Animation

See also: Video, Record, Flash, Gnash...

Stop Motion

Stop Motion Animation on the OLPC would be a great feature for the built in camera and Record activity. Remote shutter control would be a nice feature however, otherwise you will introduce camera-shake into your footage.

Isforinsects has volunteered to do a how-to as a content package. Thinking: Photos and/or video, all no vocals or words. That way nothing to translate.

One might use MJPEG Tools to assemble Record photos into an ogg, which should work with gstreamer and helix.

Stop-Motion Links

Via Wikihow, from the wonderful Felicity:

• Create Stop Motion (conventional computer & camera)
• Make a Stop Animation video
• WikiHow Animate Clay
• Figurine & armature creation
• Puppets
• Putty Dough and slime, Clay subsitutes
• Clay Animals
• Other Clay projects

Cartoon Builder?

The description of Cartoon_builder seems to match many stop-animation and timelapse movie goals: "You can play the sequence at different speeds, and save it. 'Make Your Own' functionality lets you produce original cartoons that incorporate character poses, backgrounds and sounds you made yourself using other XO applications (Paint, Camera, Microphone, etc.)"

See, for example, the Growing_Beans learning activity here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Learning_activities/Growing_Beans.

Paper Animation

Paper animation can be done as conventional drawn frame animation, shadow-puppets or cutout figures (think South Park). There is likely information about this on wikihow that could be gleaned.

Paper Animation Links

• Drawing Cartoons and Comics (category)
• Drawing (category)

Lighting

The OLPC screens with full lcd brightness might provide a decent RGB controlled fill light. Will experiment.

Display reports someone's 64 cd/m^2 measurement. x 0.0155 is... 1 cd. Perhaps 1 lm. But they tested an old prototype, so a B4/XO-1 may be different. MitchellNCharity 00:44, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

I just want to say that this is a great idea. I suspect that the screen would only have an effect in relatively low-light conditions, but it would be great if the camera still works in these conditions. —Joe 10:24, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

Dang. We need light. The longer the exposure time, the more noise-grain in the image. Since we're dealing with a relatively low quality sensor in the first place, we're already going to be fighting grain. Specialization is for Insects 11:38, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

Really? I would have thought that you'd get less noise with longer exposure times — more photons = relatively more signal = relatively less noise. So instead of taking a single-frame picture, you take a short video and then use the median value of each pixel over time. Sure, it wouldn't be practical for typical photography, but it should work great for a static scene, as in stop-motion photography. Or am I missing something? —Joe 14:01, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

I just double checked on that with my animator/photographer. And yes, images over 30 seconds are going to be ugly with digital noise. With quality CCD's in something like a Nikon d40 or better it's negligible. On lower quality point and shoot cameras it can get ugly. On webcam quality ccd's it's really bad. But webcams (here defined as an open ccd with an electronic shutter) can do 'frame averaging' as you were suggesting. I don't know how hard this would be to implement. Someone should look into that and make a decision? (not I) Specialization is for Insects 18:42, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

I'm pretty sure that noise increases with exposure time, but many people using a stop-frame animation activity wouldn't mind that much about the light changing over time - if you wanted to film a flower opening for example, you would set up your OLPC in front of it at dawn, and leave it until the sun was up. For model-moving you would need a constant light source, but that might not be the most used feature. Anyone wanting inspiration should try the wonderful [FrameThief] application. It's not free, and it is OSX only, but it is really nice. --Tomhannen 15:46, 2 January 2008 (EST)

To Do

1. Glean wikihow for conventional animation and drawing how-tos
2. Research brightness of XO-B4's
3. Get hands on with XO for shutter testing

Further reference

• http://www.earobinson.org/2008/02/09/olpc-spy-cam/
• User:Ixo/Project/Webcam - other webcam / camera links and ideas.