Fan Cinema Today

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.