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This post was written by Children's Museum Blog Ambassador, Creed Anthony. Follow Creed's posts on the blog or follow him on Twitter @acjlist.
If your kids are similar to mine then I'm sure they enjoy an animated show or two—like Transformers. While the objects in the Transformers: Robots in Disguise exhibit are a big deal, and pretty fun, there are many other aspects to movies and cartoons than the manipulatives with which our children enjoy playing.
In fact, when we visit the exhibit, my son enjoys going straight to the Rescue Bots, but my daughter heads to a different section—the animation area. She is happy to sit down and draw, sketch, and imagine her own characters. When the last Hot Wheels exhibit came she did the same thing.
I wasn’t sure she grasped what it took to animate a film. I remember as a kid going to the library and checking out films on microfiche and seeing the many frames that made up the smallest movements. And so, dear readers, I did something with my kids that you can easily reproduce, and may have already done yourself at some point. I made a flipbook.
Here’s what you need:
- Either a small stack of index cards or post-it notes. Post-its really are the best, but make sure they don’t open accordion style.
- A pencil
- Some imagination
- (Yep, that’s it. Notice I did not include artistic ability—that’s a bonus, but not necessary.)
In my flipbook short, I want to create a superhero-esque stick figure that I could make fly, circle around, and then fly back through the page. The easiest way for me to achieve this was to stagger the index cards (I did not have Post-its), so that I could see how to space each character on each card. What makes the “animation” work is that you are essentially drawing the same image, but on different sections of the card. You also want to make sure that you are drawing as close to the bottom of the card (or Post-it), so that you sketch is visible while you are flipping through the pages.
You can make this as long, or short, as you want, and as creative, or basic, as you want. When I finished, I showed it to both kids, and my 4 year old wanted me to keep showing him again and again. “He’s FLYING daddy! Make him fly again!” You can watch the flipbook in action in this Instagram video!
My daughter? She smiled, asked me to do it again, and then got kind of quiet. So I handed her a small stack of index cards, a pencil, and showed her how I made mine. I didn’t give her any directions, just showed her how to do it. She took the supplies, disappeared for about 5 minutes, and then came back with her own flipbook—of kids on a trampoline.
And while it wasn’t “perfect” (her drawings were not as close to the bottom) that’s not the important part. We planted a seed, and a little bit of imagination grew. And that, my dear readers, is what matters.
So what are you going to let your kids be inspired by today? Need some ideas? Head to the Children’s Museum. I hope to see you there.
