Animation Flipbook Using Silhouette Portrait Cutter

This instructable is part of the July Instructables Build Night with Silhouette at the Taipei Hackerspace.

We decided that we were going to create a scene from the book "The Missing Piece," by Shel Silverstein, where a forlorn circular shape rolls around looking for the perfect piece to fill its emptiness. The Silhouette cutter would be a perfect way to recreate the same figure repetitively. We used a piece of turquoise vellum with a Number 1 blade and the Number 9 depth setting. We felt the vellum was a good choice to give sharp, crisp lines because the figures we were planning on animating were quite small.

We prepared a small notebook to serve as our flipbook. The paper we used was thin enough to be seen through by using a light table, although it would turn out that the thinness did give us difficulty in flipping the pages smoothly at the end. Using a cellphone screen as a small light table, we first traced a ground line in crayon on each page we were going to use. We then glued the two characters on the page, taking care to rotate and shift the circular character's position as he rolled along.

Before creating your story, make sure you know which way you are going to flip the pages. We decided to flip the pages by releasing them with our left thumb, meaning that the first page of the story would be on the back page.