The fundamental concept behind animation is ‘Persistence of vision’. An animated film is fundamentally a bunch of images changing rapidly on-screen, at a fixed frame rate- usually above 12fps. For making your own animation you don’t need to buy expensive and professional photographic or processing hardware or software, all you need is the following:

1. A PC
2. A webcam or a set of images
3. Linux OS (I used Linux Mint)
4. Additional software - Stopmotion
5. Some creativity :) Here we go!

Step 1: Creating Storyboard

Storyboard shows the overall flow of film by means of images and text. Just make sketches of what you are going to do in your animation film.

Step 2: Installing Stopmotion

Goto System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Search for Stopmotion. Select the package and install it. Once installation is done, launch it from Applications > Sound and Video > Stopmotion.

Step 3: Selecting Materials, Setup stage, Begin Shooting

Select materials needed for creating images. You can use paper, pencil, colours, or anything. You can even use your small toys! Then setup a stage for placing these all appropriately and also the cam. Then start webcam from the Stopmotion application, shoot your film, record frames frequently pressing space-bar.

You can either

• Start drawing an image. Take snaps after drawing each strokes until you finish drawing.

• You can move the toys or images in front of cam in a creative way and take snaps frequently.

• Draw separate images for each scenes and take snaps. (I’ve created a man walking, with his different footsteps as different images

Keep on saving your work from time to time.

Note that, you can also import images from your computer or can be drawn using Gimp.

Step 4: Post Production

Once all the frames has been captured, set the frame rate to 12 fps, and click the play button to preview your animation clip!

Now, you can export the clip as a video file as File > Export > Video. Later you can attach some audio file to it using video editors.

See how easily your animation film is created! Its the magic of Open Souse Software!!!

Here is a small animation clip which I created: