IAC DISCUSSION FORUMS

Team, a friend's 11 year old son wants to animate his Lego characters. He has access to a digital compact camera and a full HD Samsung AVCHD camcorder (that doesn't take stills). Their home laptop is XP or Vista with Windows movie maker.

What's the best route ahead? Is there a simple program that can assemble all the individual camera jpegs (and maybe automatically duplicate them) so they can be timelined? Or some program that will take the first frame of every camcorder clip and put them all together?

tom.

Hi Tom,

(Sorry, I don't know what's going on with the links, please cut and paste)

One of the schools I work at (<13 y/o) uses the free program MonkeyJam ( http://monkeyjam.org/ ) for this very purpose, the timeline is presented vertically rather than horizontally which is unusual. There are many links to tutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omZ1wUoNf88

Here's a straightforward tutorial using Windows Movie Maker: https://youtu.be/FiIkea4diOQ?list=PLRMV ... Rinlr1lcyb

Generally these favour webcams and hopefully either the camcorder or the camera can be set up as such.

The two most important factors with this sort of film are camera stability and lighting.
So: use a very securely mounted camera either connected directly to the computer or one with a remote for shutter release and use equally stable artificial lighting.

I hope we get a chance to see the results. I love Lego films.

Thanks for your quick response and general hints, Tim.
Update time: their laptop has Windows 8 if that makes a difference.

The place to look should be http://www.brickfilms.com/ - a fascinating collection of news, tutorials, ideas and information ... but it under maintenance today, so you may have to wait a bit.

Seems I need a password to enter the brickfilms site Dave .. or might this be part of the site's upgrade?

I don't know. It seems to have been stuck like that for a while now.