I remember when I was very young, one of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons wasn’t a cartoon at all. It was Gumby. In case you’ve never seen Gumby, he is a funny green figure animated using stop motion clay animation.
You can understand why I was excited when I found out that iKITMovie, a stop motion 3D animation software, is a new sponsor of this site. I was excited to check out the product. All you need to make this type of movie is the software, a PC and a web camera or digital camera.
I downloaded and installed the trial, and was immediately pleased with the interface. It is happy and colorful, bright blue and yellow and very user friendly. I recommend that you click on the iKITMovie ad to the right of this article right now and download your free trial version so you can experience this innovative software for yourself! This isn’t a cheesy 10 or 20 frame trial, this is a 300 full frame trial complete with all the features of the regular version. Click over here ———>>
My 8 year old son was curious about what I was doing, and he immediately jumped on my computer to check it out. Within 5 minutes he had the webcam recording and the auto snapshots started. The frames were filled and it was time to edit, which was easy.
One thing that caught my eye about this software is the sounds. If you know anything about stop motion animation, you know that sounds are critical. You have to have high quality sounds to make a high quality movie.
This software comes with a database of thousands of sounds to choose from and mood music (or you can add your own sounds). These are cool sounds too, like burps, coughs, claps, sneezes, whistles, heartbeats, footsteps etc… like I said, thousands of very crisp, distinctive sounds! I spent about fifteen minutes just flipping through and listening to the different sounds.
Normally I would not give software that I just tried such high marks, but if an 8 year old can figure it out quickly, that really says something about how easy it is. In addition to the database of sounds, you can also record your own voice. How cool is that? You can use photos from your digital camera instead of the webcam if you prefer.
This software can be used for legomation, claymation or any type of stop motion animation movie. The people behind this software are also very committed to customer service, promising to respond to any questions via the contact form within 24 hours.
When it was time for Henry to go to sleep tonight, all he kept saying was, “No Mom, I want to play with this some more.” Anything that keeps his attention for that long must be really special!
You can check out iKITMovie’s blog on their website as well.
