Stop motion

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A stop motion animation of a moving 2 Pence coin (Sterling).

Stop motion (or frame-by-frame) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small amounts between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames are played as a continuous sequence. Clay figures are often used in stop motion animations, known as claymation, for their ease of repositioning.

[edit] History

Stop motion animation has a long history in film. Of the forms already mentioned, object animation is the oldest, then direct manipulation animation, followed (roughly) by sequential drawings on multiple pages, which quickly evolved into cel animation, with clay animation, pixilation, puppet animation, and time-lapse being developed concurrently next. The first instance of the stop motion 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. French trick film maestro Georges Méliès used it to produce moving title-card letters for one of his short films, but never exploited the process for any of his other films. The Haunted Hotel (1907) is another stop motion film by James Stuart Blackton, and was a resounding success when released. Segundo de Chomón (1871-1929), from Spain, released El Hotel eléctrico 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 Sculptor's Nightmare, a film by Billy Bitzer. French animator Emil Cole impressed audiences with his object animation tour-de-force, The Automatic Moving Company in 1910.

One of the earliest clay animation films was Modelling Extraordinary, which dazzled audiences in 1912. December 1916, brought the first of Willie Hopkin's 54 episodes of "Miracles in Mud" to the big screen. Also in December 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 .

[edit] 1960s and 1970s

In the '60s and '70s, independent clay animator Eliot Noyes Jr. refined the technique of "free-form" clay animation with his Oscar-nominated 1965 film Clay or the Origin of Species and He Man and She Bar (1972). Noyes also used stop motion to animate sand laying on glass for his musical animated film Sandman (1975). Sand-coated puppet animation was used in the Oscar-winning 1977 film The Sand Castle, produced by Dutch-Canadian animator Co Hoedeman.

Hoedeman was one of dozens of animators sheltered by the National Film Board of Canada, a Canadian government film arts agency that had supported animators for decades. A pioneer of refined multiple stop-motion films under the NFB banner was Norman McLaren who brought in many other animators to create their own creatively controlled films. Notable among these are the pinscreen animation films of Jacques Drouin, Alexeiff Parker, and Gaston Sarault such as Mindscape (1976).

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), often referred to as "The Fuzzy Felt Moomins", produced by Film Polski and Jupiter Films was also a European production, made in different countries like Poland and Austria.

Marc Paul Chinoy directed a puppet animation feature length film based on the famous "Pogo" comic strip in 1980. Titled I go Pogo, it was aired a few times on American cable channels but, sadly, has yet to be commercially released.

[edit] 1980s to present

In the 1970s and '80s, Industrial Light & Magic often used stop motion model animation for films such as the original Star Wars trilogy: the chess sequence in Star Wars, the Tauntauns and AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, and various Imperial machines in Return of the Jedi are all stop motion animation, some of it using the Go Motion process. ILM also often used model animation for some of the Indiana Jones films - the ghosts in Raiders of the Lost Ark and many of the shots of the runaway mining-cart sequence in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom are all stop-motion. The out-of-control machines in the first two "Robocop" feature films use Phil Tippett's Go Motion version of stop motion. Stop motion was also used for some shots of the final sequence of the first "Terminator" movie, as they were for the scenes of the small alien ships in Spielberg's Batteries Not Included in 1987, animated by David Allen.

Allen's stop motion work can also be seen in such feature films as The Crater Lake Monster (1977), Q - The Winged Serpent (1982), The Gate (1986) and Freaked (1993). Allen's King-Kong Volkswagen commercial from the 1970s is now legendary among model animation enthusiasts.

Jittlov again produced some impressive multi-technique stop-motion animation a year later for a 1979 Disney special promoting their release of the feature film The Black Hole. Titled Major Effects, Jittlov's work stood out as the best part of the special. Jittlov released his footage the following year to 16mm film collectors as a short film titled The Wizard of Speed and Time, along with four of his other short multi-technique animated films, most of which eventually evolved into his own feature-length film of the same title. Effectively demonstrating almost all animation techniques, as well as how he produced them, the film was released to theaters in 1987 and to video in 1989.

The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and Coraline are all good examples of stop motion film, all directed by Henry Selick.

Another individual who found fame in clay animation is Nick Park, creator of the Wallace and Gromit series.

[edit] Variations of stop-motion

[edit] Stereoscopic stop-motion

Stop-motion has very rarely been shot in stereoscopic 3D throughout film history. The first 3-D stop motion short was In Tune With Tomorrow(also known as Motor Rhythm) in 1939 by John Norling. The second stereoscopic stop motion release was The Adventures of Sam Space in 1955 by Paul Sprunck. The third and latest stop motion short in stereo 3-D was The Incredible Invasion of the 20,000 Giant Robots from Outer Space in 2000 by Elmer Kaan^[1] and Alexander Lentjes.^[2]^[3] This is also the first ever 3-D stereoscopic stop motion and CGI short in the history of film.

The first all stop motion 3-D feature is Coraline (2009), based on Neil Gaiman's best-selling novella, and directed by Henry Selick. The film is produced by Nike shoe founder Phil Knight's Laika animation studio in Portland, Oregon, formerly Will Vinton's claymation studio.

[edit] Go motion

Another more-complicated variation on stop motion is go motion, co-developed by Phil Tippett and first used on the films The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Dragonslayer (1981), and the Robocop films. Go motion involved programming a computer to move parts of a model slightly during each exposure of each frame of film, combined with traditional hand manipulation of the model in between frames, to produce a more realistic motion blurring effect. Tippett also used the process extensively in his 1983 short film Prehistoric Beast, a 12 minutes long sequence depicting two dinosaurs: one, herbivorous, being chased by the other one, carnivorous. With new footage Prehistoric Beast became Dinosaur! in 1985, a full length dinosaurs documentary hosted by Christopher Reeve. Those Phil Tippett's go motion tests acted as motion models for his first photo-realistic use of computers to depict dinosaurs in Jurassic Park in 1993. A lo-tech, manual version of this blurring technique was originally pioneered by Wladyslaw Starewicz in the silent era, and was used in his feature film The Tale of the Fox (1931).

[edit] Computer generated imagery

The almost universal use of CGI (computer generated imagery) has effectively rendered stop motion obsolete as a serious special effects tool in feature film. However, its low entry price, and still unique "look" and "feel" on film means stop motion is still used on some projects such as in children's programming (most notably on the acclaimed "Bump in the Night" series from the 1990s), as well as in commercials and comic shows such as Robot Chicken. The argument that the textures achieved with CGI cannot match the way real textures are captured by stop motion also makes it valuable for a handful of movie makers, notably Tim Burton, whose puppet-animated film Corpse Bride was released in 2005.

[edit] Stop Motion in Television

The Gumby series—which spawned a feature film, Gumby I in 1995—used both freeform and character clay animation. Clokey started his adventures in clay with a 1953 freeform clay short film called Gumbasia (1953) which shortly thereafter propelled him into his more structured Gumby TV series.

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. Dominating children's TV stop motion programming for three decades in America was Art Clokey's

In the 1960s, the French animator Serge Danot created the well-known The Magic Roundabout (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 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) and later a multi-season TV series The Wind in the Willows based on Kenneth Grahame's classic children's book of the same title. They also produced a documentary of their production techniques, Making Frog and Toad.

In the 1990s Trey Parker and Matt Stone made two original shorts and the pilot of South Park almost entirely out of construction paper.

The animated series Robot Chicken continues to primarily utilize stop motion animation, using custom made action figures and other toys as principal characters. Other action figures, called Stikfas, are very popular stop motion figures and are not extremely expensive.

[edit] Stop Motion in other mediums

The internet is also home to hundreds, and possibly thousands, of short digital films known as Brickfilms. Brickfilms films are, for the most part, object animation stop motion films featuring LEGO minifigures as a vital component. The limited flexibility of Lego 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 are youths purely animating with clay figures on public video sites such as Google video. They are often extremely simple, bordering on "freeform", but effective. Some barely have a face, but the comedic or violence proportions exceeding those of conventional clay puppets, with grisly crime scenes riddled by clay gunfire and hapless victims falling in a sniper's cross hairs. 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. Many new stop motion shorts combine brickfilming and clay animation into a new form.

[edit] Notable stop motion artists

[edit] Tim Burton

Tim Burton is very active in the field of stop motion animation. One of Burton's first films, Vincent, is a six minute stop motion animation about a young boy who wants to be Vincent Price. In 1993, Burton produced the all-stop motion animation The Nightmare Before Christmas. The film was in production for three years due to the length of time it takes to shoot stop motion. The main characters in the film were puppets that in order to create realism in the film were structured hundreds of face models with different expressions. The film is based on a poem Burton wrote inspired by "T'was the Night Before Christmas" it was then directed by Henry Selick. Selick later directed the adaptation of James and the Giant Peach, a blend between stop motion animation and live action film. In 2005 Corpse Bride was released, another stop motion piece from Burton. Computer animation of the aliens for his 1996 science fiction comedy, Mars Attacks! was deliberately made to look like stop motion when the film's budget did not allow for the use of the actual stop motion process, blurring the line between the two forms of animation.

[edit] Adam Jones

Adam Jones, Grammy Award-winning guitarist/musician/visual artist for the Grammy Award-winning progressive rock band Tool,^[4] uses stop motion capturing techniques for the majority of Tool's music videos as well. The band members of Tool do not appear in their videos, but rather use a combination of clay animation and stop motion. Jones' studies began in 1983 at the Hollywood Makeup Academy by learning "straight make-up". His focus of interest shifted to film, and he began to work as a sculptor and special effects designer for such films as Jurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It was here where he learned the stop-motion camera techniques he would later apply in Tool's music videos: "Sober" (on which he collaborated with Fred Stuhr), "Prison Sex", "Stinkfist", "Ænema", "Schism", and "Parabola".^[5]

[edit] Corky Quakenbush

Corky Quakenbush created three dozen stop motion animated films for Fox network's Mad TV in the late 1990s that helped fuel a movement of comic stop motion for adults. Parodying famous feature movies and TV shows, the shorts drew their humor from the mixing of the innocence of puppets and the profanity of violence in mainstream contemporary situations. One example is Raging Rudolph, written by Spencer Green and Mary Vilano, a re-telling of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer as if directed by Martin Scorsese. Quakenbush also created "reality animation" to mimic hand-held documentary newsgathering for Clops, written by Blaine Capatch, a parody of the groundbreaking reality show, Cops in which puppet policement bust famous stop-motion characters. Other parodies followed, such as Furious George, a spoof of the innocent Curious George children's book series.

[edit] Aardman

Aardman also produced commercials and music videos, notably the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", which uses many different animation techniques, including pixilation involving Gabriel holding poses 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. Aardman has also created many films, of which some have become household names. Nick Park joined Aardman after they took interest in his college project, A Grand Day Out. Since then, Nick Park has directed the following films for Aardman: The Wrong Trousers, Creature Comforts, A Close Shave, "Cracking Contraptions", and more recently, the feature film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, co-produced with DreamWorks Animation. Nick Park's latest work is the new Wallace and Gromit short (30 minutes) called A Matter of Loaf and Death, broadcast on BBC One on Christmas Day 2008.

[edit] Cuppa Coffee Studios

Cuppa Coffee Studios is based in Toronto and has also pioneered many of the modern techniques associated with stop motion. Started in 1992 by Adam Shaheen and Bruce Alcock, the company has grown to now the single largest producer of Stop Motion for TV with over 250 employees and 38 Studios. They have produced the classic Celebrity Death Match, Rick and Steve, Starveillance, A Very Barry Christmas and JoJo's Circus

[edit] George Pal

One acclaimed European puppet animation producer to break out in America was Hungarian animator George Pal, who, partially working in The Netherlands, produced a series of films in Europe during the 30s before coming to Hollywood to create more shorts in the 40s, now called Puppetoons under the Paramount banner, seven of which were nominated for Academy Awards for best animated film. In the late 40s, Pal evolved into feature film production, incorporating puppet animation into a live action setting in such films as The Great Rupert (1949), tom thumb (film) (1958), and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1963). Pal used model animation (animated by Jim Danforth) in two other feature films, The Time Machine (1960) and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), the latter nominated for a Special Effects Oscar, and the former winning the EFX Oscar award. Pal's work is documented in two feature films by Arnold Lebovitt, released in the mid-80s, The Puppetoon Movie and The Fantastic World of George Pal which are currently available on DVD. More of Danforth's skilled model animation can be seen in Jack the Giant Killer (1962), the ending fire ladder sequence for It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), "The Zanti Misfits" and "Counterweight" episodes of the original The Outer Limits TV series (1963), and, with equally prolific model animator David Allen, in Equinox (also titled "The Beast") (1967, 1970), Flesh Gordon (1974), and the prehistoric comedy Caveman (1981).

[edit] Willis O'Brien

The great pioneer of American stop motion was Willis O'Brien. 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) was 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, David 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.

[edit] Ray Harryhausen

Willis O'Brien's student Ray Harryhausen made many movies using a more elaborate version of puppet animation called model animation, first pioneered by O'Brien, mainly for his feature length films, the difference being that model animation strives to be "photo-realistic" enough to be able to be combined with live action elements to create a final fantasy sequence that allows the audience to suspend their disbelief that they are watching animation elements. Example of his model animation techniques; most famously, are the seven-skeleton sequence from Jason and the Argonauts (1963). But aside from the more "disguised" stop motion efforts of O'Brien and Harryhausen, America and Britain were slower to embrace the stop motion film, and so its use mainly grew out of other locations and sources.

[edit] Lou Bunin

Puppeteer Lou Bunin created one of the first stop motion puppets using wire armatures and his own rubber formula. Another early stop motion piece by Bunin, also in the 1930s was Bury the Axis, a short, satiric film about World War II probably commissioned for the US Government as a WPA grant. 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, putting an effective end to his commercial career. He then turned his attention to painting and drawing, while still creating numerous TV commercials using stop motion techniques, as well as a number of children's short films.

[edit] Lady Starewicz

The great European stop motion pioneer was Ladyslaw 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), In the Land of the Vampires (1935), and the feature film The Tale of the Fox (1937), to name but a few of his over fifty animated films.

Starewicz was the first filmmaker to use stop motion animation and puppets to tell consistently coherent stories. He began by producing insect documentaries which, in turn, led to experiments with the stop motion 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, which, because they were moving, didn't register on film during long exposures of each frame.

[edit] Charles Bowers

One of the more idiosyncratic early users of stop motion techniques was the American comedian and cartoonist Charles Bowers who employed stop-motion techniques (which he called the "Bowers Process") in his series of silent short comedies in the 1920s and early 1930s. In his 1926 film Now You Tell One, he skillfully uses stop-motion to create such effects as a straw hat growing on a man's head, cats growing out of a plant, and a mouse firing a gun. His color film, "Pete Roleum and His Cousins", a promotion piece about the importance of oil in contemporary life, debuted in the 1939 New York World's Fair.

[edit] Disney

The Walt Disney studio dabbled with puppet object animation in 1959 with the release of a 21-minute experimental short, Noah's Ark, nominated for an animated film Oscar for that year. Disney didn't exploit the technique until their associations with Mike Jittlov in the 1970s.

Disney once again experimented with several stop motion techniques by hiring independent animator-director Mike Jittlov to do the first stop motion animation of Mickey Mouse toys ever produced for a short sequence called Mouse Mania, part of a TV special commemorating Mickey Mouse's 50th Anniversary called Mickey's 50th in 1978.

[edit] Jules Bass

In North America, Jules Bass produced a series of popular Christmas specials such as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer using 'Animagic', their trade name for their version of stop motion puppetry. The specials were animated in Japan by Japanese stop-motion pioneer Tadahito Mochinaga. Another clay animated children's TV series Davey and Goliath, produced by Art Klokey, lasted from 1960 to 1977. Rankin/Bass also produced the puppet animation feature length film Mad Monster Party in 1967, and combined puppet animation with live action in The Daydreamer, their 1966 feature film.

[edit] Other notable artists

Other notable artists include 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), the Bolex Brothers, and Galina Beda.

A notable stop motion object animator was Germany's Oskar Fischinger, who animated anything he could get his hands on in a series of short abstract art films during the 20s and 30s. The best example is his 1934 film, Composition in Blue. Fischinger was hired by Disney to animate the "rolling hills" footage used in the opening "Toccata & Fugue" sequence of Fantasia (1940).

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Tayler, Richard. The Encyclopedia of Animation Techniques. Running Press, Philadelphia, 1996. ISBN 1-56138-531-X
Lord, Peter and Brian Sibley. Creating 3-D Animation. Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1998. ISBN 0-8109-1996-6
Sibley, Brian. Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie. Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2000. ISBN 0-8109-4124-4
Smith, Dave. Disney A to Z. Hyperion Books, New York, 1998. ISBN 0-7868-6391-9
Maltin, Leonard Movie and Video Guide. Signet Reference Paperbacks, New American Library, Penguin Putnam, New York, 2006.

[edit] External links

Stop motion at the Open Directory Project
BBC Blast Film stop motion animation advice

stopmotion version 09.00

[0] Elmer Kaan

[1] Alexander Lentjes

[2] Animation

[3] GRAMMY.com

[4] ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Jones#Film_work

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