The arrival of home video cameras in the late Seventies turbocharged home movies. Amateur filmmakers were used to spending a fortune on 3-minute, silent 8mm film reels that you shot, hoped the exposure was right and then sent off to the local photo lab for 3-4 weeks. When the reels came back, people had to set up a projector and screen in order to watch their flicks—what a hassle. Once video cameras arrived, however, people could watch a homemade video in color with sound on their TV within minutes; it was no contest, and film lost the battle fast. One drawback, however, was that there was no reasonable way to do stop-motion animation using a video camera.
There’s been a few workarounds since, and now here’s a sweet freeware program, Frame By Frame, that allows you to do stop-motion; all you need is a video- or webcamera, and a Mac. Its home website offers two versions and a slew of fun sample movies done with Lego, proving that it’s not that hard to get decent results.
Does anyone know a Windows program that does similar stuff? If so, post about it in the comments.
I have that program but I would much rather something with onion skin and maybe a time lapse function.
Does anyone know of anything like that for mac and free?
Supposedly the next version will have onion skin, but you can get that feature in iStopMotion’s family version, which is relatively cheap–I think it’s like $50. I’ve been working with it for an upcoming review and it’s excellent.