Re: Shows that inspire....

We used to be big fans of "Mr. Bumpy" and his "Bump in the night" show when the kids were tiny tots. For those that don't know, the premise is that he's a friendly version of the imaginary monster under the kid's bed, kind of a party-hearty Beetlejuice kind of thing. You can likely find clips on youtube or copies on Amazon.

My 15-year-old has gone bonkers for stop-motion this year, I think he's been sneaking looks at "Robot Chicken" at a friend's house (we don't let him watch it at home, the mature themes can be a little risque'). Anyhow, he has been trying to use iPhoto and a digital stills camera to stop-mo his Gundam space robots in elaborate battle scenes. That was really tedious in terms of method and results. We recently bought him a great little program from Boinx called iStopmotion for the mac, as a reward for improved grades.

Has all the features you need, onion skinning, time lapse, a blink comparator, frame replacement, etc. plus the higher-priced version includes greenscreen right in the program. Works with (some) webcams, (some)digital stills cams, and most DV camcorders with firewire.

You can import a background movie of somebody walking, for example, and use the onionskinning to match your clay or legos or whatever to the live motion a frame at a time, a poor-man's version of mo-cap, this gets you very fluid human motion in your animated puppets or whatever.

It also uses the mac's voice recognition, so you can keep the computer across the room and instead of needing any kind of remote shutter trigger, just say: "shoot" or "Capture two". and the program hears you and takes the captures for you. That's pretty awesome.

Basic version is around fifty bucks, the fancy pro vesion around a hundred, which can be used for broadcast-quality stuff, but they offer a free 5-day trial download. The company is called Boinx.