Bicycle Zoetrope

I just saw this on The Daily What and it reminded me a lot of the Monty Python spinning thing (yep, that's the technical term for it) that they used for the Flying Circus opening. These guys did something similar with their bike wheels, and it turned out pretty cool.

Apparently they wanted to see if they could film animation in real-time. After watching the video, I'm kinda wondering what exactly they made the gears out of. They look like paper, but I feel like regular paper would just rip when attached to a bike wheel. I also wonder how they came up with the gear idea in the first place and knew that it would look like that when attached to a bike wheel. I mean, either way, it looks pretty awesome.