At ITP, I took a class called Paper Enginnering and Interactive Play with Sam Ita. I was very excited to experiment with paper. Paper is such a ubiquitous medium, yet often overlooked.

One of my favorite components of this class was making pop-up books. For my first pop-up book, I took a very algorithmic approach and created a pop-up book out of repetition. It was a simple practice, but I was very happy with how it turned out.

For a more elaborate pop-up book, I wanted to create something more personal. Similar to the drummer automaton that I created last year, I decided to make a drummer pop-up book. It was inspired by the drummers in the Yaogu performance, which is a traditional folk dance popular in my hometown.

First, I experimented with a few pop-up mechanisms for animating the drummer’s arms.

I picked the closest one that reproduced the up and down motion. I made one for each arm with opposite motion. I also attempted to add a drum right below the arms.

In the next prototype, I added a bit more fidelity to the character design and made the drum stay in 3D when the book was fully open.

Finally, in the final version of the drummer, I added detailed facial features and even gave the drummer the traditional headwear from my hometown.

In addition to my own pop-up book experiments, my friend, Richard Lewei Huang and I are collaborating on a series of pop-up books of pop-up ads from the early 2000s. Below is the first prototype we built.