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.

(music) 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.