Animation Software
I have always been fascinated by animation. When I was a kid, my dad brought back an Elmo 8-millimeter movie camera from Japan, and I was thrilled when I figured out that it had a single-frame advance on it! I made several animations about five seconds long, and on a trip to the ocean set it up on a tripod and spent forty-five minutes capturing a sunset in time-lapse. I thought it was very, very cool, but it was also expensive (that film and developing cost a lot of money), very difficult to view (you had to haul out the projector, set up a screen, thread the film, and so on), and it was, of course, silent. Yes, children, no sound!
Fast forward more years than I care to think about, and it’s a whole new world. I’ve been working with a cool little software package for Macs called iStopmotion from Boinx Software. Using any standard digital video camera, you can create animations or timelapse videos. The animation window has onion skinning, which allows you to see the previous frame as you set up the subsequent image, which is really helpful when you forget just where the arm on your character was before you moved it. It also has a voice control option, so you don’t even need to touch the computer as you move your clay blob, or drawing, or whatever you are animating.
The time-lapse function is also incredibly easy. Just set the time between frames, and click record. Here’s the view from my office at the start of the day. It represents about ten minutes of compressed time. (Watch for my coworkers showing up in the window reflection.) The occasional blurring of the screen isn’t a problem with the software; it was raining really hard that morning, and there were moments when the window was covered in sheets of water.
Of course, there are Windows programs that have much of the same functionality. I haven’t worked with any of them, but there is an extensive list of available products (along with a ton of other info) at the StopMotionWorks animation enthusiast website. These guys are from the school of “if a little info is good, a lot of info is better.”
If anyone is using animation software in schools (or just for fun!), let me know. I’d love to post it here.