Introducing Webcanimation!
It has been years since the initial conception and creation of Webcam-stop-motion-thing. Many things have changed since! Meet Webcanimation the next step for the WCSMT project.
Short Animation
If you think about it, animations created with WCSMT have one main common characteristic, they are short animations that last no more than a couple of seconds and they play back over and over. I would say that more than “animation” in the common sense of the word, they are short animated loops; they are the kind of thing you could find in an animated gif, as opposed to a full length animation film. They are byte sized moving pictures. This is their appeal. They take no more than a minute to create and they allow people, both experienced and amateurs to play around with moving image. They don’t need plug ins or even that you press a “play” button. This is what i have begun to call “short animation”, if anything just to have a way to differentiate it from more elaborate animation pieces. This is the kind of animation that we want to create here.
Playing short animation
Animated gifs are beautiful. But they are heavy. Way to heavy to be feasible for this project. I have always wanted to create something that combines the simplicity of the animated gif with the flexibility of better photographic image compression and full support in modern systems (yes i am looking at you Apple with your hidden restrictions on animated gif playback)
During my time working with Miniclip we have had a number of “javascript slideshows” that work as animation players by presenting images one after the other to create the illusion of animation. These are fine examples of that.
For the next phase of WCSMT i wanted something different, something lighter. I wanted something that would not require to load multiple images (with multiple header requests). I wanted to drastically reduce the size of the animations as our server can barely keep up with the demand.
I looked at early examples of animation like the Phenakistoscope, and the Zoetrope. Looking at these i got the idea to create a simple image strip containing the frames of an animation and to use CSS to move the image from side to create the illusion of animation. The solution is elegant and light. It doesn’t require to load multiple images. It’s all CSS and a bit of javascript. Voila! You can still download the ever popular animated gif, of course, but these are created on the fly and never stored in the server. (Otherwise i wouldn’t be able to afford the hosting)
Create
Creating these animations with your webcam still requires the use of flash. As much as flash is going away it will be years and years before html5 is fully and transparently supported by all mayor browsers. And it will be even more time for this to be taken the extra step that will give webcam support without plug ins.
Mark Adams, and 
Emily are discussing. 
Bob, 
The guy of awesomeness, 
aa, 
Brad and 8 others are discussing. 
Emily 5:02 am on April 10, 2012 Permalink
Hi! I love this program. It’s been spreading all over Tumblr and I’ve seen a lot of funny gifs made. But when I tried to make/publish my own the program would freeze and get stuck in the process of saving forever… I’m not sure what I did wrong.
Piterwilson 5:23 am on April 10, 2012 Permalink
Hello Emily, sorry you had that problem. Today our server is having a bit of a Eastern weekend hangover, but we are working to make it all better. Please try again soon!
Mark Adams 10:44 am on April 15, 2012 Permalink
This is fantastic! Do you think you could add an auto-capture feature? So it would automatically take an image every .05 seconds or so?
Piterwilson 4:54 pm on April 15, 2012 Permalink
Mark, that’s a great suggestion. I will absolutely consider it for the next update. Cheers!