Starting from that date WCSMT will be no more and all traffic will be redirected to Webcanimation. Links to animation created with WCSMT will still be available for 30 days after that.

If you will like to know more… please read on…

The WEB-CAM-STOP-MOTION-THING project has existed since 2007 (time flies!). During all this time a lot of fun has been had, thousands and thousands of animations have been created, we have been featured by really cool sites like b3ta and the front page of digg (back in the when… oh the “digg effect”). We have participated in events like the PLA in Bogotá and the Games Art Networking in London.

In 2012, it is time to move on to a new phase for the project. This new phase is called Webcanimation. The focus of this phase is to bring the idea to more people and to make it more accessible making use of newer  and more efficient technology. You can read more about the specific changes here.

I hope everyone has enjoyed WCSMT and that you will also enjoy 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.

After months of work getting my head around Objective-C I am very proud to announce my very first application for the IOS : Camstructr for the Iphone and Ipod Touch!

Camstructr is an application to shoot composite photos using the camera.

The viewfinder is divided into sections whose layout you can modify, when you touch on each of the sections, a region of the final photo is taken.

When all sections are shot the final image is created and you get a chance to review the photo before saving it to the Camera Roll.

Camstructr is now available on the Itunes Store.

For more information see the Camstructr page.

Their final verdict gives it a flattering final score and concludes:

“Kids and newbies to animation will have a blast with SketchStar, producing animation shorts with character”

Move aside Cesar Millan, there’s a new hispanic accent in town

We have just completed a way long over-due update of WEB CAM STOP MOTION THING based on the feedback and bug reports received. This update includes:

• Bug fixes
• UI Improvements

Thanks for your patience, it’s been a busy year!

Taken from About.com

“…the basic rule of Spanish names is fairly simple: In general, a person born into a Spanish-speaking family is given a first name followed by two surnames, the first being the father’s family name (or, more precisely, the surname he gained from his father) followed by the mother’s family name (or, again more precisely, the surname she gained from her father)…”

Also it is very common (specially in Latin American countries) for there to be 2 names in a Spanish first name.

This article on wikipedia correctly states that what i refer to here as “middle name” is actually part of the “first name”. I have only used the “middle name” convention to make it easy to understand for English speakers. In reality there is no such thing as “middle name” in Spanish names, just compound names.

The version of iOS on “The Evil One” does not match any of the versions od iOS supported for development with this installation of the iOS SDK. Please restore the device to a version of the OS lister bellow, or update to the latest version of te iOS SDK;…

And then it would show that the OS Installed on my Ipad matches exactly the Xcode supported version, thus, contradicting the message’s text.

Trying to make sense of this error did not give any results and Googling this problem did not help much. I went to the developer forums where people asked me if the device had been jail-broken or if i had used any betas of the SDK: to both the answer was no. After that pretty much everyone was stomped and i was told to go to the MacStore and check for a hardware error.

I restored my ipad and gave it a clean install (loosing all my data, i guess this is why you are supposed to have a spare Ipad/Iphone for development) but still the error persisted. I was about to go to the MacStorebut i decided to try something else before doing that, just in case.

For those having the same problem upgrading to 4.2 here’s what worked for me: Unistall and Reinstall Xcode. I did have the latest version but for some reason doing this made the problem go away.

After i followed the instructions on this post and re-downloaded and reinstalled XCode, my Ipad went back to functional status.

This is the first time i had to wipe my Ipad and i was very glad to see that the infamous Kindle app actually keeps an online Library of all my purchased books, so i didn’t loose them.

Now if only i had backed up my Epic Win progress…