I may not be Steven Spielberg, but every time I see a rerun of Gumby, I'm convinced I could be a famous producer. With Linux, I don't even have to get a fancy movie set. I can make my own science-fiction adventure film with nothing more than a Webcam and a streak of bizarre creativity.

Stopmotion is a Linux program designed for creating stop-motion films. It's available for most distributions and easily compilable for the rest. Stopmotion is simple in its design, and it allows you either to import a series of pre-taken photos or take live stop-action with a Webcam. I find the latter to be slightly easier, as you can see a ghost image of the last shot you took, making the slight changes you need easy to spot.

Recording stop-motion films is tedious work, but the end result can be pretty cool. Check out the homepage, short-linked here: http://is.gd/stopmotion. If you create an interesting video, send a link to ljeditor@linuxjournal.com. If we get enough, we'll post them online.