The book-in-production will be released eight months from tomorrow, which means that I’m thinking of ways to promote it on-line. One obvious possibility would be some sort of YouTube video type thing, showing a conversation with the dog about physics. This runs into problems, though, given that the dog is, well, a dog, and thus doesn’t take direction very well. It’d be really difficult to get the right sort of video of her.
One solution to this would be to get some really basic video of me talking to her as a frame for the conversation, and do some sort of animation to fill in the rest. So, for example, the Bunnies Made of Cheese conversation would start with her staring out the window, wagging her tail, and then when we start talking about the physics of virtual particles, switch to animation of virtual pairs appearing and disappearing, and cheese bunnies in the backyard, etc. Then it would end with me asking if she wants to go outside, and her running for the back door.
This, of course, presents problems of its own. Namely, I have no idea how to do this sort of thing. My video-making skills are limited to piecing together clips in Movie Maker. And while I suppose it would theoretically possible to make an animation by piecing together umpteen still frames, there are more pleasant ways to drive myself completely insane.
It occurs to me, though, that there are probably software tools that could be used to make this process simpler. And it also occurs to me that I probably have readers who know something about this. So, two questions:
1) Is there software that makes it easy to put together little animated movies? This would need to run under Windows (Vista or XP), and ideally should be either free or relatively inexpensive. I’m not looking for anything too fancy– something that generated a South Park/ Monty Python sort of moving clip art look would be fine for my purposes.
2) Is there an easy way to turn animations in VPython into movie clips? I probably ought to just email this directly to Rhett from Dot Physics, but somebody else might know. I use VPython to do physics simulations for the intro class I’m teaching this term, and it ought to be possible to use it to do animations of the physical processes I’m interested in. I have no idea how to get those into a form that could be incorporated into a movie clip that could eventually end up on YouTube, though.
Any pointers you can provide to software that can do what I want would be much appreciated. Or, for that matter, if you happen to be a person who does this sort of movie-making, and you work cheap, email me, and we’ll talk.