Time Reversal Flip Book Made With InDesign

Have you ever wished you had a rewind button for your life? These instructions will help you create a rewind flip book so you can reverse the irreversible.

Step 1: Plan It Out and Take Photos

Decide what you want to portray the rewinding of. For me it was a time when I cut my own bangs. Decide how you are going to act it out or represent it. Take plenty of photos because you will need about 30-40 usable ones for printing. If it is about yourself, you may want to consider having a friend take the photos for you. When my friend took the photos for me, I first tried acting it out at a normal speed while she shot it in "Sports mode." But, there were long pauses in-between groups of photos, so we ended up shooting it photo by photo while I acted it out in slow motion.

Step 2: Upload and Choose

Upload your photos to your computer and choose 30-40 that you would like to use and would help create a cohesive story.

Step 3: Create the Flip Book Pages Using Adobe InDesign

Open a new document in InDesign.
Choose File, Place and then select the first photo for your flip book.
Once the photo has loaded in the cursor, Drag the cursor from the top left corner of the page down and to the right until you see a pink vertical line in the center of the document. Then release your mouse. The pink line shows the midway point in the document.
Now fill the rest of the page with photos, using the pink line as your guide.

Step 4: Make the File a PDF (optional)

Make the document a PDF, by choosing File-Print then selecting Adobe PDF as the printer.
This allows you to export the InDesign file as a PDF, for printing convenience.

Step 5: Print and Cut

Print the paper on photo-paper or light-weight card stock.
Cut the photos apart carefully. You want all of the photos to stay the same size.

Step 6:

Put the photos in the correct order so it looks like you are rewinding the moment. (which usually means putting the last photo taken in the front and working backwards in time from there).