I’ve been playing around with stop-action animation always wanted to try adding animation effects frame by frame to live real-time footage. My Nikon still camera has an “ultra high continuous” mode where it will take up to 100 640x480 jpegs at 30 frames per second.
I used this mode to shoot my five-year-old daughter, Brigitta, hugging her favorite stuffed animal, extending her arm and dropping it. I then mass renamed the 3.3 seconds of jpegs in reverse order; so it looks like her bunny flies up into her hand. The “magic” (she loves magic) is the lightning bolts that were added frame by frame to summon her bunny up to her hand. I mixed a pretty cool sparky sound to go along with it.
My seven-year-old daughter, Svea, loves Star Wars. I took a picture of a weird glowing liquid sphere thing that we have, cut it in half, extended it, changed its color and used it for a light saber. A wav sound search resulted in some authentic light saber sounds.
Below are single frames from the animations as well as links to the WMV files. Each file is less than 10 seconds long (with a title) and less than .5 MB in filesize.
http://hallbuzz.com/movies/2007/brigitta_summons_bunny.wmv
http://hallbuzz.com/movies/2007/sveas_light_saber.wmv