sporksmith/EepEepMotion

A tool for opportunistic stop motion - taking many (unrelated) photos of a single subject, and creating animation.

EepEepMotion is a tool for opportunistic stop motion animation. It was
created as part of the Travels of Code Monkey project:
http://wp.sporksmith.net/travels-of-code-monkey/

The idea is to take many photos of one subject, annotate that subject's
location, scale, and orientation in each photo, and then use that information
to create animations. This software was originally intended as a one-shot
creation. There's a lot of ugliness as a result. Depending on the
level of interest, and how my time permits I'll try to 
clean this up and generalize it to make it more straightforward to 
create animations of subjects other than Mr. Monkey. 

Included:
blender/	Blender plugin for exporting animations
EepEepMotion/	Processing application for annotating photos,
		matching individual photos to a chosen position,
		and for creating animations from the exported blender
		specification.
Travels/	Project data specific to the Travels of Code Monkey video.

Installation:
To get started, you will need Processing (http://processing.org/). 
Currently, you will need to install the peasycam Processing
library (http://mrfeinberg.com/peasycam/), though this is only actually
used for 'viewallmode'. There are currently a number of hard-coded
paths in EepEepMotion.pde that you will want to change. Minimally,
you'll need to change project_root_path.

To create animations, you will need Blender (http://www.blender.org/).
To export blender animations to a form readable by EepEepMotion, you need to use
the included blender plugin blender/export_ascii.py. You should link this
into blender's scripts directory.

The subdirectory Travels/ includes most of the sources necessary to reconstruct
the Travels of Code Monkey video. Notably missing are the source photographs,
which I could not include here for sake of space and IP issues. I've asked
the photographers about making the photos available under creative commons,
but have not been able to get a response from all of them. 

There is a skeleton directory tree under Travels/pictures. In each
subdirectory, there is a file called 'View Online.url' with the url for
that album. The easiest way to download these albums is probably using
the Picasa application, though it can also be done using a combination
of GreaseMonkey and DownThemAll.