Making a TED-Ed Lesson: Bringing a pop-up book to life

In this short video, we're going to show you how we constructed

and animated a pop-up book to explain Earth's tectonic plates.

The supercontinent Pangaea broke apart 200,000,000 years ago,

but the pieces haven't stopped shifting.

Although with animation we can show this movement easily with drawings,

we thought it'd be more interesting to depict gigantic sliding slabs of rock

using a tangible object that also moves and shifts.

and the pop-up book idea was born.

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To make your own pop-up book, you'll need some basic paper tools,

such as scissors, an X-Acto knife, glue, double-sided Scotch tape, a ruler,

a bone folder or other creasing tool, and, of course, some paper.

For this lesson, we first determined the visual style

by making illustrations and deciding on the overall

design, colors, shapes and elements we wanted on each page, or spread.

You can have more detailed illustrations, but we wanted to illustrate this lesson

simply by playing with shapes and colors.

When you visualize your pop-up and choose a visual style,

you will want to make a bunch of good old pencil sketches on paper

and plan each movement for each spread.

Plan as much as you can:

all the basic shapes and how they connect and how you want them to move,

which parts you want to pop-up first.

Challenge yourself,

and explore multiple possibilities of how your main element on the spread can pop up.

For the next step, make a mock-up spread

and see if your masterful paper engineering ideas

translate from a sketch to the actual prototype.

Instead of using fancy paper, start with the cheap stuff

and allow yourself to make mistakes and adjustments.

This prototype lets you see how your preliminary sketches will come to life.

You will want to first draw all individual parts on a single sheet,

including all your main pieces, all the supporting pieces and the folds.

You may be surprised that there are only two types of folds

that can make your elements pop up the way you want:

a step fold and a V-fold.

Here, you can see how we used a step fold

to make each layer of the Earth step out.

Then, cut all your individual elements and assemble using glue

or double-sided Scotch tape.

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Through trial and error, make sure that all

the elements, shapes and placements are moving the way you imagined,

and that they fold properly when closed and opened.

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Once your prototype is tested and complete,

you can proceed to making the final product in color.

Draw or paint on your main pop-up elements as you see fit.

For this lesson,

we decided to just play with simple shapes in different colors

to create the world of shifting continents we imagined.

(Music)

When we were planning each spread, we knew we wanted some elements

to move independently of the typical pop-up book

using slight manipulations and animations.

We had to plan well, but also use a few tricks.

As always, when you're making stop-motion,

you may have to be creative and use all sorts of unusual tools and props

to achieve the effect that you want.

In this shot, the birds had to fly across and off the edge of the book,

so we used Fun-Tak to move the clouds across the page.

Once they left the page, they had to be trimmed

to get the illusion they flew off.

When the pages of the book close at the end,

we had to flip each page, supporting it in each position

long enough to be photographed as an individual frame.

We used binder clips, wedges, Fun-Tak,

and almost every handy little thing you can think of.

Once all the individual frames were photographed,

we put them all together and composited

to make our pop-up book look like it's moving on its own.

So now, think of a special occasion

where you can surprise someone with your own unique pop-up card,

or an entire story that you want to tell,

and start plotting the ins and outs of your pop-up book.