--- 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 This flipbook was inspired by the many, many paintings of the Great Fire of London, pictured below: ![Great Fire of London](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Great_Fire_London.jpg)