We have decided to make a real book and shoot a stop motion animation of it to act as the stage for our pages. Further down the line this will require compositing with the digital pages. But first to make the book. Fortunately I have just recently completed a book binding course and while most of the binding techniques won’t be applicable, it has given me a grounding in the principles.

I decided to make the book A4 size as this would be the most manageable to deal with physically. Testing the page dimensions against a 16:9 ratio beforehand also let me know that it could work within a film context.

What I decided to do was to use quite a heavy grade card and sandwich wire loops between two sheets. I then glued these two sheets together to create essentially one page. I made the wire lengths long enough to be sandwiched between two of these ‘sheets’. This meant that when we went to turn the pages that half the wire would be embedded in the book which would enable the other half to have a solid foundation. This foundation would enable us to manipulate the wire.