Transform a book into a unique flip book. This tutorial is quite involved and requires a book, printer, video (or digital animation), gorilla glue, a jig, and a bit of time. Here is a video of the result:
1) Find an old book that you don’t mind destroying. I used The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ($1.00 used). The book should have enough pages to contain an image sequence. About 200 pages (100 actual pages, since we only print on one side) should do.
2) Create a 5 to 10 second video. For the purpose of this tutorial, I used iMovie, but any application that allows exporting as a sequence of images will do. It’s helpful to have a white background. Too much black will make the prints muddy. Also, it helps to use video with simple, distinct motions. I tried this once with a few seconds of juggling and it didn’t look good at all. Depending on the book you use, some, or all, of the image will be printed over text, complicating the background and making subtle motion impossible to follow.
3) Export the video to an image sequence. In iMove . . . Share >> Export using QuickTime >> Export Movie to Image Sequence. Then click Options and set the format and frames per second. I used JPEG and 12.
--Frames per second is the number of pages in your book divided by the number of seconds in your movie. Most books are numbered on both sides of the page. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has 180 pages, or 90 actual pages. 90 pages divided by 7.4 seconds, is about 12 pages per second. This exports an image sequence of 90 images, or one image per page. You have to play with this a bit until you get the number of pages to roughly match the number of images.
4) Clean up the image sequence as best you can. I used a few Photoshop actions to crop the images and adjust the contrast to make the background whiter. Remember to consider the sequence as a whole. If you crop one image you have to crop them all.
5) Remove the book’s binding. Take a sharp knife and cut through the paper that holds the cover to the book. Then slice off the glue that holds the pages together. You may have to slice and pull the pages out one at a time. You can also use a scissors on smaller quantities of pages. It’s important to keep everything in sequence. Be creative. Every book is different.
6) Open the image sequence in Preview (Any app will do. The goal is to easily print each image on its own page). In Preview, all the images should be listed in the pane to the right, alphabetically. hopefully, the oder is maintained by the image titles (01.jpg, 02.jpg, etc). You can do a test flip by arrowing through the images in preview. Select all the images (command-a) and bring up the print dialog. This should allow you to print all the open images. The next part really depends on your printer. Before sending your book pages to the printer, do some test prints.
•First, figure out which image will print first. Some printers collate and send the last image first. My printer collated, which was okay, because I wanted the image sequence to start on the last page. This may not be how a flip-book is supposed to work, but it is what I wanted.
•Second, figure out where the image will print on the page. You want the page to go through the printer so that the clean edge (the one you didn’t cut with a knife) is the edge your printer uses for alignment. This will ensure that every image is in the same place. I was able to get the image to print in the corner by un-checking Center Image and scaling to 40%.
7) Print an image on each page of the book. I ended up hand feeding the sheets one at a time, in order, starting with page one. You might be able to bulk load the printer, but it could be messy.
8) Re-bind the book. First, check the stack of pages and make sure they are in the right order. The printer may have reversed them. If so, reorder them so page one is on top. At this point I will refer to another tutorial . . . http://www.persistenceunlimited.com/2006/03/fun-and-easy-how-to-guide-to...
Here is a summary of the process. Build a jig to clamp the stack of pages. Dampen the edge that you want to bind. Apply Gorilla Glue to the edge. It will react with the water. For the first 30 minutes or so, periodically sponge off the excess glue with a paper towel (gorilla glue expands). After removing the excess glue, I covered the gluey binding with a sheet of paper and applied direct clamp pressure to it. Leave clamped for 3-4 hours. Reattach the cover using duct tape. I then covered the Duct Tape with masking tape . . . or to make it even cleaner, glue in a whole new inside cover.
