Flip books in the digital age

You've probably done it before. You're bored in class, and so instead you draw cartoons on each page of your notebook to create an animation. And then you flip through the pages of your notebook to watch your masterpiece. What you have created is called, a "flip book."

In the digital age though, we'll be getting rid of notebooks and maybe paper in general. Can we still do flip book animation? You bet we can. And here's one example of it.

Check out www.twitter.com/smartarg - it is actually the Twitter account of Smart Cars in Argentina. You know that 140 character limit of Twitter posts? And have you heard of ASCII Art? Well, those are the two key elements to this "digital flip book."

To view the animation, go visit their Twitter account, press and hold "End" on your keyboard or simply scroll to the very first, bottommost tweet (until it says "Back to Top") - this is to make sure all tweets are loaded already - then go back up to the very first one. If you're on Chrome, keep pressing "J" to get the desired flip book animation. I am not sure if pressing "J" will work on other browsers; and you have to press it a number of times to get the animation moving; holding it won't cut it. Yeah, this is even more work than an actual flipbook. And because of changes in fonts and layouts and what not, the animation seems a little garbled up. So much for the "digital" age, right?

But hey, it is the digital age. You can just press play on this YouTube video that features the "digital flip book animation" from their Twitter page. It's actually probably their TV advertisement, though. Yeah, welcome to the digital age.




I found out about this through TWiT.