How to Make Flipbook Animation Machine from Cardboard

Creator: The Q (Youtube)

How would you spend your leisure time on a breezy weekend? If your mood is set on a vintage animation that reminds you of an old flipbook, then you’re in for the right place!

Take a moment to revive back the old days of how animation is made with your own drawings and imagination as you flip the pages around. Rather than making small-scaled flipbooks made of stick notes or trimmed booklets, The Q will show us how to make a flipbook animation machine at home with cardboards and a PVC tube that enables the character in the book as you turn the handle around.

Before you start making the machine, spend some time to draw your favorite animation or your own storyline. Remember to have the same background for each scene. After achieving a bunch of pages, get yourself ready with all the essentials you need including cardboards, skewer sticks, a PVC tube, and hot glue.

Since the machine needs to stand idle by itself, you need to start with the main structure. They include the base and the frames that will hold the machine together.

To create the bottom part, stack up smaller rectangular cardboards on a bigger one and top them with another corrugated sheet secured with glue to create a nice curve.

As you finish with the foundation, cut out four more shark fin-shaped cardboards centered with a hole in the middle to fit a tube in the next step, before gluing the two pieces together on both sides of the base.

Next, create two spinner wheels that are made of a 10 cm diameter cardboard as you create holes around the rim with 0.5cm space in between marked on the secondary circle with a length 4cm radius.

Continue until you finish the circle. Create a hole to fit your PVC tube in the middle of each spinning wheel before you insert the tube in through the frames by having the 2 wheels insides.

Then work out on the spindle by stacking more cardboards on each other before inserting another tube inside the hole before you attach them to the remaining tube that’s connected to the spinner.

Last, is to arrange your drawings and fold them halfway through with your own remark. Since this is a flipbook, the first page needs to be on top of the next bottom part on the other side.

After you fold it in half, put a skewer stick in the middle and stick two sides together that make one page. Continue with the rest of the drawings before you place each scene sheet to the spinning machine one by one. Place another cardboard on top as a page stopper and you are done!