Last spring I discovered the free stop-motion movie maker, JellyCam. I was instantly impressed by JellyCam even though at the time it had limited features beyond capturing images with a webcam and playing them back in stop-motion. JellyCam has made a couple of nice improvements in the ten months since I wrote my initial review of it.

The biggest improvement to JellyCam is the option to up include a soundtrack in your movies. When I first tried JellyCam I could only use images that you captured with my webcam while JellyCam was running. Now you I upload images that you have stored on your computer, camera, or phone. Another nice enhancement in the latest version of JellyCam is the removal of JellyCam watermarks on your videos.

JellyCam runs on the Adobe Air platform. If you don’t have Adobe Air Runtime on your computer, you will be prompted by JellyCam to download it. The download is free and it takes just a couple of minutes to install.

JellyCam was created and is developed by one man. You can keep up with his latest work on JellyCam here. I like JellyCam so much that I included it in my best of the web presentation at NCTIES.

The video below will help get you started using JellyCam.

Applications for Education
One way that JellyCam could be used in the classroom is to create a time-lapse video of a lengthy process like osmosis. Take pictures of raisins in water over a period of time to create a time-lapse stop-motion video of the process of osmosis. Your students could also attempt to make a video like this one in which stop-motion is used to show how food is processed by a cow from start to finish.