My son, Joe, is a Lego fan and is always wanting to duplicate the stop-action animations he finds on YouTube. These can be quite complex and without software designed for the process is can be quite hard to do. Enter this piece of Windows software, MonkeyJam. MonkeyJam allows you to create stop-animation sequences easily using your still camera, video camera or web cam.
The most important feature for any stop-animation program is "onion skinning". This is the digital version of what hand animators used to do -- drawing in pencil on onion skin or tracing paper and then comparing that to the next drawing by flipping back and forth between the two. This feature helps to insure that you are moving your characters in small enough increments that your animation will play as a movie and not just a series of still frames.
If you have a budding animator in your house, download and try out MonkeyJam.
I first heard about MonkeyJam in the post below...
MonkeyJam – freeware lets you create cool stop-motion animation for fun and profit: "
MonkeyJam is a neat little freeware prog which lets you create those really fun, cool stop-motion animations you see around. You [...]"
Here is a short video created by the author of this blog post.
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