Stop Motion Magazine April 2010 Issue #5 is available for download!!!

Stop Motion Magazine April 2010 Issue #5 is now available for free download at www.stopmotionmagazine.com This has been a great issue to release and we'd like to thank Screen Novelties, and Mark Sullivan for being a part of it. You can also find the Vertical Shooter tutorial in the back of the issue.


Enjoy!!!

Test Pattern

Still going strong on the April 2010 Issue. There were a couple of hick-ups in columns and articles today. We decided after much conversation to not publish the article about the Dingus. After reviewing the full interview with Kelly Mazurowski it became apparent that some trade secrets about the device were talked about and revealed. So we have to put a hold on the interview and article out of respect for Kelly. He does promise though that when he is ready we will be the first to let the world know.

April 2010 Issue 5 will be delayed by a couple of days.

John Ikuma
Executive Editor
Stop Motion Magazine

Vertical Shooter and Stop Motion Pro 7 Test Drive

So we finally got everything rockin and rollin on the vertical shooter set up. Here you see the Canon Rebel XS attached to the shooter. The camera is attached to a Mac Intel Quad Core Xeon computer running Windows XP. I had to do a product review for the April Issue of the magazine and this was the perfect setup to run it with. I chose to do a quick animation of a paper cutout Gopher that took about 5 minutes to make and the animation took about 30minutes to do. Over all I love SMP7 for it's simplicity and ease of use. Plus all the features on that software are very useful and I almost made it through all of them. The quick video clip is below.

PacMan Dingus and how to make a Vertical Shooter

Ok, the title of this posting doesn't sound all that whole-sum. But the fact is that this little controller that you see above the text is probably the coolest (toy) addition to the stop motion world. It's a work of genius created by Kelly Mazurowski that acts as a software based frame grabber control surface!!! What?!?!?! Yep that's right it's a very retro-styled device used to control your favorite frame grabber like Stop Motion Pro, Dragon, or any other frame grabber out there. We have the whole interview about the device an Kelly's plans to release them in the April Issue of Stop Motion Magazine that's scheduled to be released next Wednesday Night.

There's been a ton of delays with releasing this upcoming issue. For instance I (John Ikuma) had Jury duty for 2 weeks!!! Yep I got picked to serve my country and you know what I'm glad because the guy was found innocent. Another set back was the decision to build the vertical shooter for the tutorial section of the magazine which is pictured below. 

This was mainly do to the fact that I had more fun building this then actually doing anything else. It was an awesome build and took three evenings since I was elsewhere during the day. So you'll find all the instructions for the build in the April Issue of Stop Motion Magazine. I should mention that it's a 2 part tutorial and that the platters that go into the shelve slots are going to be in the June issue.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy it because this issue was a lot of fun to make.

Interviewed Screen Novelties Today

We sat down today with the boys of Screen Novelties for the upcoming featured article in this months issue of the magazine. Chris, Seamas, and Mark shared their world and their studio with us. If your unfamiliar with who these guys are then you've been missing out. But don't worry you'll become instant fans once you see some of their work . They've done both commercial and television work and are currently working on developing a feature film. If you ever wondered who did the stop mo for the Sponge Bob Square Pants series and Movie along with the television show Chowder these are the guys. Checkout their Mysterious Mose music video that's embedded below.