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Flipper is a flash toy created for The Party Basket to amuse, delight and entertain our visitors. No more, no less. We don't want you to be stressed, we don't want you to be unhappy. We want you to spend a few minutes of your day just doodling! Let your imagination flow onto the page, and watch it come to life! Click on "Help" if you get stuck, or look in our Gallery to see some other flipbooks that visitors to this site have made
What is this "Party Basket"? Is it some sort of basket of party? That sounds rather fun.
The Party Basket is an online, UK based store which sells fun and funky little party pack gifts and loot bag goodies for kids birthday parties and special occasions. Have a look, browse around!
Disclaimer - The Party Basket holds no responsibility for the content of any flipbooks on the site. If you feel a certain flipbook is offensive in some way, get in touch and we'll look into it
Direct all enquiries to flipper@thepartybasket.co.uk
Basically, you need to do this...
Nothing's working, all I see is some random error message
Flipper needs, as a minimum, a Javascript enabled browser and at least Macromedia Flash v.6. If you don't have those, then you won't see nuffink, mister!
How do I work this thing?
See the "Help" section for a quick guide about how to use Flipper
There are blank frames in my animation, but all the frames are joined together when I play it back
Flipper has been designed to make doodling and drawdling as easy as possible. To do this, we decided to simplify the process as much as possible. The playback of any animation will discount blank frames. You can see which frames are blank and which are not in the page-bar at the bottom of the drawing area. Filled pages will show up as green, and any blank pages will show up as white.
Everything's going realllyy sloooowwww
Flipper is pretty graphically demanding on your computer, what with all the flipping and page changing and whatnot. If you find things are going slow while you're drawing, you can turn down the quality, or number of "Ghosts" by clicking on the options on the white bar at the bottom. Or during playback of a gallery Flipperbook, you can turn down the quality of the animation to get a speed increase
Ghosts? What's this talk of ghosts? Stop it, I'm scared
Don't worry, your computer's not haunted. To make the animation process easier for you, when you skip ahead a frame or two, you'll see a faint image, or "ghost" image of the previous two frames. This will allow you to match up your new frame with what's gone before to get a nice smooth animation. To see more or fewer ghost images, click on the option in the white bar at the bottom of the drawing screen.
I can't draw anymore, my pencil's run out
Because Flipper is a graphically intensive application, there's a set limit for each frame which says how much drawing you can do on one page. This is so the animation won't play back too slowly if you decide to fill the page completely with mad, random scribblings. You can follow how much of the page you've already filled up from the line on the side of the pencil or the percentage "Current Frame" in the white bar at the bottom of the drawing page
I still can't draw anything, even though I've moved to a new page
There's also a limit on the total amount of data the application can hold, so that nothing, y'know, explodes or goes wrong. This is set pretty high. You can do about a megabyte's worth of drawing before the limit kicks in - if you know anything about simple vector drawing packages, you'll know this is a reasonable amount, especially for an online application. You can follow how much memory you've used by the percentage "Memory Usage" in the white bar at the bottom of the drawing page
I still can't draw anything, I mean, I'm rubbish at drawing
That really doesn't matter. Most great artists can't actually draw. Even though that might be a complete lie, that shouldn't stop you. Doodle! Have fun! Make a mess and don't bother cleaning up afterwards! That's what art's all about anyway, not some snobby snob in a coffee shop shouting Rembrandt and Jean Paul Sartre at you. Sod that. Pick up a pencil and express yourself.
Your adverts are annoying me. I don't like adverts. Make them go away!
Unfortunately, it's a necessary evil in this day and age. Flipper! has been proving rather popular lately, and each flipbook animation takes up a fair little bit of bandwidth. We've yet to fully judge reaction to advert placement on the page, if it annoys you that much feel free to mail us and if it seems like the ads are too intrusive, we'll do something about it
Can I use this animation tool for serious purposes?
You can, if you want. Although we wouldn't reccommend it. It's just a toy, after all. Perhaps in the future it'll grow into a more fully-fledged animation tool, but until then, just be happy with doodling absstract doodles. Future enhancements may (yes, may) include the ability to export the animation to Animated GIF format, and many other things. As I think of them
Who made this thing? Can I get him to make me something like it for me?
Yes, if you ask nicely. Go to his website and send him a message, or something. He'll get back to you fairly quickly, whenever he's not away drinking tea or listening to Radiohead
What's going on? I'm confused
If this is all a little too much for you, why not try lying down for a while, or relaxing by a window with a cup of tea watching the world go by. Have a break, have a kitkat. If you don't have any kitkats, steal one off someone else, or go for some other form of chocolatey snack
Some of the "questions" in this F.A.Q. aren't actually questions. What gives?
Well done, you win a shiny gold banana. Go away and annoy someone else with your pedantic questions...
A UK based online store
This lovely little Flash Toy was created for The Party Basket, an online store based in the UK selling toys for kids party packs and loot bags. You can find all sorts of things there, so if you're planning a kids party or event in the near future and need some gifts or goodies to hand out, then that's the place for you!
