Way overdue is our mentioning of Oscar Stringer's cool new CD, "The Animation For Education Toolkit":

Thanks, Oscar, for this great resource.

Mathias Mertens organises the second annual german Brickfilm festival "Steinerei 2006" May 13th in Hannover, Germany. Entries can be made by german speaking brickfilmers (must be member of the Brickboard.de forum) and are due by March 30th. They will be shown at a local cinema. The best films will be chosen by a top-class jury.

FotoMagico 1.5.1 adds support for new album types (including photocasts) in iPhoto 6 and fixes a number of issues which you can read about in the Version History. Download here.

Recently we had our 2006 kick off meeting in Leoben, Austria. We took the opportunity for a photo shooting session creating a number of pictures for the use on our website. Here is a funny animation:

From Left to Right: Vera, Werner, Achim, Michael, Oliver, Florian

Sven is going overdrive with his new short "Them Twickenham Knights" (starring our own Vera!) and has published a page with Royal Extras: A real cool Making of with two new pages every day, posters and desktop pics, a collection of links to other "Knightly" animations and even the obligatory outtake.

Stewart from UK pop, punk and rock band Slash Bikini writes: "Last weekend we made a little video for our band using your software [iStopMotion] and an iSight camera. This was our first attempt at stop motion and we think it is quite charming. Thanks for the software - we think it's awesome!"

Check out the video here. A bit of background info to the video is here. The band is giving some of their songs away on their website and you can get their album "Backup Chiller One" on iTunes.

Rick Curran reviews iStopMotion 1.9 for MacNN:

Overall this is an interesting tool for your AV arsenal. It helps you create smooth animation and time-lapse movies for a reasonable price.

Rob Galbraith benchmarks the MacBook Pro for his Digital Photography Insights and mentions FotoMagico: "The only other app of significance we unearthed in Universal Binary format is Boinx FotoMagico 1.5. And while it's a way-cool slide show maker, it doesn't lend itself to A-B performance comparisons."

An assessment which is probably correct. We tried to compare FotoMagico running on an Intel iMac to FotoMagico running on an last generation iMac G5, but other than rendering movies, we did not find a function that could be easily timed. And rendering movies is done by QuickTime and not by FotoMagico.

Sven is also hosting a Podcast about and with his work. Subscribe here.