Wooot, wooot! I’m into double digits, peeps.
For project 10, I give you: the Flip Book. Remember these things? I think we used to make them with little drawings when I was a kid. Here, the idea is that you get a whole bunch of photos of one small event, print them all out and create a very, very low tech kind of “movie.”
Problem #1: you need to plan way, way ahead, because you need to have at least 30 shots of one event, preferably an event that lasts less than 2 minutes. In the Encyclopedia, they use this as a wedding book, so they have the cake cutting or maybe just the cake eating moment as their flip book. Me, I don’t have 30 pictures from anything at my wedding, so I took a whole series of photos of the kids on the swings. I figured that would make for pretty good flip book subject matter. (As a side tip here, it’s probably best to take these photos with a tripod so that they are all framed similarly.)
Problem #2: which way do you flip a flip book? Do you go from front to back or from back to front? This seems like a question that the Encyclopedia should answer. My first inclination was to go front to back, but it’s easier to flip from back to front, so, hmm.
Problem #3: it doesn’t really work. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, but the flip book doesn’t really… flip all that well. But I should probably back up and explain how this craft progressed.
First, I took the photos. Great. Then, I ordered prints from Costco and picked those up. Check. Then, I had to go to Kinko’s, which is really now FedEx with a Kinko’s inside (are there any free-standing Kinko’s any more?), to make color copies of the photos, because I wasn’t about to use up my toner on color copies. I figured the photos were maybe too thick to flip, and that’s why the Encyclopedia told me to photo copy them.
Done. Then you have to trim all the photos (or, rather, the copies of the photos). The book suggests you make a frame out of waxed paper so that each photo can be cropped exactly right. And now I’m thinking, “It’s enough that you want me to crop 30 photos for this dang thing. NOW you want me to do it in this totally labor-intensive way?” So I ditched the waxed paper thing and just eyeballed it. This was a good choice.
OK! Color copies trimmed, I’m ready to make it into a book, but first I thought I’d see how lovely the flip worked. [cue sad trombone here] The flip did not work at all. The paper was a) too flimsy and b) too slippery from the color printing, so it kind of all stuck together. It flipped from page 1 to page 17 and then to page 30, with all the intermittent pages sticking together. I tried to problem solve this issue for a while– I even spent a good 5 minutes laying out the photos slightly fanned so that when you flipped it, your finger would touch each one. Didn’t really work so well.
It was at this point that I abandoned the photocopies (hello, waste of time!) and went back to the actual prints. It seemed to me that part of the problem was the flimsiness of the photocopy paper, and that hopefully the stiffer photo paper would help. I’d say that was true, but the flip thing still doesn’t work so well. The problem with the photos is their natural tendency to curl on the top and the bottom, which hampers the flip action.
I know, you had no idea that a simple flip book could be so technically challenging, right?
Setting aside the basic functionality of the thing, the aesthetics are kind of nice. You make a nice little cover out of cardstock and ribbon, and it looks like this:
Inside, the first page looks like this:
To illustrate the flipping problem, I took a video. I flipped both from front to back and back to front. I added some super cheesy music that came with the Flip video (don’t get confused… Flip video camera not related to flip book project. :-) ). You know, for your enjoyment.
[vimeo 12757847]
So, you see the problem.
TIME INVESTED
About 2 1/2 hours
If you include the trip to FedEx/Kinko’s and to get the prints at Costco, it took longer. The longest time suck was trimming the photos and getting them just right. 30 photos is a lot of pictures to have to trim and punch. (This time investment doesn’t even include all the time I spent trimming the photocopies, only to realize that they weren’t really working.)
TOTAL COST
- photo developing, $4.16
- color photocopies, $5.24
- cardstock, $0.99
- ribbon, $0.99
Total cost = $11.38
DIFFICULTY
Easy to moderate, because of the precision of lining up the photos
WAS IT WORTH IT?
No. That was an easy one. I put a lot of time and effort into this project, and it didn’t even work. If anyone is an expert on flip books, let me know what I can do to make it work.
Wow, you are really making your way through the challenges. I think the book looked pretty good, though it seems like something that would be more fun as a kid project rather than some kind of keepsake. I mean, when you’ve got a flip video you don’t really need a flip book. There’s something sort of postmodern about taking a flip video of your flip book. Maybe you should create and even more elaborate project, like then you trace the photos and turn them into sketches and then that becomes an animation book.