Stop Motion at New Media Meeting 3

Jonas Jongejan and i were fortunate to be invited to setup our installation Stop Motion for this year’s New Media Meeting in Norrköping, Sweden.

New Media Meeting was a really nice event. Lot’s of interesting participants, talks, bands, dj’s, vj’s and yes – lot’s of party and dancing. Plenty party geeks. Super cool organisation, great hotel and a personal host assigned to each artist. And I wondered if i should bring my sleeping bag…

Norrköping is a beautiful city. It lies along a river that has provided power and torque for the city’s industry since the 17th century. People are fishing salmon from the streets.

Stop Motion was originally brewed up in 2 days using processing, but we soon fell short of Java’s 2gb ram limit.

Coding Stop Motion

So this time we decided to port the whole thing into openframeworks. I had no prior experience with c++, but Jonas’ father is a professional programmer, and he helped us sort out some of the quirks of pointers and such.

In the original version we had used a video-camera for the stills, so it could definately look better. We decided to use a real camera instead, and read up on the ptp protocol for remote capture control. Jonas had a Canon G9, et voila, it almost worked. We could not make it respond to the standard commands, and after some days of poking around, it seemed that the camera speaks an undocumented dialect of ptp. *sigh*. It was actully more reliable to applescript a crappy Canon software, that crashed if used on an intel mac. Fortunately i’m broke enough to still use a PowerBook G4. Again closed source software, undocumented and buggy. But images were snapped, scaled and transfered via wifi to jonas’ macbook.

Before going to Norrköbing we set up the prototype at the Copenhagen Pecha Kucha. And it worked, though the Canon software was still acting up once in a while.

As the Canon G9 didn’t really work we had to work on the code, so we missed all the talks at NMM ( But the late night parties and the other art installations were of impressive geekiness.

The mixture of selfreproducing machines, lovely asskicking ladies with a sneaky vj, fab lab entrepeneaurs, and a guy with a record player for knäckebröd and lego brick sequencer was eclectic alchemy to say the least.

Indoor camera test setup

We ended up borrowing a Nikon D80 from the organisers thinking that such an expensive SLR should have a super duper ptp implementation. It worked … sometimes. The camera insisted on returning bullocks instead of an image whenever it pleased. After firmware updates and lots of poking on the usb port we again suffered the realisation that people who want to remote control cameras with software are a minority. It took us the whole friday to finally come up with the voodoo commands that would make the camera fail less than 20%. And we found out that when the battery level dropped below half, the camera started to act up again. So we made sure to charge.

And saturday night it worked! The guy who had borrowed us his camera didn’t have a power supply, so we were forced to close down the installation for recharging, but it did work.

Reason to celebrate and the after-party was great. Ended up dancing in kraftvärket till 7am.

In the process we learned not to use or even think of buying cameras with undocumented ptp implementations, that laybox rox, that alla som inte dansar är våldtäktsmän, how beer is apparently really dangerous for swedes and how to use svn and google code.

Thus, the Stop Motion source code is therefore online at http://code.google.com/p/stopmotion
If you know c++, run a mac and are of a patient nature, feel free to have a look at the mess – and contribute if you will. Especially if you know about ptp, or how to use either the mac framework or gphoto correctly. We newbies ended up piping commands into a gphoto shell, hrem.

And please respect:

1. contribute your changes to the codebase.
2. run at your own risk.
3. and observe that any commercial use of the software is hereby prohibited.
4. which is why you should contact us before exhibiting the work in public.