RESOURCES

Further information will be posted soon but in the meantime you can download our flick book template and guidelines

It is amazing just how simple an animation can be. Just two images, perhaps one with eyes open, one with eyes closed, and a face will blink, come to life. For example a very short bit of film of a figure walking, literally two paces, download this onto a computer, export the clip as a sequence of still images and print these out so that students can copy the exact movement, but drawing their own figure. (This is of course a classic trick of the animator; even masterpieces of digital effects like ‘Who Shot Roger Rabbit’ make use of real actors onto whose movements the digital creations are mapped). Once the sequence of drawings are complete re-scan them and turn them back into little movies, and then re-print the scanned drawings to turn them into flipbooks. You can also experiment with the creation of moving backgrounds so that the figure appears to be moving forward rather than just walking on the spot.

You can create a simple template of flipbook proportioned rectangles on an A4 sheet - it could be two columns of four, or six, or eight, depending on how thin the flipbook is to be. You can do this in Photoshop, using the rectangular marquee tool and stroke command, saving the result as a jpeg file, but it could as easily be created in any graphics programme, or even in Word. Having printed out as many sheets per student as will make a reasonable flipbook, they draw their animations frame by frame. If it is to be based on a walking figure, it is simple to use a sequence of images (as mentioned above) to trace the movement from. If the sequence is printed out in the same format as the template then the figure can be traced, preferably using a light box, but more likely making use of a window! You can hold the finished flipbook together with a bulldog clip or, a really neat solution is to use little brass bolts with big flat heads, one threading into the other.

Making use of layers in Photoshop, and the animation pallet in Photoshop to export layers to a Flash movie file. Or using the action palette in Flash to create a flipbook that will flip ‘virtually’ on a website as you pass a mouse over it. With the new photo ipods came a new form of the flipbook; iPod scrubbing, where you load a sequence of images onto your iPod then flip through them at speed with the touch wheel. It even makes a satisfying clicking noise as you scroll through the animation!

Adobe Premiere, which is a ‘high end’ video editing suite, has a feature that will export a sets of images to and from Photoshop (Adobe Filmstrip Format). Or there is a tiny and freely downloadable bit of software for Mac’s that will do the same thing, called ‘Cheap-O-Scope’, it will convert a short video sequence into the Adobe Filmstrip format. iStop motion, animation software that captures stills from a plugged in DV camera (for the creation of stop frame animation) has a print to flipbook feature, and in video editing software such as iMovie or Premiere, exporting a short movie to an image sequence creates an instant photo flipbook.

RESOURCES

LINKS AND DOWNLOADS

Course Downloads

Further Websites