Flip book
What Is A Flip Book ?
In its most basic form, a flip book is an actual physical book, and each page is a drawn image. The audience flips through all of the pages at an even pace, resulting in a short animated movie.
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A requirement from our brief was to create a flip book animation using an A7, roughly 80 paged, flip book provided to us. We were given the option of creating a traditionally drawn flip book, or to print out frames from a scene from a piece of media of our choice. I chose to create my animation traditionally drawn, I have never created a flip book before so I believe creating one by hand will give me more creative freedom.
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Before I began drawing up my flip book, I researched into a range of flip books created by other artists on YouTube, from all my research the video below titled 'Valentine's Day Flipbook Animation | Flip Book Artist 2019' was my favourite, it inspired to make my flip book visually pleasing, with the centre focus on a character.
From a young age, I have always admired how beautiful hair on a character can look, it has always been something I've wanted to try and animate myself. Animating hair on a character can visually look so amazing if done right, an example of this is Walt Disney's The Little Mermaid, and how they brought Ariel's bright, vivid hair to life with its movements through natural occurrences in the film (e.g being underwater, the wind blowing through it, the hair being touched/combed, etc).
I had never animated hair or used a flip book before, therefore I decided on animating a character flipping their hair because it seemed the easiest and simplest way to animate hair, before I dived into animating I looked back to YouTube for reference and was able to find the video below.
After I had found my reference, I then drew a few thumbnails to get an idea of HOW I wanted my character to visually look. For my source of inspiration, I used Rebecca Sugar's show 'Steven Universe', I chose this show because the characters are made up of shapes and simplistic line work, giving the characters an almost smooth texture. Experimenting with character design is an aspect I'd like to improve on in animation. However, I did change the style for my character just to make them more aesthetically pleasing (e.g putting strands and detail in the hair).
Steven Universe Stevonnie's character reference sheet
My character thumbnails
To help with precis movement, I transferred my reference video into Photoshop and broke the video up in the timeline using 80 frames, the same amount of pages in the flip book.
The video below shows the final product of my flip book. For the video I took a picture of each page and put them into Adobe After Effects to create a video, I done this instead of recording myself flipping the book because it was hard to see each page that way.
Overall, I am glad that I decided to create a traditional flip book, even if it was more time consuming, I was finally able to create an animation on hair. I think that the animation on the hair is good, but if I were to change anything I would clean up certain pages to make the texture of the hair look smoother, I could have done this by managing my time better and being able to go over the pencil lines with a black fine liner.