ELEMENTARY

Assembled Flipbookit mutoscopes on display.

Tricia Fuglestad

Transdigital art has components that are experienced both physically and digitally. As an elementary art teacher, I’ve been energetically exploring the possibilities of this exciting style of art-making for a number of years with my students. They’ve made clay penguins break into a flash mob–style waddle dance. They’ve turned caricature paintings into animated bobbleheads. They’ve expressed their feelings through color monsters, then demonstrated their feelings more dynamically with stop-motion animation (see SchoolArts, December 2020). The list of projects is seemingly endless as my students become more comfortable navigating our class set of iPads and creativity apps.

The question of how to share our completed transdigital artworks is a problem I’m continuously trying to solve. I began by hosting digital animations on my blog. But in doing so, I detached one-half of the transdigital art and presented it singularly—it only told half the story. The whole story of a second-grader’s giraffe painting, for example, is that it not only looks like it can dance—it can.

Students stop to engage with the hand-cranked animations.

How do I showcase both experiences simultaneously? I’d like to share one highly engaging and almost addictive solution: Flipbookits! A Flipbookit is a retro-inspired mutoscope that permits you to hand-crank a twenty-four-frame looping animation. The cardboard kit comes with a companion website that helps you convert your digital animation into twenty-four frames, print them onto custom labels, and assemble it with easy step-by-step instructions.

The kit teaches viewers about the illusion of movement as first  experienced more than 125 years ago when early motion picture mutoscopes were first invented.

The Flipbookit makes digital animation a physical experience. It teaches viewers about the illusion of movement as first experienced more than 125 years ago when early motion picture mutoscopes were first invented. It turns a digital piece of art into a traditional animation experience with a physical result. What a mind-blowing way to share transdigital work!

A set of completed mutoscopes.

I wrote a grant for a craft party pack of the kits to exhibit samples of the digital work each of my classes created. These were displayed alongside the physical art in the classroom, hallway, and at the district art show. The whole school community flocked to the displays, many waiting in line for their chance to crank the handle and watch the animation dance about in the box.

A more economical way to use the kits is to purchase one for each classes’ collaborative animation project. I set up a fifth-grade rotoscope animation lesson where each student contributed one frame to a rotoscope animation. When the kit was assembled, students saw how their contribution to the flipbook sequence helped create the illusion of movement.

I called this project a “rotoscope in a mutoscope”—watch this little movie to see the process. I took a two-second video of a volunteer student from each class doing a dance move. The two-second video was broken into twenty-four frames. These were assigned to each student to draw with a simple rotoscope technique (drawing over video) on the iPad using a free app called Brushes Redux. Students were challenged to find ways to create uniformity in size, style, and technique as an animation team.

This project began as a physical dance performance and ended as a physical dance viewed in a hand-cranked box. The sound, the look, and the experience of seeing their animations in this format was mesmerizing to my students. One student stood by the Flipbookit display, paused, sighed, and said, “I can do this all day.”

Tricia Fuglestad is a K–5 art teacher at Dryden Elementary School in Arlington Heights,
Illinois. fuglefun.com. fuglefun@gmail.com
Make It, Move It, Flip It