Flip books are a fun project that a lot of kids haven’t seen. Flip books even teach a little about animation and perception. They do take time and patience to complete, but aren’t messy, and don’t need many supplies. A flip book is simply pages with a series of drawings. Each drawing is changed incrementally, so that when the pages are flipped it looks as if the drawing is moving.
What happens is that the image your eye sees stays in your perception a fraction of time longer than the actual picture does. This is called “persistence of vision”. Because of this, we see the pictures “moving” in a fluid motion.
To make your own flip book you will need paper and something to draw with. A small notebook or even a stack of sticky notes works great. To start, think of a simple animation like a smiley face changing to a frown, or a butterfly flying across the paper, or a stick figure waving. On each paper you need to draw the image as close as possible in the same position and size. If you use a ball point pen and bear down a little as you draw, you’ll make a nice impression on the pages below. It’s easy to see where eyes or hands need to go. As you make the drawings, change that one animation detail a tiny bit. The butterfly wings may move from up to ¾ up to ½ way up to ¾ down, and so on. The tinier you make your changes to the drawing, the tighter the animation will look. If you make your changes a little bigger the animation looks faster. But be careful, too big of a change in the picture doesn’t make for that flowing feel of movement. The original cartoonists used a very similar method to animate cartoons.
You can also do flip books drawings in the corners of other books. And with the use of computer drawing programs you can make sophisticated looking flip books by copying the same picture over and over and changing those small details. I think you could even make a custom one with photographs. Our camera has a feature that allows for continuous photos. It would be cute to do a photo book of children waving or going down a slide.
These make a great rainy day or sick day project for elementary and older children. Younger children are fascinated with the results but really don’t have the coordination or patience to make an effective fluid motion flip book. For adults they would make a fun addition to altered books.
Also See:
How To Make Pop-Ups – Joan Irvine
Cloth Paper Scissors – Magazine Review