Dezeen Music Project:Â designers Masashi Kawamura and Kota Iguchi made all the animations in this music video for Japanese band SOUR's single Music Is Life using rotating compact discs.Â
Kawamura of creative agency PARTY and Iguchi of design studio Tymote used the CDs to create a kind of phenakistoscope, a nineteenth-century animation device consisting of a series of still images that appear to move when rotated.
"The idea came from the lyrics," Kawamura told Dezeen. "The song is about life and the way it cycles like the rhythm of music. That made me think of using CDs as the surface to create animations on."
Traditionally, a phenakistoscope would have to be viewed through small gaps to create the illusion of movement and prevent the images from blurring into each other. Kawamura and Iguchi managed to create the same effect by syncing the speed of the rotating discs with the frame rate of their video camera.
"The slits on a phenakistoscope simulate flashes of light and create a kind of strobe effect called persistence of vision," Kawamura explained. "In our case, we used the frame rate of the camera to recreate this effect without the slits. We shot the film at 15 fps and filmed 17 frame animations to synchronise with the 105 BPM of the song."
Kawamura and Iguchi created animations on 189 CDs to make the video. They raised the money for the project on crowd-funding website Kickstarter, and backers who pledged $70 or more will receive one of the discs used in the shoot, signed by the band.
