The Flip Book

The Flip Book Project or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Use Flash.

As someone who is interested in animation I was really excited about this project.  A chance for me to get extra experience with frame by frame animation and get work done at the same time sounded great to me.  While I still like how my flip book turned out, I am a bit upset with myself for not asking if I could just submit a Flash animation instead of actually using a book.

To create the project my original intention was to make a simple storyboard and then sketch out each frame by using the previous page as a base.  However when I started I quickly discovered that the pages of the book I bought were not very easy to see through.  No matter how much light I shined on the pages or what I used to draw with I could not see any pages below the one I was working on.  So I decided that the best way to outline what to draw would be to create a frame by frame animation in Adobe Flash.  If only I knew that I could just turn in this animation I would have saved a lot of time, but oh well too late now.  Note to self: asking questions is a good idea.

While it's not perfect I am fairly happy with how this quick animation turned out.  It gave the mysterious and surreal concept a very stylized and cartoony appearance which I think makes it more enjoyable than if I tried to make it realistic and serious.  

With each frame lined up it was now time for me to do it all again but this time with a pen and a book which, as I soon learned, was not the easiest way to draw.  After a few hours of copying with a pencil and then tracing over each line I finally had my flip book completed, although it was not quite the same as my initial idea.

Drawing the same image over and over again without computer guidance or a light board is a fairly tiresome experience.  Thus after a while I began to work away from my outlined frames in exchange for a less time consuming method.  The part when he steps into frame in an exaggerated manner was changed to have him pull his head back so I would not have to keep drawing it in the same position.  Due to this change the rapid rubber band like motion that brings him fully into frame was replaced by a gradual stretch.  I also shortened the motion of him pressing the button into the same frames as his arm movement to save even more time which seemed to confuse several people in the class as it went by too quickly.

Finally I just grew too tired of drawing the same frames over and over so I completely changed the button press to make him vanish in a cloud of smoke instead of having the door appear first.  Now the door would appear open as the cloud vanished and then the door would quickly close and disappear itself.  The final frames off the wind blowing his hat were added to make the ending feel a little less abrupt but at that point the book pages would flip so slowly that most people probably missed it.

In the end I think my flip book came out alright.  What I wanted to do was make a flip book that gradually took over the entire page and I feel like I was able to do that.  Although that very ambition also made it much more difficult to flip through than something smaller.  I also made it so the animation could be viewed both forwards and backwards so no matter how someone flipped through the book it would still make sense.  Whether they see it as a door appears that reveals a strange man who slinks off the frame or a man who creeps onto the frame and disappears into a strange door it still tells a story.