Making Paper Movies: Experiences & Ideas

[Monique]

Does anyone of you have experience with making paper movies?

The ones where you have a booklet with images and when you flick through it you have the illusion of a movie.

I'm making a booklet and have the idea of making a moving worm in it, but I am wondering whether every page should have a new image, or whether the frame rate should be lower. The idea just occurred to me and I haven't had the time to experiment yet

 

[turbo]

Flip-books were sometimes packaged in Cracker-Jacks when I was a kid, as were little scenes sandwiched under fresnel-patterned plastic that changed when you moved them around. Not all Cracker-Jack toys were crap - some of them would make you wonder and think.

 

[Monique]

Flip-books were sometimes packaged in Cracker-Jacks when I was a kid, as were little scenes sandwiched under fresnel-patterned plastic that changed when you moved them around. Not all Cracker-Jack toys were crap - some of them would make you wonder and think.

Flip-books! Thanks, I didn't even know what to google for :)

 

[Sorry!]

Yeah we used to make them all the time in class. Usually we just used post-it notes but you can buy actually set ups for making a flip-book. (we used this one time in art class was pretty cool)

Normally they only involved stickmen though but in my art class we had to make one that was REALLY detailed some of the peoples were so amazing... For instance one person had a fuse burning and it blew up a box and a jack in the box popped out saying 'merry christmas' and it was bouncing around... it was really quite amazing to see actually.

 

[Monique]

I need to have a sinus wave move from one to the other end of the page, I'm trying out Flash at the moment.. any tips for me? I have figured out how to have an object move from one position to the other, but I'm not sure how to get the sinus movement.

 

[BobG]

We used whatever book we were assigned to read in English class, since we had to buy the book and it belonged to us. It also meant you could have some really long "movies" or very detailed short "movies" if you wanted really good animation.

Yes, the vertical positioning can be tough (assuming the side of the book you're flipping is the bottom). Cheap trick - draw some evenly spaced lines along the top and bottom of the book (the sides adjacent to the binding). Even though you've drawn those lines on the side, you'll be able to see a dot along the edge of your scene. It will help you line up your drawings. If you're good at that sort of thing, just having a visual reference will help you set your spacing. If you have to, you can run a ruler from one dot to the other with a very faint, erasable line to help you set your spacing.

The spacing for sinus waves can be particularly challenging - even more challenging than sine waves, I imagine. I usually had to settle for cosine waves.

 

[Monique]

I have found a real live worm movie that will be the model for my drawing. It all needs to be digital, because the book will be printed. Once I have a single wave, it should be easy to loop it. I wonder if this is going to work..

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

If you want it to go slower use more pages and more frames. Making two or three of individual frames may help but primarily you want to make the differences between images as small as possible unless you want certain motions to be quicker than others(not sure if you want to get that detailed). Most often though people don't worry much about the speed at which the flip book will move. It sort of depends on how much time you have to spend on this.

 

[BobG]

And the fun thing is that you can divide the characters in your flip book onto alternate pages. Kind of a dumb adolescent trick for when you didn't want it to be too obvious that you'd made a stick figure porn movie out of your copy of "Grapes of Wrath".

 

[lincs-b]

How long did it take you?

 

[Pattonias]

Here's the result!

LOL that is pretty cool.

 

[Monique]

How long did it take you?

Two hours or so, I had to figure out how to work with Flash. It's a loop of 12 frames that I made

 

[Lisa!]

That looks nice!
Can I ask why you'de decided to make that?:shy:

 

[Monique]

That looks nice!
Can I ask why you'de decided to make that?:shy:

It's for my thesis. I'll place the images in the margin so that when you are looking through it, it will appear as if a worm is crawling from the top to the bottom (worms are my profession ). It's a fun gimmick, unfortunately I can't show you the cover.. it has worms made out of candy crawling all over it. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I am planning to make cupcakes with worms crawling out of them for the party

I guess the answer to why is.. because you need to be a little bit nutty once in a while
Remember, it is the worm that lures the fish, not the fisherman or his tackle.

 

[turbo]

The worm in your flip-book is pretty cute, Monique. Not at all like a liver fluke, a hook worm or a pin worm. Since you are slim, have you entertained the thought that you might have a tape-worm?

 

[Monique]

The worm in your flip-book is pretty cute, Monique. Not at all like a liver fluke, a hook worm or a pin worm. Since you are slim, have you entertained the thought that you might have a tape-worm?

I am pretty sure that I don't have a dark passenger

 

[turbo]

I am pretty sure that I don't have a dark passenger

Good news. Any young lady that can consume 3300 cal/day and still try to put on a little weight must have an impressive metabolic rate. When I was in HS and college, until I stopped distance-running, I never got over 125# and ate what I would estimate was at least 3x the calories needed to keep an average person at normal weight.

Usually, once a summer for at least a week or two I would live with my grandparents, and my grandmother would do her best to try to put weight on me. She had recently retired from a job as the base-cook for a log-driving company, and she knew how to serve up calories. Toast and bread was always buttered with her home-made butter. Fruits and cereals and some hot vegetables were always served with heavy cream (the vegetables had butter floating in the cream), and there was some form of sweet dessert served with every meal. If you had coffee or tea and wanted some whitening, it was always cream, not milk. Then, there was pie and ice cream for an evening snack. My grandfather (actually, my father's step-father) was a monster of a man, about 6'5" with hands the size of dinner-plates - very lean and rangy and strong as hell. When I was a kid, I could usually keep up with him, meal-for-meal, and if my grandmother didn't think that I was putting on any weight after a week or so, she'd campaign my parents to try to keep me for another week or more.

Never did Grammy serve a meal that wasn't loaded with protein and fats. Never did she manage to put any real weight on me.

 

[lisab]

It's for my thesis. I'll place the images in the margin so that when you are looking through it, it will appear as if a worm is crawling from the top to the bottom (worms are my profession ). It's a fun gimmick, unfortunately I can't show you the cover.. it has worms made out of candy crawling all over it. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I am planning to make cupcakes with worms crawling out of them for the party

I guess the answer to why is.. because you need to be a little bit nutty once in a while
Remember, it is the worm that lures the fish, not the fisherman or his tackle.

Awesome idea, I love it!

Also remember - it's the fish that lures the fisherman.

 

[Lisa!]

It's for my thesis. I'll place the images in the margin so that when you are looking through it, it will appear as if a worm is crawling from the top to the bottom (worms are my profession ). It's a fun gimmick, unfortunately I can't show you the cover.. it has worms made out of candy crawling all over it. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I am planning to make cupcakes with worms crawling out of them for the party

Wow! What a brilliant idea!:!)

PS: I was just curious to know whether you made it just for fun or you are going to use it somewhere in your work!