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Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts

Thursday, March 26, 2009

StoryBlender Can Animate Your Photos



StoryBlender is a new on-line utility that will animate your photos. Tony Vincent twittered that he had tried StoryBlender so I thought that I would wander over and see what was happening.

StoryBlender provides you with a wide assortment of mouths/lips that you can place on photos of your choosing. You can change the size and angle for these mouths so you can make them fit the face. You will see that I placed a set of lips at an angle on my face. (It appears that you can only add one set of lips per photo.) Took a while to get the right fit, but it seems to work. Still looks a little dorky but I have seen worse on the David Letterman Show.

Students could use this technology to animate historical pictures. Imagine having them add voices to George Washington or Madame Curie or Leonardo Da Vinci? It would require them to research what they would have said and how they would have said it.

What do you think? How would you use StoryBlender to bring animation into your educational setting?
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Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Periscope: Webcam or Security Cam

I was just surfing the web today when I dropped by freeverse.com. You may know about this company because of the wonderful games that they make. I was just perusing their applications when I found Periscope. This Mac-only software ($40) is billed as the "next generation of web camp software." I don't know if it is the next generation, but it is truly unique.

Periscope is primarily designed as a surveillance tool. It will enable you to monitor a room by taking a photo when it sees motion, hears sound, or at timed intervals. I am not too sure how to use the surveillance tool in the classroom, but imagine using this to create time-lapsed photography to study processes. The greatest part was that all of these photos can be sent to your e-mail, .Mac web page, or FTP site, and can even be uploaded to Flickr!

Ideas for time-lapsed photography: Watch a bean pod grow over a week (set it to click every 6 hours); Study the shadows as the sun progresses across the sky (point the camera out the window and click every 10 minutes); or Watch a geranium flower bloom over two hours (click every 7 minutes).

Stop Motion Animation: I was struck with the possibilities for creating my own stop motion animation. I set it up using the iSight camera built into my MacBook. I wasn't very imaginative, but I created this Roaming Jax video.



True, there are other programs that are designed for creating stop motion animation, like Frames by Tech4Learning. Frames was created specifically to make stop motion animation simple for kids, but I will have to review that at another time.