So I found a refurbished iPad on the Apple site for really cheap.

My old one...the one that I won as first prize in the Douglas Adams contest back in 2012.....she has had a long a fruitful run. I blogged it all if you wanna look back at it. I believe it is Jan through June of 2012. She was a Ipad gen 3. I won it like 4 or 5 months before the gen 4 came out, but right after it was released. Yeah that year they released them really close together. It is a signal of my accomplishment. It is a reminder of what I can do. It is a memory of Stephen Fry (aaaaaaah) calling my work a love letter that was cute but not too precious. It is a memory of Bob Stein looking me up and giving me a call and saying he thought my comedic choices were good, and that he thought I had talent and potential. He told me to contact him when I was ready to go pro. It is also a reminder of how petty people can be, as it is the only part of the whole prize package I actually recieved.

She has served me well. However, years and years of use and a buse has made her....weary. I have struggled for years to keep her going. I personally replaced the battery andthe bluetooth, and I replaced the screen and digitizer at least 4 times. I have an issue with my joints, and that means from time to time my hands just release and stop holding whatever it is I am holding. Sometimes that means the ipad she ended up on the floor. 😞 When I had a good case for her it was fine. When I didn’t....well that is the reason the screen and digitizer was replaced so many times. This last time when I went to replace the screen I found some internal damage that was fatal. Well, almost. She had been dropped so many times the metal tags that hold the LCD screen in place were completely sheered off. Even though the screen works fine, this means it is floating around inside the iPad and it cannot sync with the digitizer. I can’t just get new tabs....I have to get a whole new LCD screen. Which no one has. iFixit has them off and on, but now is not one of those on times. They also charge $45-$50 for one, without the shipping.

So I had to make a decision. Do I persist in keeping her going with bubblegum and duct tape, or do I move on? Moving on felt...wrong. Like cheating on a spouse. She has been a loyal friend, and a memory I will cherish for the rest of my life. It feels wrong to just give up on her. But she is now old enough I can’t update her further than ios 9. And it will be harder and harder to keep her in action. But.....they engraved “Don’t Panic” on the back of her. But if I have to keep putting $40-$50 into her every couple of months, and she will still only be limping along, is it worth it?

Well, perusing the Apple site and finding the cheap refurbished iPad made my final decision. I bought it. And now I am testing Weebly’s newer app by posting from it.

It is sad. I feel like I betrayed a friend. I feel like we have been through so much together and I am just tossing her aside like yesterday’s jam. There is so much I have been able to accomplish just because she was there in my life. So much more I plan to accomplish, and she won’t be there by my side (or on the floor).

​ I am not going to just throw her out though. I will eventually get the new LCD screen and make her work again. Or I will gut her and put her shell in a shadowbox for my wall. For now I feel like I am mourning a friend. Is that wierd?

It has been 5 days. Yes, that is a long time to take on this project. A lot more than I expected. I thought the majority of my problems with this software were because I was unfamiliar with it. After working and working to try get get what I wanted out of the software I finally gave up.

My first move was to get the manual. I figured any questions I might have would be answered by it. I was wrong. Things it didn't explain that would have been helpful:

-How to join clips
-How to put sound to more than one clip, when you are using multiple clips in your movie (which they suggest you do) and you have one long sound clip
-How to remove audio that you have uploaded. Not from the clips, but from the import queue.
-How to resize your stills

I had several issues while working with this. Again, I am probably trying to do more than it was meant for, but still it was frustrating. As I do not currently have the ability to capture pictures directly into the computer, importing stills was all I could do. As I used my iPad to take the stills, I had no options as to the size or dimensions of the stills. Because they were so large it took a long time to import. I expected this. It would be a lot to ask of any program to make that large of a data import go quickly.

I chose to set the movie frame rate at 24 fps. It is easier to calculate movement with an even number of frames per second. That is something I am still struggling with. When you see the video you will see stilted movement and fluttriness. That is due more to my learning curve for calculating movement than it is the software. Still, 24 fps seemed to work out ok.

Because I plan to break my videos up into scenes, I made more than one clip to test the software's continuity abilities. The first clip is from the TMBG Istanbul video I have been playing with, the second is just a little thing I shot to play around with. I recorded myself playing a simple chord progression on the ukelele for my sound. I am glad, because if I had chosen dialog getting the sound to match would have been way more difficult than it already was.

The first issue I encountered was getting the clips to join up. It isn't clear how to do that. My idea was to take my two clips, put them back to back then add the sound. That didn't work. There is no way to do that. So then I tried to add the sound to the first clip, but then it made the first clip twice as long with a long pause of background, then it ran the second clip. That is where I ran into the next problem. There is no time ticker anywhere. I had no idea how long each clip was exactly. My next idea was to cut the sound into the right length for the clips. Makes sense. Didn't work. I tried exporting each clip separately to figure out how long I needed to make each audio clip. It was off by 4 seconds. When I cut the audio and imported it into AI, each clip was too short. At that point I ran out of patience and just moved the audio so there was a few seconds of silence at the beginning and a few at the end. Having instructions on how to do this would have helped a lot. Having a counter so I knew exactly how long my clips were and how much audio I needed to fill the space would have helped a lot.

I have a bunch more I can say about it, but I think I am going to end it here. I was disappointed. I expected more from Aardman. At the very least I expected to be able to find answers to my questions and not spend 5 days with frustrating trial and error.  I also already stated some things in my last post, and as I did not find answers I will just leave it alone. I am glad it was a free trial and I didn't waste money on it.

So here is my final video:

Obsession. I think that is the word that best describes my relationship with stop motion animation. I think I have also mentioned in the past that I have a secret crush on Aardman Studios. They are the creators of Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, the kid's show Timmy Time, and last but not least, the new movie The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists! (which was changed to Pirates! Band of Misfits for US audiences. WHY??? the original title was SO much better!!) BTW, thier stuff is no longer claymation. It is now all latex. It is a better choice. Easier to keep from getting fingerprints or lint sticking to the models, harder to destroy, imminently more reusable. Imminently more practical.

Anyway, I digress.....

My point is that Aardman has teamed up with some software developers to create an easy to use interface for stop motion called Animate It! It is aimed at kids, to get them started with playing around with stop motion. They have a kit you can purchase that has some plasticine type clay, a mold, plastic eyes, and a green piece of felt that can be used for a green screen. I think you can only get it in the UK. But the software is available online for a 14 day free trial. As it is a free trial, I thought I would play around with it to see how well it works. I haven't played with it very much yet. I must admit, if you are capturing your movie with a webcam or computer connected camera it is easy to use. It does allow for stills import, but you have to really search to find the options for it. It also takes forever to import your stills. It took me 40 minutes to get all 917 pictures imported into the software interface. I also had to import them in batches.  Here's a screen shot:

See the odd looking frame in the middle of the strip at the bottom? That was my attempt to expand the beginning of my animation by replicating frames already in the timeline. I have no idea why that happened yet. I am guessing it has something to do with the size of the picture. I still need to research why, but my theory is it autosizes it when I import but doesn't when I replicate. I am thinking it is something I can overcome if I learn a bit more about the software.

The other problem I am encountering thus far is lag time and responsiveness. Sometimes when I try to do something in this interface, it either takes an unreasonably long amount of time or doesn't happen at all. Again, I need to do more research, so I am not sure if it is because this is a new interface or maybe I don't have the processing power this software requires. I did not see any requirements listed anywhere, so I assumed they had made it usable for the lowest common denominator. My computer doesn't have the greatest processor, but it also isn't that bad.  I can play most video games no problem.

In the next couple of days, while I still have the free trial, I will play around with it and look for forums and answers. I hope to have a good video to show you by the end. The list price on the website is in pounds, so I suspect that it is not available for purchase in the US. that is something else I will have to research. The price for the full version is 19.95. Direct conversion places it at around $30.

I also have yet to play around with the audio options.

Though I doubt that Aardman studios will move from the full featured Stop Motion Pro to this software, it looks like it may be a cheap, useable alternative.

More laters! 

So I did a little playing, and found some interesting things. No, I wouldn't recommend always using iPad apps for stop motion. Seems stupid if you have the money for the real deal compiler software and real equipment. I don't. I have had problems getting After Effects to work, Windows Movie Maker goes in and out of utility, and pretty much everything else out there requires you to be able to capture directly to computer and my point n shoot doesn't allow that.

So now that I have the iPad that was first prize for the Literary Platform Douglas Adams Animation contest, I thought I would research the feasibility of using the iPad. I do not have a Mac computer, so that has been my first hurdle to jump. Apparently they do not play well together. After several tried I finally got the pictures I took with the iPad onto my Windows machine. If I can ever get the software to work for me, that might be doable. At first I was having problems with the camera. Remember, this was made to be idiot proof, which means very little control. I learned a few things about how to get it to work right.

1. Use a LOT of light. The controls are really shitty, so if you want a clear picture you need lots and lots of light. Even if you think you have enough light, add more. The camera seems to work better with excess light than with not enough. Grainy pictures that aren't as crisp as you want them will be the result if you don't.

2. Even when using Focus Lock, double check to make sure focus hasn't changed. If you tap and hold your finger in a particular spot, it will lock focus on that spot and it is supposed to keep focus on the spot until you move it. Well, in the we-know-better-than-you vein, it doesn't always stay in focus lock. From time to time it does the face scan thing, which removes focus lock if the focus isn't focused on what it thinks is a face. This annoys me. I have not found a way to turn the face recognition off yet. That may come, but for now there doesn't seem a way around it, so you have to constantly check to make sure your focus lock is where you want it to be.

3. Keep fingers away from the lens. I know this seems a simple and obvious thing, but when you are dealing with smalls sets as I am and have to keep the camera close in, sometimes I can't help but get my hands or fingers too close to the lens, which breaks the focus lock and readjusts it to the closest thing - me. That shouldn't happen with focus lock, but it is happening just about every picture.

Ok, so now I have figured out how to get the camera to sort of work. Lets talk about the apps I tried out. Most of the animation apps were not for stop motion. They were for drawn animation. I found 3 apps that actually fit the criteria and also didn't require me to buy the full version for a Mac in order to use it. I tried out iMotion HD, StopAnimator and StoMo. I have no idea who created these apps. I am not promoting any of them particularly. I am just comparing them. Remember as I go through these that I am looking to do good quality videos. All three of these would be good if you are a kid and only want to play with stop motion. Someone who is an expert in stop motion and is very skilled at the craft may be able to do a better job than I did. But for what it is worth, here is how it all shook out.

iMotion - This one isn't too bad. It does have an onion skin option, which I like. You can also do time lapse with this app. I haven't tried it yet. Seems interesting. Doesn't do stop mo though, so I will leave that for later. First thing I noticed is you have absolutely no control over the camera. You can't set focus lock, you can't zoom in, you can't do anything. This is fine if you are working in a big set, I guess, but in these small sets it is a pain in the ass. The focus is so not consistent it makes me want to scream. Also, when exporting the video you do not get to choose the frame rate of the exported video. You can choose it in the app, but it ignores your choice when exporting.

Here's the short sample video I did:

Besides being fluttery, which seems to be my issue not the app's, it is way faster than it should be. If you slow it down to the speed it was supposed to be, you can see the focus changing. Annoying!

StopAnimator- This one also doesn't allow for any type of camera control. It also doesn't have any onion skin capability. You don't have any type of frame rate control either. The one good thing about this app is if you set some things in the camera mode, it will hold on to them - though focus lock is not one of them. But if you zoom in via camera then switch apps you can be zoomed in for this app. When watching this one, notice that even though I did not move the camera in any way nor did I set a zoom or unset a zoom, the views are very very different.

Here's this one:

This one at least stayed at a good frame rate. You can see the focus changing. It is infinitely annoying.

StoMo - This has the most controls inside the app of all of them. It keeps track of the number of frames you have taken, it allows you to shoot more than one scene and label them. It also gives you control over how dark the previous image is when using onion skinning and lets you control the fram rate. You can play it back at several frame rates to see which one works best. It is also the only one that allows you to edit individual frames. The biggest problems with this app is again you have no control over the camera and the image you get isn't exactly the image you see in the preview. It isn't always as focused as the actual picture is, so you have no idea what exactly the end result will be. It also has some lag and responsiveness issues.

Notice how much further away it looks than the other videos. I did not move the camera, play with the zoom, nor did I have any type of control over that. The frames in the app look closer to what you see in the other video than to what you see in this video. It also continuously refocuses, and as you can't really tell under the onion skinning and blurriness, I couldn't fix it. That frustrates me as well.

So, I suppose in conclusion I don't really think any of these will work for what I do. There may be more that I have missed. The search feature isn't exactly precise in the app store. There may be ways to work around these flaws. And one day I may have the patience to figure them out. For now, though, it doesn't work. I have limited energy at the moment, so I need to find one thing that I like and really concentrate on learning it. Once I settle onto what "it" is.

Oh...and none of the apps allow you to add audio. You have to find a separate application to do that. That is annoying as hell as well.