Make a Flip-book From Almost Any Movie

The art of flip books is very old. And even though most of them are still drawn, you can make a flip book from nearly every movie.

This instructable shows you how!

First: Shoot your movie own or get one from a friend (aka youtube)!

The ideal movie is:

• 20 to 30 seconds long
• Something interesting should happen
• Just one szene, not to complex
• and of course, it should still work without sound!

If you have pictures for a time lapse movie, you can of course also take these. Then you can skip to step four!

I chose to make a flipbook from a paraglider start I did some years ago. You can see the original video here.

There are different possibilities to extract pictures from a movie. Use the one that suits you. I used 'virtual Dub' as a video editor. It provides the function save as pictures and is a perfect video editor by the way.

In the second picture you can see, that this short movie has 528 frames in it, resulting in 528 individual pictures.

Once you saved your video as a series of individual pictures you have to choose some for the flip book. A number of 40-60 pictures is perfect. Less than that gives you a very short flip book, and more pictures make the flip book too thick to flip correct. 

So take every tenth or every twentieth picture. When something is happening in the movie you can also take a few additional pictures from this scene. So finally we have one to three pictures per second of our original movie.

I chose to use every fifth frame and used the search-function to chose these pictures ending on 5 and 0.

This step is also up to you, because everybody has his favorite picture-printing program, mine is ACDSee. This program provides a function to print 10 pictures on one sheet of paper. Take care to get the position of the pictures right on the page, because if you do this, you have much less trouble with cutting them later.

Print all the pictures of 4 or 5 sheets of paper.

What is the right position?
We want to save paper and the amounts of cuts that are necessary!
Therefore I only want to have one vertical cut! That means the border on the right side has to have the same width as the border from the left picture to the middle of the sheet. If you use DIN A4-paper like I did, the width of a full paper is 210mm and a half paper cut in vertical is 105mm.
I printed in a pdf and used the acrobat measure-tool to determin the width of the borders. It might be hard to see on the pictures. In the final one I have a right border of 13.57mm and a distance from the left image to the right border is 118.03mm (105 + 13.03mm), which seems to be precise enough.

Before we start to cut, I usually number all pictures and write them on the most left end of the 'single' page of a flip book.
This makes it much easier if I mess up the ordering of the pictures!

Now take a sharp cutting machine and start cutting the pictures.

Emil Lumbeck was a german book binder, who invented this method of joining several sheets of paper into one book.
It is a method of cold gluing and I explained it here:

https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-lumbeck-a-book-book-binding-method/

But instead of a supporting frame, we just use two paper clamps!
 

Now all we have to do is finish the flipbook by adding a nice cover.
I usually use one of the pictures of the movie on the cover, but you are free to use whatever you want!

Make the cover longer than needed, because it's hard to guess how much paper is needed for the back!

And this is the result of it: