Flipbooks are usually seen as simply amusements, but the format offers interesting opportunities. Held in the hand, they can be inspected carefully at close range. As you would pick up a stone on a trail and turn it over in your hands, a flipbook invites you for a closer look by its scale and its availability to touch and manipulate its pages. By giving the viewer control over the "playing" of the motion shown, the book gives the opportunity to slow, stop, break down, and replay that motion in a way that is impossible in other time-based arts.

I have been making flipbooks for several years, and have refined my process into a format that works well. I begin by recording video of motion in the landscape: water rippling, clouds forming, trees swaying. I download the video onto my computer, where I edit the scenes down to 2-second clips. Each clip contains 60 still frames, which I extract, process in PhotoShop, and layout in a 6-page document. The pages are printed on soft-gloss paper on a color laser printer, and I cut each page into ten flipbook pages. I collate the pages, and bind them with a metal clip. Each completed book is 2” high by 3.5” wide and fits in the palm of your hand.