Welcome to your assignment for persistence of vision. We're going to push this optical illusion concept to its breaking point by creating an animation with only two drawings. So we're gonna achieve this with something called a thermo trope. And this was invented in 1825 by an English physician, and it was a popular children's toy, if you can believe it, back in the day. So the tools we'll need, I'm going to use my trusty post-it notes again, and because they have a sticky back to them and we need a pin, I'm gonna use a permanent marker. Be careful if you use one of these.
Um, and because it's a thicker pin, it's, it'll be easier to see the illusion once we start spinning it and we need something to attach it to, to spin the Thelma trope. You can use string as well, but, um, this is just easier for me and I think it's less complicated than trying to tie knots and string. So let's get started. So for this animation, we're gonna draw a bunny rabbit popping out of a top hat. So let's get started. And I'm gonna start with the sticky part at the top here.
And I'm gonna draw the, the hat at the bottom. So I'm gonna draw one curve here, and then I'm going to draw two curves for the side. And then I'm gonna draw the brim of the hat as an oval here. And then draw the inside of the hat where the hole is, and then draw a little band here for the, to signify the top hat. So you know, I'm a professional 3D animator. I'm not that good at drawing.
So, um, I, I trust that you can follow along and do this as well. So the next drawing we're gonna do is the bunny rabbit popping out. So we have this one. We're gonna gently remove this and put it sticky side up over here so that it can stay sticky. And what I'm gonna do is actually grab my iPhone here and use a free flashlight app that's actually has a white screen. So what you can do is actually use that as a kind of light table so you can see through the drawing.
So I'm gonna take a new paper and our drawing and the sticky side is up right now. So I'm just gonna rotate this so that there's a sticky side here and a sticky side here. So they are basically going to enclose each other, um, so that we have a sticky side on both ends. And it doesn't have to be perfect, but somewhere, somewhere in the neighborhood. And so I'm gonna flip this over so that we can see through this and trace it, but I'm not gonna trace it entirely because we need to leave room for the bunny rabbit. So I'm going to start with the top rim and just leave the very top part of it open so that we can draw the bunny rabbit and then draw and trace the rest of it.
So now that we have that done, we can get rid of the phone and draw the bunny rabbit, which is the fun part. So I'm gonna draw a rounded bunny rabbit. So I'm gonna draw a little belly here, and then I'm gonna have the arms kind of coming out, kinda rubber hose style, meaning, uh, very uh, bendy and signify a little thumb there. And then I'm gonna draw a very round face and then leave some room for the ears, which is very important for a bunny rabbit. So we'll have one ear there and I'm gonna do another ear maybe bent, and then just give him some eyes, a nose and a mouth and maybe that kind of, uh, typical cartoon rabbit belly there. So there's our magic rabbit.
Now the magic comes when we put this to the pencil. So grab your pencil first. We need to separate these pieces of paper, so very gently remove them from one another. 'cause you need to sandwich the pencil between them now. So I can start here. You can, you could either start at the top edge or we could go all the way up so that the sticky side has ha will only be touching paper now and it'll give our hands a little more room to spin on the pencil as well.
So then now we have this sticky side, which is gonna go here and I just need to line up the corners. There we go. And then gently kind of mash these down so it'll keep the, keep the pencil in the center and then just kinda gently mash those down. So we will have a, Our little thermo tr. So there we go. So now all it's left to do is spin this bad boy.
So depending on how slow you do, it will affect how much popping is going on or, or not. You can kind of make it look like he's there the entire time. If you spin it fast enough or if you slow it down, it'll look like he's popping in and out of the hat. So give that a try yourself because, um, the effect works much better in person than it probably does on film. But that is a thomo trope and how much you can get away with persistence of vision with only two drawings. In the next lesson, we're going to start learning the 12 principles of animation so you can become a better animator.
Thanks for watching.