Once upon a time, in the days before computers talked and digitized video, people made movies using a pen and paper. These movies, called flip-books, consisted of a series of images drawn on paper that, upon application of an extremely technical thumb-and-forefinger method, appeared to move.
The ice-age period of filmmaking is long gone, but never fear — S. H. Pierce has come up with a software product that lets you return to the past. FlipBook lets users make their own flip-books out of Scrapbook files, QuickTime movies, and PICS animations.
To create the flip-book pictured here, I used my highly developed artistic skills to draw several images in Adobe Photoshop. I then copied the images to my Scrapbook and opened the Scrapbook from FlipBook. (In order to import correctly, the images in the Scrapbook must all be the same size.) Once I opened the Scrapbook in FlipBook, my eight images appeared as a movie that I could play.
You can also import a QuickTime movie. For both movies and line art, the type of image you use will affect your output. Images with minimal color contrast will not print as nicely as those with highly contrasting colors.
The FlipBook application enables you to open and play files and prepare them for printing. The software has no image-editing or animation functions, so to make the most of this product, you will need your own image-editing program. FlipBook’s limited fiinctions make its price of $89 seem a bit high — even its approximate street price of $60 is a little more than I would pay for this product.
FlipBook comes complete with 50 sheets of perforated paper for printing your flip-books, and S. H. Pierce also sells the paper separately (50 sheets with 10 cards a sheet for $16.95). The Flip Setup option allows you to select the paper type, add guidelines, and choose the side on which to bind the book.
FlipBook requires 2MB of RAM and about 900K of disk space. S. H. Pierce says FlipBook is compatible with both QuickDraw and PostScript AppleTalk printers. I printed samples on an Apple LaserWriter IINTX, and print quality was excellent. The product also comes with Lafe Locke’s Film Animation Techniques (Betterway Books, 1992), a book for beginning animators that gives guidance on what types of images will create the best flip-book.
FlipBook doesn’t do much besides help you make flip-books. It is good at its job, though, and if you want to make flip-books out of your digital images, you may want to shell out $60 or $70 for this product. Of course, you could also just print your images and arrange them into a flip-book yourself. For the bored executive or for parents who want to educate their children about the olden days, FlipBook is a good high-tech option for a low-tech task.
Pearlstein, Joanna. (June 1994). FlipBook 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 86).
S. H. Pierce & Co.
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2023-01-07 / 
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FlipBook.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
