ON COMPUTERS | BY BOB AND JOY SCHWABACH
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November 2007, Week 1 |
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STOP-MOTION PHOTOGRAPHY
Claymation Studio is a $40 program that lets you link shots taken with
any digital camera into an animated video. The results are surprising.
Claymation has become kind of a catchword for stop-motion photography,
but initially referred to using just figures made from clay. The
characters and
scenery are modeled from colored clay, and each movement requires either
You don't have to use clay figures. Claymation Studio lets you easily
connect
still pictures of just about anything into a continuous animation. We
used a
tripod-mounted camera taking single shots of a plastic duck and a
banana, for example, and had the little critter appear to race toward
the fruit and then jump up and dance on it.
This is pretty stupid-sounding stuff, but it echoes what the teenage Ray
Harryhausen did many years ago in stringing together single shots to
make scenes that ultimately became major motion pictures. He used two
toy plastic dinosaurs and by moving them slightly for each shot, made
them appear to be fighting. He later was instrumental in creating the
full-length movies "Mighty Joe Young," "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad"
and "Jason and the Argonauts." A single scene of five actors fighting a
group of skeleton warriors in "Jason" took four months to complete.
Actor Tom Hanks told Harryhausen he thought it was the greatest movie
ever made.
THE WRITE STUFF
Helium.com is a new site that
encourages writers to comment on controversial issues of the day and/or
write for payment. The site has different sections: Debates,
Marketplace, Contests, etc. The Marketplace section has assignments for
short articles, with payments ranging from less than $10 to
It sort of creates a brokerage for freelance writing, an idea whose time
perhaps has come. Other sections of the Web site raise our collective
eyebrows. For instance, prize money is offered for the best articles,
ranked by registered users. This lays it wide open to people getting
lots of votes from their church group, schools, etc.
AND NOW, TO A GREAT AND WONDERFUL GUY ...
Tribbit.com is a new site for
posting tributes. You (meaning anyone) initiate a tribute by uploading a
photo and choosing a theme. It can be someone's birthday, or a
graduation, for example. Or it can be anything: There's a tribute to the
Beatles, for instance, which includes music, videos and some interesting
commentary from Beatles fans.
It's like an online card that just keeps growing, as people on your
e-mail list add
Having an open field is kind of dangerous, however, since not everyone
is of a bright and cheerful mien. So we talked to the site hosts and
they said they would try to program in some privacy.
EDUCATION
After a pause of 25 years, we decided to revisit Knowledge Adventure's
JumpStart education programs for young children. We half expected the
same old stuff we saw back then, but things have, in fact, been updated.
The graphics are good, the education is good, and you can color us happy
about the whole
We particularly liked the world you walked around in as you discovered
things in JumpStart World for kindergarten ages. The next two programs
cover first and second grades. All are $20 from
JumpStartWorld.com. There's
a free trial.
IN THE ZONE ALARM
ZoneAlarm is a famous program for guarding you from spyware, hijacking
and being tracked as you browse the Web. There's a free version of the
basic program at download.com, or you can try out the new free beta
version of ZoneAlarm ForceField. ForceField creates a virtual bubble
(like the Cone of Silence in the old "Get Smart" TV series) that
protects the user against so-called drive-by spyware and key loggers.
The final version of ForceField is expected to retail for $30. More
details at ZoneAlarm.com .
BOOK
"The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects," by Michael Hammel; $45 from
NoStarch.com. GIMP is a free
photo-editing program for Windows. It competes with Photoshop with its
many powerful features, and of course has
NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns here at oncomp.com or seven years worth of columns at oncomp2.com
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repositioning the figures or changing their expression. Do enough of
these and you can put together a short movie, frame by frame. The
process is incredibly time-consuming, but the final effects are
unlimited. Outstanding examples are the movies "Chicken Run" and
"Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. 
