Animation

Laura and I have been experimenting with stop-motion animation - set up a camera on a tripod with a remote shutter release, then position a scene in front of it, and change it by a very small amount between shooting frames.
10 frames per second seems to work ok for what we are doing (and you get more video for your money, so it is a bit more rewarding!).
I am using mencoder to turn the jpeg images from the camera into a mpeg4 video using the following:

mencoder mf://*.JPG -mf fps=10 -o leaves.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800 -vf scale=640:480

This produces an mpeg4 encoded .avi file, scaled to 640x480 pixels.
You can then run mencoder again to add a mp3 audio stream.
The results can be seen at http://flickr.com/jones139.