A great idea for a classroom activity, for a group or even for a family, is to make small flip book animation projects. Flip books all children and adults to create mini-movies in a book on their own featuring their unique artwork and a short message.
The wonderful thing about flip books is they don’t need to have elaborate artwork. Even stick figures can come to life and act out a scene, portray a favorite activity, or even show a chapter from a book. Kids can even create their own comic action books which are much more entertaining than traditional still comic books.
Parents and teachers can help children to create wonderful, simple or elaborate flip book animation projects in a relatively short period of time. Of course, the amount of detail the child puts into the drawing, coloring and action will be a big factor in the total amount of time required for the project.
Number of Pages
To give a realistic movement to the animation it is important to have between 5 and 15 pages per second. Most flip books will be three to four seconds in length, so approximately 15 to 60 pages in total length is ideal. The more movement there is or the more detail you wish to show the more pages needed.
For smaller children, parents can help in completing every other page or in completing the drawings. The children can then color on their own or with help from Mom or Dad.
Making the Connection with Flip Book Animation
When creating your own flip book remember each picture or image must match with the previous one. For a first project choose a very simple shape and then make the slight changes so the image appears to grow or change as you flip through the pages.
By making only slight changes and using more pages a more movie-like quality of flip book animation will be achieved. However, for kids, larger changes are also fine as they may not have the patience or the interest in making the details as particular as an adult.
By making changes in the position of some or all of the objects in your flip book you can give the idea of motion or movement. Some people like to start on the last page of the book, the final position, and draw backward to the starting position while others may want to draw in advancing order. In reality either option works well to give the flip book animation you want.
At Fliptomania, we have blank flip book animation activities packs which are perfect for parties, classes or family activities. To learn more see us at Fliptomania.com.
