Stop Motion Animation

Happy belated New Year! One of my resolutions is not to promise that I'll blog more. There are a lot of stuff I could write about but I choose to be lazy instead.

Anyway, we spent much of the holiday break in Toronto. We visited the Ontario Science Center where we played with stop motion animation in a hands on lab. Jade was really interested in animation and she wanted to do more. I promised her that we could it when we got back to California. When we got back home I looked for a few packages for the Mac and the best one I found was iStopMotion. It's really simple to use (even a 5 year old can use it) and it produces great results. The product has many tiers including a home, prosumer and professional versions. The home version is about $50 and has all the features you need to create stop motion animation. I imported the clips into iMovie for editing and adding the soundtrack.

I experimented with the set up using a crappy Logitech web cam since I didn't have a FireWire cable for my DV camera. Once I figured out how all the pieces fit together, I set up a table top animation studio in the living room. I showed Jade the basics of using the software and let her go. The film above was done mostly by Jade with a little help from me. Jade and I worked on the two characters at the beach but Jade did the other clips herself. Sound track by Buckethead.