About Movember.  This past month of November I was supportive of those around me who are struggling with the diagnosis of cancer.  Movember was started to bring light to men’s health issue and particularly prostrate cancer a number of years ago.  Since then our awareness of men’s cancer issue has increased as men around North America are more cognizant of their vulnerability with respect to prostrate and testicular cancer.  I found out at the beginning of November that a friend was diagnosed and another friend’s wife was also diagnosed with breast cancer.  Hmmm, that’ll get a guy thinking about his own health.  My story over the past month has been to fast from shaving, not just around my moustache but my whole head.  Below is a video about how the hair grew back, in a daily photo blog format.

Now to the details of how I collected the images so that I could effectively do a stop motion animation of or time lapse video of the progress.  It’s more stop motion in the sense that I didn’t stand there all day long but went about my business of being a father, husband, teacher and fisherman but each day returned to the same spot in my kitchen, albeit for one photo, to take a similar photo.  I used my iPhone 6 with the forward facing camera set to capture a square image.  With the lighting the same as Day 0 I began the 30 Day photo shoot.  Once captured to the camera roll, I would open that day’s image in MocaDeco which can be used to put text captions on photos.  Having setup the template each day I would just upload the picture to the template and change the day number.  Exporting the newly captioned picture back to the camera roll, the daily template would be saved.  Once in the camera roll Google photos could upload the image to online storage.  Once safe and sound there, I could create an animation in Google Photos of each days events to make an animated GIF.  This was good for the first while but as the images count increase watching a mute animated GIF got old after the first few pics.  I resorted to a video creation app called WeVideo, which is like iMovie but simpler.  Rendering the stitched images into a movie with some music created the video below.  Another feature of WeVideo which I like is the ability to voice over the music and images.  This could be effective for telling a story.  Pros of WeVideo on the iPhone 6: easy to use, uploads to WeVideo web service so that you can continue editing your work on a PC or other browser based device.  Cons of WeVideo: signin is required which is cumbersome for students but with web-based storage an account is necessary.

That’s about all it took to create the stop motion animation of #Movember2015. This was a matter of learning.

Thanks for reading.  Carpenter Out!