The season of garage and lawn sales is here. It's always interesting the things you can find. Like they say, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." Last year at this time I picked up a Logitech Quickcam USB camera for a mere two dollars. It sat in drawer for the better part of a year until I stumbled upon a posting on the GeekDad blog that encouraged me to pull it out and put it to use.

The blog posting mentioned a few free programs that could be used on older computers to put them back into service. One of the programs was named MonkeyJam, and this application introduced me to the world of penciltest or stop motion animation. Working with both a scanner or a web camera, MonkeyJam allows you to take many individual pictures and stitch them together to form an animated movie.

Once I got it installed, a fairly painless operation, it was fun to watch how quickly my kids took to the program. It didn't take long for them to run for their Lego. In fact, a quick Google search with the terms "monkeyjam lego" results in over 2000 hits including a fairly detailed Star Wars Phantom Menace Lego video among the top ten (I loved the plastic screen used as a force field and the jump sequences are not bad). MonkeyJam has a fairly limited feature set, but one interesting feature lets you combine more than one layer in your movie. This provides some simple ways to combine separate images into one frame including "darken", "multiply" and "blend". I'm guessing you can use this to combine character animation with a moving background.

I liked the simplicity of MonkeyJam, but as we used the program a bit more I realized that it was difficult for my kids to keep their characters and sets still while other items in the scene were being moved, and sometimes it was hard to know how far to move a piece to achieve smooth motion. A little more research on the Internet revealed a feature that other stop motion programs offered called "onion skinning". This helpful feature shows a "ghost" image of the previous shot at the same time you are previewing the live image from your camera. This lets you easily position items in relation to where they were in the last frame, and lets you do rough corrections when things get bumped accidentally as well.

There are several other free stop motion programs available including Animator DV Simple+, Motion Mage and StopMojo. I experimented a bit with StopMojo and found the onion skin feature to work very well. Several of the programs also allow you to combine audio files to your movies, letting you add a musical score, sound effects or dialog to your cinematic creations.

The most challenging thing with each of these programs came when it was time to save (or export) the movie to a file format for viewing with a video player program. Some of the animation programs have several configuration options, the most bewildering being the choice of a codec. My suggestion is to save your project in the program's native format and then experiment by exporting several movies each with combinations of the various options, until you find a format that suits your needs. For instance, if you are going to share the resulting file with people using Windows Media Player, make sure your movie plays well there. If you are concerned about file size, then choose a codec which generates the smallest file. Most codecs are pieces of software that compress the movie to a size smaller than the combination of all the individual image sizes, sacrificing some of the details in the pictures, not noticeably for the most part though.

You can get pretty creative with these free applications, making short movies for fun or building clips for adding to your own home or business videos (I'm already imagining some animated titles for our home movies). Who knows where your, or your children's imagination will take you? One thing is for sure, stop motion animation will provide hours of fun at this GeekDad's home.