What is Stop Motion?

This is me aged 14 year's old. I made this film using stop motion techniques.
I am now going to explain how stop motion began...

Stop motion is done in individually photographed frames so they look like they are moving. They are played as continues sequence. Stop  motion is used alot in TV adverts.
"Techniques"

Stop Motion started with Edweard Muybridge's Running Horse. There is an example of the movement of a horse in motion. Edweard was asked by a horse owner to find out if his horse's hooves came off the ground all at the same time. He set up the cameras near the track parallel to the horse's path. He used 24 cameras and they were 27 inches (69 cm) apart. 

The shutters were controlled by trip wires triggered by the horse's legs. He managed to take photographs with all the horse's feet off the ground.
 

He move the images onto the glass and blend the photos to create a different angle. He called it a "Zoopraxiscope" Zoo/prax/iscope/.
People couldn't believe it!
For example.


It is called "PERSISTENCE OF VISION" Our brain is fooled into thinking it is moving.
For example, this is still image. "Mind trick"
s

20th century,
At late 1910/20, Willis O'Brien (below photo), he was a sculpture who also created models: a caveman and a dinosaur. His first work was "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link"

For 'King Kong',Willis O'Brien started by making the model of a gorilla. He then animated the gorilla. He developed the "Rear Projector Effect." The projector was at the back (rear). Frame by frame he would picture the characters. He would also use plates behind the characters as backgrounds. In for example, "The
Lost World"





















Another pioneer who was influenced by Willis O'Brian's work was Ray Harryhausen (Above photo). In the 60s he produced
Jason and the Argonauts. He designed pre-film backgrounds and then added an overlay. Jurassic park producers used Harryhausen ideas to animate the  monsters in the film. He did Pre-film backgrounds then an overlay.
"Dynamation" was influenced by Ray Harryhausen using the 3D models. Models were added into react with the human actors. For example "Voyage Of Sinbad" in 1960(Below photo).


The roping sequence was hard to do. A jeep had to be used to "lassoe" the dinosaur from Gwangi. 24 frames = 1 second of the film.

The technique was very effective and simple. He projected a live action image onto a rear screen to capture the animation table with the model. He placed a glass sheet in front of both. He used the matte line to ensure not to make to close to camera and background. The wax pencil used for to correct the frame and he thought that the line was accurate. He used the paint with black matte paint on the lower section, below the line. He photographed the model reacting to the live action on the plate. After this, he made a second pass in the camera to put back in the lower previously matted out section so creating a combined image with the creature looking as if it was part of the live action. 
They used the metal wire to animate the actors' rope.


Hallmarks of his work. Ray Harryhausen gave the animation life and the animals looked real. They reacted with the human actor and he was a key developer stop motion.

Another great influence in the stop motion world was Jan Svankmajer (below photo). His work was complicated and surreal. He used live motion and stop motion and sound to create scenes and movement. Of course, stop motion does not have sound- the animator has to put it in after. Jan's sound effects created atmosphere and helped to tell the story through unusual sound effects. In Alice in Wonderland he used surreal sounds to create a powerful, creepy and scary film. the characters are silent but the sound effects give the scenes comedy with a surreal twist to it. His work was Alice In Wonderland. In the scene, Jan uses non-diabetic piano music with short sound sounds to link to Alice running and then disappearing into the drawer.

He took 2 pictures for everyone movement.

Terry Gilliam was influenced by Svankmajer. He created animation using cut from magazines, books, photos and newspaper. He started off with a storyboard and notes on the sounds he wanted. He used a template with marks on the edge to show him which shot to film. Gilliam's animations mix his own art,with strange,  shapes, with backgrounds and moving cutouts from antique photographs, mostly from the Victorian era.


Shooting with one frame mean that an animator

Shooting on ones means that the animator moves the object he/she is animating every time a picture or frame is taken. It's a lot of work, but when it's done correctly the result is some very smooth, impressive animation. 
Shooting on twos means that the animator moves the object he/she is animating and then takes two pictures or frames. The animation isn't as smooth but it still looks great and it takes less time to animate.  It might seem like it would be better to just animate at 12 fps or 15 fps and that shooting duplicate pictures or frames is a waste of time and space, but sometimes you will find that you need to animate on ones to get something to look right. For example, if you have a character walking down a street and a car drives by quickly, you will want that car to be animated on ones, otherwise it wont look right as it passes the screen. So, you would move your puppet and move the car, take a frame, then move the car again without moving the puppet and take another frame. If you were shooting at 12 fps or 15 fps, animating the car on ones wouldn't be an option.



Tim Burton is known as Nightmare Before Christmas director. He create his many artworks for the characters which were give them the good visuals. It took him about 3 years to make and their puppeteers worked on it. The frame rate was 24 per second to create the illusion of three-dimensional, real-time action.

As a young boy, Burton would make short films in his backyard on Evergreen Street using basic stop motion animation techniques or shoot them on 8 mm film without sound (one of his oldest known juvenile films is The Island of Doctor Agor, that he made when he was 13 years old).


Burton was influenced by Dr Seuss, an American writer and cartoonist. He worked in the animation department  of the U.S Army.


The success of his short film Stalk of the Celery Monster attracted the attention of Walt Disney Productions' animation studio, who offered young Burton an animator's apprenticeship at their studio. He worked as an animator, storyboard artist and concept artist on films such as The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron and Tron.

Genres and forms:
Pixilation is a stop motion technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in an animated film, by repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames. 
The object is not changed instead the actor is recorded moving  like a human puppet. It was the idea by Segundo de Chomon. His films was "The Electric Train" in 1905 and El hotel eléctrico (Spanish: The Electric Hotel) 


Cutout animation is a technique for creating animations using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs like Terry Gilliam's style. A great and very successful project is “Southpark”  It was created in 1997. The first episode was produced using cutout animation then the creators used software which copied the cutout technique.


Clay-animation: The most popular form of stop motion animation, it uses clay and putty etc. They usually have a skeleton of wire to maximize and to help the movement.“Wallace and Gromit” in 1989.


Puppet animation: It uses puppets (general difficult  in structure, made with fabric, latex or wood, unlike clay models, the characters do not need constant retouching. “Bob the Builder” 1999.


Silhouette animation: Characters are only seen as black shapes. The shapes are shouwn using a back-light.The original silhouette animation technique was more a form of puppetry using what was hinged paper dolls  These dolls were positioned against a solid backdrop on an animation stage and filmed with a rostrum camera, and repositioned with each frame, moving in sequence and posed much like hinged and jointed dolls.  Inspired in the European theatre of shadows, the figures are just  a dark shadow. “The adventures of Prince Ahmed” (1926).

Model animation:  Variation of “Puppetoon”, where characters of stop motion mix with real images characters. “Who framed Roger Rabbit” (1988). The work would probably have been influenced by Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen who pioneered using stop motion with live action.


Go motion animation: Phil Tippett and Industrial Light & Magic created the go motion technique for the first time for some shots of the tauntaun creatures and AT-AT walkers in the 1980 Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back.: A step further in the evolution of stop motion, it uses computer technology to achieve a movement more real by imitating the blurred effect of a body or object in movement. Jurassic Park (1993).


Graphic animation: It is based on computer generated images, these images range from graphic interchange format (Gifs) to web pages created using more complex programs like Macromedia Flash. It uses 2D and 3D. “Kung Fu Panda” (2008).

Object animation: The objects are real objects, not created. Norman McClaren was a pioneer of this genre used in his short “A Chairy Tale” (1957) where the protagonist is a common chair. They used pixilation, this is a stop motion technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in an animated film, by repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames. The actor is like a living stop motion puppet.