How Animation Works in a Flip Book

Flip books consist of a series of images viewers fan through to create the illusion of motion. First patented in 1868, they were a popular precursor to the invention of film projectors. To this day, they continue to appeal to children and even appear in advertising and promotions aimed at adults. They were once a prize in Cracker Jack snack food and a common gimmick for humor books, which would place a very small figure on the bottom corner of several text pages, which would come to life when readers fanned through them.

In this series of flip book animation, our film and multimedia instructor demonstrates how to plan, produce and perfect your very own flip book. Whether you are watching a simple shape change before your eyes--as is the case with the flip book produced in these videos—or watching a short cartoon, this project is a great introduction to principles of animation. Our expert explains persistence of vision and tweening in the context of this fun educational project. Don’t know the role of a keyframe in an animated cartoon strip? Not sure how many images are needed to create the illusion of movement? You will soon find out in these free videos. And before you know it, you’ll be sharing the fun with friends and family. And you might just learn something in the process.

"Hi, this is Cable for Expertvillage. I'm going to be introducing some animation principles to you today and we're going to demonstrate it with the construction of a flipbook. Now, animation is lots of fun and everyone loves animation and think of it as Bugs Bunny or Looney Tunes, but it's much more than that. It's basically, a lot of people think of it as the same thing as a movie, except instead of using a camera, you're drawing everything. Now, the principle of motion picture photography and animation, they are essentially the same. They are a collection of still images just slightly different than each other that are shown back in rapid succession and give the illusion of movement. Now this illusion of movement is contributed to an idea. It's called the persistence of vision. Now, you can see this principle at work in a century's old toy called a zolotrope. Now a zolotrope is just a simple card with a picture on each side and when the pictures are alternated by spinning it, you can see that the images appear to become combined. In this example, we have a bird on one side, and a cage on the other. We spin the disk and through the retention of one image to the next by the brain, then it looks like they are one solid image. This is the same principle when you apply it to a whole screen of images."