Jason finds out how cold an ice shower is

When I was young, my brother and I used to draw on the corners of notebooks. Each page had a slightly different drawing, so that when you flipped the notebook the drawings appeared to be moving. It’s still fun. And you aren’t limited to drawings either; you can also do this with a series of sequential images!

So how do you take your collection of images and turn it into some sort of flip book? It’s easy and today I’ll show you how to do it in two ways!

Method 1: The GIMP
The first method is ideal for non-techies, since we won’t need to do any typing at all. We’ll be using the image editing program called The GIMP. It’s built-in to most versions of Ubuntu, but if you’re using Windows or Mac, no worries because it’s free and open source and you can download it from their website.

The end result is going to be an animated GIF

From The GIMP, click on File and then Open and open the first image in the sequence. Then click on File again and then Open as Layers and choose the 2nd through the last images. To do this, simply click the 2nd image and shift-click the last one.

Before proceeding further, you can click on Image then Resize Image to resize the images to your liking.

Now, click on File and then Save As. In the dialog box, change the file to somefile.gif

Another dialog box will appear. Choose Save as an Animated GIF

Method 2: Terminal
This second method will require you to get your hands dirty with the command terminal. The advantage is that it’s much quicker to do.

To convert to an animated GIF, we use ImageMagick

Click here to install imagemagick (Ubuntu only)

convert -dispose previous -delay 10 -loop 0 *.jpg animaion.gif

If you wanted to convert to a video, you can use FFMPEG

Click here to install ffmpeg (Ubuntu only)

ffmpeg -r 10 -i image%d.jpg video.avi

And there you go! Easy as pie! Now go set your camera to continous, hold that shutter button, and go make some of your own!