UH 323 Flipbook

_uh323/2025-04-30-flipbook.md

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+---
+title: "Flipbook"
+excerpt: "Not Yet Present"
+sidebar:
+  - title: "A wild ?????? has appeared!"
+    image: https://placekittens.com/450/250
+    image_alt: "placeholder image"
+    text: "This image used to be a kitten, and the text used to say \"Meow\", but then the kitten-generator broke. The image still might be a kitten, but it's no longer a guarantee."
+---
+
+Here we are, the final day to submit this, and I have a flipbook.
+
+Now, I'm bad at drawing, and even worse at animating. I've tried both a while back, and the results were ugly. So, I thought, why not just print something and cut it out?
+
+So, I found a gif on the internet and decided to turn it into a flipbook.
+
+Easier said than done. Even if the images were extracted to individual frames, I couldn't just put them on a USB drive and ask Crimson Copies to print them. Why? Because half the card is obstructed by the rest, so half the space needs to be unused. A regular printer would pack the images as close together as possible.
+
+Additionally, once that's done, trimming the images to the perfect size for a page is difficult without markers, and it's tedious, as when printing multiple flipbook pages per 8.5x11" page, the placement can drift per physical printed page.
+
+And that's not even mentioning the pages have to be in order, and each flipbook page has to be the same size, and a whole host of other issues.
+
+My answer to this? Python!
+
+No, not the snake.
+
+It turns out that having to work with image processing has some advantages. I wrote a script that will generate images for a printer, which can then be cut out with a papercutter or similar tool. For this flipbook, an example is below.
+
+![Flipbook Page](/assets/uh323/flipbook/6.png)
+
+Cutting out, we see the assembled flipbook
+
+<video>
+  <source src="/assets/uh323/flipbook/flipbook.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+  Your browser does not support the video tag.
+</video>