Sunday, July 4, 2010

Stop motion animation with Luciole

A couple of students came to me recently to explain that they needed help with (what appeared to be) a really complicated process for creating stop-motion animations. They were doing something in Photoshop with some proprietary plugin that could only run on a particular computer, and were unable to bring that computer to school. It got me thinking: the process of creating stop-motion animation is not complicated, so surely there must be some easy-to-use software out there for creating animations. The short answer is: there is.
I installed Luciole from the Ubuntu repository (took me 30 seconds to download and install) and it turned my laptop into Peter Jackson's studio. Thankfully it was wet last weekend, so I turned the kitchen table into a brickfilms stage. My first effort was far from interesting (my wife just frowned and shook her head when she saw it) but now I can't wait until my son is old enough to make films with. I'm sure, however, that in the tradition of train sets and meccano, the grown-up will have more fun than the child.
And if that isn't enough to encourage you to try it out, would break dancing plasticine men convince you?

I chose to be a bit less ambitious with my first attempt:

No comments:

Post a Comment