Stop motion

From Freepedia

Stop motion is an animation technique which makes static objects appear to be moving. It is central to the clay animation technique used on popular children's shows such as Gumby and to the puppet-based animation of such well-known films as (Tim Burton's) The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993), Chicken Run (DreamWorks/Aardman Animations, 2000) and Corpse Bride (Tim Burton, 2005).

Stop motion requires a camera, either motion picture or digital, that can expose single frames. It works by shooting a single frame, stopping the camera to move the object a little bit, and then shooting another frame. When the film runs continuously for more than 15 frames per second, the illusion of fluid motion is created and the objects appear to move by themselves. This is similar to the animation of cartoons, but with real objects instead of drawings.


Contents

History

Stop motion animation is almost as old as film-making itself. The first instance of the technique can be credited to Albert E. Smith for The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898), in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life. The earliest clay animation film was Modelling Extraordinary (1912).

The great European stop motion pioneer was Wladyslaw Starewicz, who animated The Beautiful Lukanida (1910). The technique took hold among the avant-garde in Eastern Europe in the 1920s and '30s, growing out of a strong cultural tradition of puppetry. Notable artists include the Russian Alexander Ptushko, Hungarian George Pal and the influential Czech animator Jirí Trnka. The aesthetic tradion of the puppet film was continued by Bretislav Pojar, Kihachiro Kawamoto, Ivo Caprino, Jan Švankmajer, Stephen and Timothy Quay (Brothers Quay), and Galina Beda.

The great pioneer of American stop motion was Willis O'Brien, who animated The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933). His student Ray Harryhausen made numerous movies with the same technique; most famously, the skeleton scene from Jason and the Argonauts (1964). But America and Britain were slower to embrace the puppet film, and the use of stop motion grew out of other sources.

American children's television in the 1950s had often used string-puppets, and in Britain the glove-puppet had been part of popular culture from the days of Punch and Judy.

In DDR they were early too, in November 1959 the first episode of Unser Sandmännchen was shown, a character that primary had cold war propaganda as its main function. And new episodes are amazingly enough still being produced, making ot one of the longest running animated series in the world, althought the show's purpose today has changed to pure entertainment as the cold war is over.

In the 1960s the French animator Serge Danot created The Magic Roundabout (from 1965) which played for many years on the BBC. Another French/Polish stop-motion animated series was Colargol (aka Barnaby the Bear), by Olga Pouchine and Tadeusz Wilkosz, and was an expensive series to produce.

A British TV-series The Clangers (1969) became popular on television. The British artists Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall (Cosgrove Hall Films) produced a full-length film The Wind in the Willows (1983) based on Kenneth Grahame's children's classic.

Italy stop motion films include Quaq Quao (1978), by Francesco Misseri, which was stop-motion with origami, and the clay animation kitties Mio and Mao.

A stop-motion animated series of Tove Jansson's "The Moomins" (from 1979), produced by Film Polski and Jupiter Films was also a european production, made in different countries like Poland and Austria. This stop-motion was rather primitive, sometimes the puppets "moved" by a series of stills instead of showing actual movements.

In North America, Jules Bass produced a series of popular Christmas specials such as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (1964), while Art Clokey created the television series Gumby (using clay animation) and Davey and Goliath (1960-1977).

Current Work

The first stop motion feature film to receive worldwide distribution was Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). More recently, stop motion has been used in the works of Aardman Animation, including the Wallace and Gromit films as well as their film Chicken Run (2000).

Aardman also produced commercials and music videos, notably the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", which uses a variant of stop motion called pixilation; this involved Gabriel holding a pose while each frame was shot and moving between exposures, effectively becoming a human puppet. More recently Aardman used this technique on a series of short films for BBC THREE entitled Angry Kid, which starred a live actor wearing a mask. The actor's pose and the mask's expression had to be altered slightly for each exposure.

Another more complicated variation on stop motion is go motion, co-developed by Phil Tippett and used on the film Dragonslayer, which involves moving the model slightly during each exposure to produce a more realistic motion blurring effect.

Although nowadays the almost universal use of CGI (computer generated imagery) has effectively rendered stop motion obsolete as a serious special effects tool in feature film, its low entry price means it is still used on children's programming, commercials, and comic shows such as Robot Chicken. The argument that the textures achieved with CGI can not match the way real textures are captured by stop motion also makes it valuable for a handful of movie-makers, notably Tim Burton, whose animated film Corpse Bride was released in 2005.

The internet is also home to hundreds, and possibly thousands, of short digital films known as Brickmation. Brickmation films are, for the most part, stop motion films featuring LEGO minifigs as a vital component. The limited flexibility of Lego's minifigs make for both ease of use and less than realistic action, which might be said to constitute a vital part of their appeal.

Even amateurs can try stop motion with most ordinary video cameras with a few simple steps:

  • Use a tripod, a chair or something else to secure the camera;
  • Toggle recording modes until you find the appropriate mode;
  • Start shooting clay models, LEGO, action figures, or any other desired object.

Software

Compare with

References

  • Tayler, Richard. The Encyclopedia of Animation Techniques. Running Press, Philadelphia, 1996. ISBN 156138531X
  • Lord, Peter and Brian Sibley. Creating 3-D Animation. Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1998. ISBN 0810919966
  • Sibley, Brian. Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie. Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2000. ISBN 0810941244

Stop Motion Movies

External links

See also

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