Making a TED-Ed Lesson: Bringing a pop-up book to life

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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 Pangea broke apart 200 million 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. 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. Plan as much as you can, all the basic shapes and how they connect and how you want them to move, which parts you want to pop up first. Challenge yourself and explore multiple possibilities of how your main element on the spread can pop up. For the next step, make a mock-up spread and see if your masterful paper engineering ideas translate from a sketch to the actual prototype. Instead of using fancy paper, start with the cheap stuff and allow yourself to make mistakes and adjustments. This prototype lets you see how your preliminary sketches will come to life. You will want to first draw all individual parts on a single sheet, including all your main pieces, all the supporting pieces, and the folds. You may be surprised that there are only two types of folds that can make your elements pop up the way you want, a step fold and a V-fold. Here, you can see how we used a step fold to make each layer of the Earth step out. Then cut all your individual elements and assemble using glue or double-sided scotch tape. Through trial and error, make sure that all the elements,