Green Man 2009
3rd September, 2009Imagine a festival somewhere in a parallel universe… Where giant slugs serve pizza and guinea pigs eat pies, romance blossoms for penguins and portaloos, monster musicians play on stage, kitchen utensils form a band, and the crowd contains all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures! Here it is…
Almost 100 short animations made by hundreds of young people, in a few hours, in a big red tent.
This, our fourth time at the greenman, was exciting and fun - we worked with more young people than ever before, and we were really impressed with the ideas, patience, creativity and skills that we saw! Well done to all who took part.
Thanks to Ste and Sian, Emily, Eileen and all the crew in the kids area, and also to Remix, who very kindly let us use the music that young people made with them during the festival.
(See the comments for animation software tips and links)
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:18 pm
We had a fantastic time at the festival and our daughters (Capella, 7yrs and Azara, 3yrs) both enjoyed taking part in creating a clip for this year’s film (the pizza monster towards the end of the film!). They loved it so much, I am attempting to set up our PC here at home to allow them to make a stop motion film using a Philips Toucam 900nc webcam. I’ve been trying to download some freeware stop motion software, but without much success so far - is there anything you can recommend? What’s the software you use - can I use a webcam with it? Will it cost much?
Hope you can help, you have been a real inspiration.
September 8th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Hi There, thanks so much for you comment. We’re really glad that you want to keep animating! The good news is that it’s easy with a webcam.
You can download various programs to help.
We use the excellent Stop Motion Pro
http://www.stopmotionpro.com
It’s the same software that Aardman use to animate Wallace and Gromit and has all kinds of useful features. It’s not free, but there is a cheap ‘junior’ version that does everything you could ask for.
In the past we have used Animatior DV
http://animatorhd.com
This is great too, but perhaps a bit less friendly looking. But the major bonus is that they let you download a completely free fully working version: http://animatorhd.com/download7
If you use a Mac then iStopmotion
http://boinx.com/istopmotion/overview - is the way to go.
And for all the folks who prefer linux (great!) then use Stopmotion
http://stopmotion.bjoernen.com - which is completely free too.
All these programs will work with a standard webcam, although a video camera will give you much more control over focus, zoom and lighting. Video cameras need to be firewire compatible.
The best thing to do is download some software and try it.
Hope this helps…
September 16th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Martin,
Fantastic. Downloaded AnimatorDV Simple and seems to be perfect. I’ve been creating short morph films all evening. Now, must let the girls have a go! We’ll send you our efforts soon. Many thanks for your excellent advice.