The kids and I have wanted to play with stop motion animation for ages. Since we got a video camera for ourselves for Christmas we can finally do it.

We grabbed a free stop motion application called SingleFramer (OSX only). It pretty much has no features, just onion skinning which allows you to see what your model is doing overlaid with the previous frame you just took so you can see what you have changed between frames. Harryhausen never had it so good. There’s a few good packages with more features for under $100, but I wasn’t gonna lay out any money until we see if we enjoy doing this - it’s pretty time consuming.

Connor and I screen tested a pipe cleaner bug we made yesterday for our first quick play with the gear. He really enjoyed it and is keen to go again. I rearranged the model and he clicked the frame capture button. You can see my hand in one frame :) We only made about a second of video, but we’ve learned a lot!

Watch The Bug’s First Screen Test (72kb, Quicktime required)