Teaching the Instruction Manual

If you are an educator, and you would like to use the Instruction Manual as a guide for an extracurricular course, or supplementary to an animation class that you are teaching, then please feel free to use this page as a reference to how to organize that material in a classroom setting for group learning purposes.

Flipbooks can have many uses.  They can show you how a stick figure can be brutally mutilated, or they can show you how math principles apply to physics.  Kid Analog and StereoMedia only teach kids intelligent flipbook design, breathing real life into drawings using real math.

The computer sciences of animation are advanced, compared to hand-drawn flipbooks.  In order to understand how to build complex flash animations, however, one must first be able to draw an old-school original yellow-orange notebook flipbook. 

7-Day ExtraCurricular Guidelines

01.  Introduce ourselves and state our goals.  That should probably take up the entire hour!  Goals are important because without them, it would be difficult to understand what the purpose of the work actually is.  Since progress is important to the outcome of the course, it seems likely that students will be more likely to improve at what they're most interested in.  That's the reason for day one.

02.  Layers.  We're going to talk about what a "layer" is, and why it's important to think in layers.  We'll use the ground as the first example of a technique in layering.  This is a technique that appears in many other types of animations, including high-quality CGI that you see in the theaters.  It can be as simple as a single line.  Also to be discussed is the concept of "Layer Chronology" to advanced students.

Individual Class Project

Everyone in the class will also be handed a small blank 80-page graph notebook.

Completed by the next class is expected the layers of background:  Ground and Clouds.

03.  Day three is all about "Objects."  We're going to talk about what an "object" really is.  We will describe how to draw motionless objects (ones that stay the same on every page) and "animated" objects.  We will also discuss techniques which allow objects to interact.

Every kid in the class will be asked to teach themselves how to draw the "Turtle On A Bicycle" flipbook.  It will be 80 pages long, and in all likelihood, it should be done by the end of the course.  Students are encouraged to take 20 minutes out of their TV time in order to produce their own short cartoon.  Students are expected to have completed the layers of ground and a possible hill or two, maybe a few "Objects" which will be discussed in day three.

Individual Class Project

Ground and Clouds complete, begin working on the rest of the elements.

04. This day marks the point of completion for the Turtle On A Bicycle flipbooks.  Each flipbooker will be asked to present their work to the instructor for a 10-minute discussion on techniques and will begin "storyboarding" the next flipbook.  

05.  Begin the student's original flipbooks using the storyboards from day four.

06.  No particular lectures are planned, but conversation will be encouraged.  Focus for the last three days of the course are in completing their own original flipbook using the techniques described throughout the course.  Flipbook experts will be ready to answer questions.

07.  Presentation day.  Good Luck Jonathan!  All flipbooks will be shown through a videocamera projected onto a screen.  As a complimentary service, all participants' flipbooks will be, upon request, included in the "flipbook archives" page aboard the website, FlipbBookIsland.Com (in the form of YouTube videos, with original StereoMedia music as background, license-free).