Stop motion

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Image:Wng.jpgStop motion is an animation technique which makes static objects appear to move. 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) Corpse Bride (Tim Burton, 2005), and all of the Wallace And Gromit films.

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 at 24 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.


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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 and J. Stuart Blackton for The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898), in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life. In 1902, the film, "Fun in a Bakery Shop" used clay for a stop-motion "lightning sculpting" sequence. The Haunted Hotel (1907) is another stop motion film by James Stuart Blackton, and was a resounding success when released. Segundo de Chomons (1871-1929), from Spain, released Hotel Electrico later that same year, and used similar techniques as the Blackton film. In 1908, "A Sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Nightmare" was released, as was "The Sculptors Nightmare", a film by Billy Bitzer. One of the earliest clay animation films was Modelling Extraordinary, which dazzled audiences in 1912. December of 1916, brought the first of Willie Hopkin's 54 episodes of "Miracles in Mud" to the big screen. Also in December of 1916, the first woman animator, Helena Smith Dayton, began experimenting with clay stop motion. She would release her first film in 1917, "Romeo and Juliet".

The great European stop motion pioneer was Wladyslaw Starewicz (1892-1965), who animated The Beautiful Lukanida (1910), The Battle of the Stag Beetles (1910), The Ant and the Grasshopper (1911), Voyage to the Moon (1913), On the Warsaw Highway (1916), Frogland (1922), The Magic Clock (1926), The Mascot, (aka, The Devil's Ball) (1934), and In the Land of the Vampires (1935), to name but a few of his over fifty animated films.

Starevich was the first filmmaker to use stop-action animation and puppets to tell a story. He began by producing insect documentaries which, in turn, led to experiments with the stop-action animation of insects and beetles. Initially he wired the legs to the insects' bodies, but he improved this substantially in the ensuing years by creating leather and felt-covered puppets with technically advanced ball & socket armatures. One of his innovations was the use of motion blur which he achieved, most likely, by the use of hidden wires.

His techniques 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 Jiří Trnka. The aesthetic tradition of the puppet film was continued by Bretislav Pojar, Kihachiro Kawamoto, Ivo Caprino, Jan Švankmajer, Jiri Barta, Stephen and Timothy Quay (Brothers Quay), and Galina Beda.

The great pioneer of American stop motion was Willis O'Brien (1886-1962). In 1914, O'Brien began animating a series of short subjects set in prehistoric times. He animated his early creations by covering wooden armatures with clay, a technique he further perfected by using ball & socket armatures covered with foam, foam latex, animal hair and fur. Birth of a Flivver (1915), Morpheus Mike (1915), The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1916), R.F.D. 10,000 B.C.: A Mannikin Comedy (1917/18), The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1919), The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), The Son of Kong (1933), and, with the assistance of a young Ray Harryhausen, Mighty Joe Young (1949), yet these were but a few of the many films he animated. O'Brien's Nippy's Nightmare (1916) may have been the first film to combine live actors with stop-motion characters. His partnership with the great Mexican-American model makers/craftsmen/special effects artists/background painters/set builders, Marcel Delgado, Victor Delgado and Mario Larrinaga, led to some of the most memorable and remarkable stop-motion moments in film history.

O'Brien’s imaginative use of stop-motion, and his ambitious and inventive filmmaking, has inspired generations of film greats such as Ray Harryhausen, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Jim Danforth, Art Clokey, Pete Kleinow, Tim Burton, Dave Allen, Phil Tippett and Will Vinton, as well as thousands of lesser known animators, both professional and amateur. Many leading Science-Fiction and Fantasy writers also credit him as a great source of inspiration.

Puppeteer Lou Bunin created one of the first stop motion puppets using wire armatures and his own rubber formula. The short, satiric film about WWII entitled Bury the Axis debuted in the 1939 New York World's Fair. in a Bunin went on to produce a feature-length film version of Alice in Wonderland with a live-action Alice and stop-motion puppets portraying all the rest of the characters. Bunin was blacklisted in the 1950s but still managed to create numerous TV commercials using stop motion techniques, as well as a number of children's short films.

Willis O'Brien's student Ray Harryhausen made many movies using the same techniques; 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 November 1959 the first episode of Sandmännchen was shown on East German television, a children's show that had cold war propaganda as its primary function. New episodes are still being produced in Germany, making it one of the longest running animated series in the world. However, the show's purpose today has changed to pure entertainment.

In the 1960s, the French animator Serge Danot created the well-known The Magic Roundabout (from 1965) which played for many years on the BBC. Another French/Polish stop-motion animated series was Colargol (Barnaby the Bear in the UK, Jeremy in Canada), by Olga Pouchine and Tadeusz Wilkosz.

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.

Italian stop motion films include Quaq Quao (1978), by Francesco Misseri, which was stop-motion with origami, The Red and the Blue 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 (using 'Animagic' stop motion puppets) (1964). The specials were animated in Japan by Japanese stop-motion pioneer Tadahito Mochinaga. Meanwhile, Art Clokey created the television series Gumby (using clay animation) and Davey and Goliath (1960-1977).

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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 Animations, 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 (1981), which involves moving the model slightly during each exposure to produce a more realistic motion blurring effect. This technique was originally pioneered by Wladyslaw Starewicz in the silent era, and was used in his feature film The Tale of the Fox (1931).

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.

Another craze on the internet is just purely animating with clay figures. Extremly simple, but effective. Some barely have a face, but the comidic proportions exceed those of the clay puppets. The the comedy helps the viewer enjoy the animation without noticing the simpleness of the clay puppet. Many younger people begin their experiments in movie making with stop motion.

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.

NBC is using a version of stop motion called Stromotion for the Olympic Games. During some snowboarding events, they used the technique to break down the various tricks done by athletes.

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Software

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Compare with

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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
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Stop Motion Movies

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External links

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See also

de:Stop-Motion es:Stop-motion fr:Animation image par image nl:Stop-motion ja:ストップモーション・アニメーション pt:Stop motion simple:Stop-motion sv:Stop motion

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