I found this advert on Pinterest and loved how the renders were spinning around each other in a circle. I looked up how to to achieve this and found that it was called a repeater effect.
I looked up some tutorials on this and found several. I liked this one on how to do a Phenakistiscope. This is one of the oldest forms of animation. It is kind of like a flip book in that there is one frame and the rotation of the drawing at a certain speed creates an illusion that the images are moving. It can be achieved using a record player moving at 45rpm. I first rendered 360 rotations of the cans and the aubergine and peach.
I then imported that in to the scene in aftereffects and made a separate composition that was long and skinny because that was going to be duplicated around the anchor point in the centre.
Inside another composition, that scene called aubergine is altered by putting on a freeze frame and then adding a expression on the Time and the Rotation. This would take the time from the aubergine comp, which was 40 frames and take a freeze frame of the aubergine on each frame and rotate it in a circle by 9 degrees (360/40). This created the image above, 40 images of the aubergine, each image is the individual frame. I then took that image and rotated 45 times in one minute. This then achieved the illusion that each still was a rotating aubergine.
I then put the original rotating aubergine in the middle.
I also did a spiral one
I started off creating an animation of the aubergine, keying its position and scale so it looked like it was falling and growing at the same time.
The I took that duplicated that composition so there were serval in a loop. Then took that loop into another comp and used the time and rotation expression and duplicated it around in a circle which created a spiral.
Thoughts
I still fine expressions in After Effects quite daunting, but, I’m glad I gave it a go. The original tutorial was actually intended for someone to print out the stills and then put it on a vinyl, however, I’m glad I stuck with it and saw that the illusion works digitally as well.