Kranky Kids® presents
The Ian Lendler Illustration and Animation Poetry Contest 2010
(This contest is open to students only.)

Flip Boom: Emergency Mouse Animation Tutorial
Cheat Sheet 20100111

The purpose of this tutorial is to help students understand how to start making an animation. I am basing this tutorial on Emergency Mouse by Ian Lendler.

Below I have written out the poem on individual frames in the original Flip Boom program:

After duplicating each different frame 15 times - you get the following animation:

Click here to watch in QuickTime.

That seemed to go too fast for reading Please Break The Glass - so duplicating more frames slows it down. After duplicating each different frame 20 times - you get the following animation:

Click here to watch in QuickTime.

Now - that's not really animating the poem very well - for me it's just reviewing the poem to get animation ideas. Looking at the title alone - I quickly animated the idea of an "emergency mouse" like this:

Notice above and below that only every other frame has color added to the mouse - this will make it flicker like an emergency light in the final animation.

Below is the animation that resulted from the above work:

Click here to watch in QuickTime.

That was just the title of the the poem - the rest of the poem still needs to be animated. (I could randomly move the tail in some frames to give the little mouse even more life.)

Now go and create your own animations of the entire poem (or any of the other contest poems) and enter your work in the contest.

Any questions?

return to top of page