The
Flipbook
Experiment

For a few weeks in the Spring of 2024, readers took turns tracing the previous person’s drawing to make a flipbook-style animation. The result was 22,454 drawings.

We set out with a singular focus; make the longest collaborative flipbook animation ever. We ended up creating 25 different animations. The initial experiment ran for the majority of the period, resulting in an eight-minute video composed of 5,760 drawings. Watch it below.

The second experiment involved creating a 30-second animation, repeated four times with the same starting image, to compare how they evolved. We did this for six different starting images (24 total animations). You can scrub through frame-by-frame results below.

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But wait, there’s more! We ran a secret experiment in an attempt to observe the online disinhibition effect. Our theory: people would be more inclined to draw inappropriate images (i.e., penises) with no personal information attached to their submissions. Why? Without fail, any free-form drawing project on the internet yields phallic imagery. Despite our best algorithmic efforts to thwart these from surfacing, you will still notice two exemplary moments if you watch the video above closely. We wanted to quantify this tendency.

To test the effect, people were asked to add their name for recognition or get notified when the flipbook results were ready. We split the group in two; half were prompted to draw a circle confirming they were a human before being asked for their information (name, phone number, or email), the other half were prompted to draw after we had their info.

The results were…surprisingly mild. We had 5,899 participants; 3,308 submitted a drawing before giving their information, and 2,591 after. The results for both groups were similar. Our conclusion was that most likely the experiment was flawed. Regardless of the order of the prompts, people knew personal information was about to be collected. While the disinhibition effect wasn’t significant, the lack of subversiveness in general was quite surprising. Despite accepting all forms of drawing attempts, 99.2% of people still adhered to the prompt by attempting a proper circle.

Our small rebellious group yielded a meager four probable penises, some non-circle geometric shapes, hearts, flowers, human figures, and various other doodles.

That’s all for the recap. If you want to go deeper about what it all means and learn about other aspects of the experiments, check out the deep-dive conversation our team had reviewing the results.