A. No need for a script (although you can make one if you like), no retakes until the actors got the lines right, no carpenter required to build the stage. Almost anything can be animated. Action toy figures, self made clay figures, paper cutouts, pencils. Almost any story can be told. Henry VII & the Battle of Bosworth, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Newton's law, matrix multiplication, the day of a Mayfly. Stop motion animation makes assignments in any topic interesting and fun. To keep students interested, it is important to provide immediate feedback. In iStopMotion, you see the ghost image of the current scene live on top of the last frame taken. This way you can see if the animation is going to be smooth, if you have moved all the items you wanted, if you accidentally knocked on the camera. Another thing is the fault tolerance. Since you can immediately see the image you took, you can spot if someone had their hands in the frame, delete the image and take it again without the hand. At any time while you work on the sequence, you can check if you've got it right by playing it back in full speed. The last important thing is that students can take possession of their work. Use iStopMotion to make a flip book that students can take home and show to their family and friends. Or edit your movie in iMovie and export it for the student's mobile phone or iPod.
Q. How was the product developed?
A. When we first started, we did not have education in mind as a potential market. We intended iStopMotion to be used by Ad agencies, Movie makers and the like. But soon after the first release, teachers started to contact us and tell us how great the application is for the classroom and how much their students loved it. Even 5 year olds found the software easy to use. Now, when we develop new versions, we take care to keep it that simple and easy to use. Many things in the new iStopMotion 2 were inspired by comments from education customers. For example, iStopMotion will now first ask for the location and the name of the file so that saving it in the end does not take a lot of time.
Q. How easy is it to integrate into school's existing systems?
A. iStopMotion is available exclusively for Apple Mac OS X. To run it, a school requires at least one Mac with Mac OS X and a DV video camera. Hardware requirements for the Mac are not very steep, any Mac that runs Mac OS X 10.4 is suitable. iStopMotion files tend to get big because it stores every frame in full resolution, so a lot of harddisk space is recommended. If a school plans to deploy iStopMotion on more than one machine, we can issue a single multiple seat license which is the same for all computers. This license can either be stored on a central server or easily copied to all the computers using several techniques like providing a unified disk image or with Apple Remote Desktop.
Q. What support/training does the company provide teachers using the software?
A. The software is exceptionally easy to use. We think that formal training is not necessary. At the website ( http://boinx.com/istopmotion/edu/ ) we provide links to third party online trainings and tutorials and keep a list if inspirational ideas as well as examples. Here is a cool idea: some teachers let their students figure out the software and then teach their teacher about it.
For further information, please contact:
Vera Ruttkowski
Tel: +49 (0)89 840 0550
Email: vera@boinx.com
Website: http://boinx.com/istopmotion/edu/
