Grab a camera and a few objects from your junk drawer, and you're ready to go take lots of photos of the objects moving little by little, string the photos together, and you're animating. It's not hard to set up a basic stop motion rig, and the truth is that absolutely no computer is required. The object can be anything from paper cutouts to elaborately sculpted models. The principle is the exact same as hand-drawn animation, except instead of drawing a character, you photograph an object, moving the object little by little between each snapshot. We've all seen stop motion animation before: there's Gumby, Terry Gilliam's famous cut-out interludes for Monty Python, and recent movies like The Box Trolls. As part of the classroom activities, the students are encouraged to file feature requests. From its inception, it's been designed by its primary user and intended audience: a teacher and her students. It came about as a direct response to the lack of a reliable and simple stop motion software for Linux. As an added feature, since DIY projects have been highlighted in the past weeks, the resulting animations from the application have all been done by year 5 and 6 students at local schools, and the application itself was developed by me and the students' teacher, Jess Weichler of Makerbox. Cell animation is just one kind of animation, though, so this month we'll take a look at stop motion animation. Last month we looked at digital cell animation with Krita.

Basic stop motion animation software