Jeff Scher writes: "I'm an animator and a huge fan of iStopMotion. As a teacher I've been using it in school (School Of Visual Art in New York) in the animation department and in the Graphic Design department as well. I have used it professionally and in art gallery contexts. [...] I love iStopMotion and it has changed my life."

Jeff has posted some of his work at his website and will be giving a special seminar for high school students at the Musem of Modern Art (!) on stop motion animation end of October.

Paul Lewis made the movie "Transition" with iStopMotion for his college of art diploma.

For users of Apple's Backup 3, it is now as easy as never before to back up License Keys and Preferences for Boinx Software Products. Boinx Software introduces the QuickPick for Backup 3:

To use this, you'll need Apple Backup 3 which is available as part of their .Mac service. Allegedly, you do not need to be a paying member to get it, it is also available if you sign up for a trial account.

Download the QuickPick installer from the link above and start it. It will put the QuickPick files in the proper location and give you instructions on how to create a backup plan that includes Boinx Software license data and Preferences.

It works for all Boinx Software products.

If you use other Backup programs, the QuickPick backs up the following directories and files:

• ~/Library/Application Support/Boinx/Licenses/*.license
• /Library/Application Support/Boinx/Licenses/*.license
• ~/Library/Preferences/com.boinx.*

If you did not understand that part, you'll know why it is so cool to have the QuickPicks in Backup 3...

Adrian uses iStopMotion to create night sky time lapse movies which he posts to his .Mac homepage. Check out the "Orion Time Lapse" and the "Day to Night time lapse". Cool.

This weekend, I was at the ATI Switzerland, giving a presentation on iStopMotion on Saturday. I am becoming a great fan of the Apple education community, meeting with all these great teachers. Some of them are amazing idealists, spending their own money on iBooks for their pupils and equipment that the schools can't afford.

At the beginning of this event, there was a presentation by Jean-Luc Barras of the SFIB which runs the educa.ch portal for education in Switzerland. He presented an impressive high level view of the state of education in general. It reminded me why I once was very passionate about the issue of learning. He introduced himself with a quote by a third world teacher about his children needing "soccer fields for the minds". The idea being that educational content needs to be fun and competitive.

Of course, we believe that iStopMotion fits this perfectly. It is fun, educational in a lot of areas and it can easily be given a competitive context where, in the end, everybody wins.

The iStopMotion presentation gathered a large croud. From the numbers, a bit less than half of the ATI participants were attending my talk despite 3 other presentations running at the same time. I hear that attendees were impressed and found the presentation useful which I am glad to hear. If you could not attend the talk, it was essentially a summary of the main points of stop motion animation in the classroom. Apple has a couple of great pages on the topic online at the english web site and the swiss.