At 42, retirement is a long way off for me, and there's no telling where we'll be with technology at that point. But there are all sorts of things I'd love to play with, if only I had the time, and Boinx Software's iStopMotion [1] is one of them. In essence, iStopMotion is stop motion animation software that enables you to make movies by combining together many still images, frame by frame. I'm a huge fan of the Wallace & Gromit claymation movies, and I could easily see spending tons of time moving little bits of clay around and using iStopMotion to take pictures of them and turn them into a finished movie. It's the sort of thing a child could get sucked into for days. If you want even more of a sense of what iStopMotion can do, be sure to check out the examples [2] of what people have done with iStopMotion on Boinx's Web site.
For professionals, Boinx offers iStopMotion Express ($99) and iStopMotion Pro ($499), which add features for animation aficionados and professionals, including continuous recording, rotoscoping (tracing over live-action video), adding soundtracks, custom project presets, integration with Final Cut Pro, and the capability of creating your own foreground and background masks. But for the rest of us, the $49 iStopMotion Home has plenty of features to noodle around with and have some fun.
So if you want to win one of two copies of iStopMotion Home 2.0, each worth $49, enter at the DealBITS page [3]. All information gathered is covered by our comprehensive privacy policy [4]. Remember too, that if someone you refer to this drawing wins, you'll receive the same prize as a reward for spreading the word.
[1]: http://boinx.com/istopmotion/
[2]: http://www.boinx.com/istopmotion/examples/
[3]: http://www.tidbits.com/dealbits/istopmotion/
[4]: http://www.tidbits.com/about/privacy.html