Remaking My Favorite Flipbook 30 YEARS LATER

This is an animated book that I made when I was a child and from then until now many things have happened I grew up I went on a mission I went to university I dedicated myself to cinema I got married I had children My animation skills even improved I have been able to animate some films like Coupon, the two-string box trolls, the missing link in Paranorman, but making animated books like this is one of the things that made me fall in love with animation in the first place. In fact, this is my son Asher when he was just four

years

old and he saw a flip book for the first time and it's this hot dog flip book that I showed him so what I want to do is now that three decades have passed I'm going to remake this flip book and see how much better.

I can do it, so what I want to do in

remaking

this

flipbook

is basically tell the same story, you know, with more or less the same shots, but I want to improve the animation and I want to make it bigger and I was actually surprised to realize from this. This will be the third time I've done this flip book. Here's the first version I made as a kid. I totally forgot this one existed and then I found it a while ago in my old flip books so this is actually the second version now I'm doing version three so hey maybe in another 30

years

I'll do it again.

I prefer to do things slower so it's less intimidating so let's start with the easy part of the animation, a hot dog bun sitting there doing absolutely nothing, this is my kind of animation and then this new version tries to up our game here, so we'll start with a big empty button twist and then I want to see a pair of metal tongs drop the hot dog onto the bun. I'll make the hot dog sink a little on both ends to add a sense of weight, okay, it looks pretty good, okay for the sauce, uh, we can't go straight to the hot sauce, you need to start with mustard and then we will bring on the big shots with some hot sauce moments like this are a perfect opportunity to use a drawing template properly, so I'm going to make a master drawing of the mustard bottle and then what I can do is reposition that template for each page and simply tracing it makes it much easier and keeps the shape of the mustard bottle consistent from page to page.

I'm going to draw the movement of the bottle first and then I'm going to go back and add the mustard spill after that and I know you all have been wondering what the top of my head looks like so here you go, ah, that doesn't look like all well. I'm going to redo some of that. Okay, that works better. Now we will make the ripple mustard pour. Alright, now it's time to get the hot sauce out, so same thing, I'm going to make a master drawing that I can reposition and trace on each page of the hot sauce bottle.

We're going to put a nice fire-looking label on the bottle and I don't want just a little bit of hot sauce, we're going to put a big load of hot sauce on this dog, a couple of drops over the edge, but I don't think it's going to be enough. for this one, we have to make it bigger, right? so let's drop a big red pepper right on top, use the tongs again to drop it in and then since it's falling we can give it a little splash when it hits the hot sauce. I'm very happy with the way it turns out.

Looking at it, I think it looks great. I love making splats, uh, making splats and drips and stuff, it's a lot of fun, but yeah, I'm really happy with this so far. I'm really nostalgic for this specific

flipbook

because I remember how I felt when I made it. I remember sitting on the couch drawing it sitting next to my mom and I remember how cool I thought the hand movement was and picking up the hot dog. I just remember really liking the way it looked. So same thing now I'm going to have a hand to pick up the hot dog, which means I need a video reference.

Unfortunately, there are currently no hot dog buns in the house, but I have a sweet potato, so that will have to do. but it doesn't matter too much what I'm picking up. This is the general size of a hot dog. I just need to see how the hand moves. That will be the main point of this reference video. So now I can watch that reference video frame by frame and see how my hand moves and how each finger moves frame by frame and that's a big help as I draw the hand that goes in and grabs the hot dog. a couple of drops fall as he leaves the frame.

I really love drawing drops and splashes, they are so much fun, that's why I love making my slime video so much. If you've seen that it was nothing more than drips and splashes, so now it's time to make a video reference, but this time I have hot dog buns, so in the original you put everything in your mouth in one bite, so that's what I'm going to do, oh my gosh, okay, so that's my animation reference. I'm keeping a close eye on it for the rest of the flipbook and now I'm going to move on to the most problematic part of this animation: the fire, here's the problem.

I wanted to make it bigger with the fire, but the original flip book style was really cartoony. He ate the hot dog and then it was like fire. This version is very realistic looking and it's like being engulfed in flames and then there's this look of absolute terror on his face. It's going too far so another idea I had was to try to make it more cartoonish just lean into it and make him, you know, have his eyes pop out along with the flames, that's probably more horrible, yeah, this isn't the one. right idea, so what I'm going to do instead, I'm just going to scale it down. the fire a little bit, I'll redo some pages so the fire doesn't engulf his entire head and the flames of the underworld, okay, so I think that's better and it's a little less demonic looking and obviously I've been doing this. a little out of order, I'm going to move on now to doing the shots of eating the hot dog before the fire and after that we should be ready to do the rest of the color, so this is good, that's it. the color is finished, it's finally finished, finally finished, so here are the first two versions and then the newest one 30 years

later

, so I can't believe this took me so long, but I'm very happy with the result. and I had a lot of fun with the hot sauce and the fire and everything, but I'd love to hear what you think next and if you want to make your own flip books, go to andymation.com, you can get my flip book kit. flipbook paper my light panel everything I use in my videos so go check out Animation.com and I'll see you in the next video hmm