for animation is/are EXCELLENT. But the school director is so cheap on resources towards us. There's ONE 3-hole punch for the entire animation program (the school's lack of confidence in supplying 2-d vs. 3-d seems prominent) and it's only usuable for more than a few mins on weekends.

It can also only punch 3 pages at a time of standard copy paper....oh well, we'll keep this old art alive yet! :-)