Memorable World History/Authors

Stop Motion Animation

Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion when the series of frames is played back as a slow sequence. Objects with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop-motion animation using plasticine figures is called clay animation or "clay-mation". Not all stop motion, however, it requires figures or models: stop-motion films can also be made using humans, household appliances, and other objects, usually for comedic effect. Stop motion using humans is sometimes referred to as pixelation.

Terminology

The term "stop motion," relating to the animation technique, is often spelled with a hyphen as "stop-motion." Both orthographical variants, with and without the hyphen, are correct, but the hyphenated one has a second meaning that is unrelated to animation or cinema: "a device for automatically stopping a machine or engine when something has gone wrong" (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993 edition).

Stop motion should not be confused with the time-lapse technique in which still photographs of a live scene are taken at regular intervals and then combined to make a continuous film. Time-lapse is a technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured is much lower than that used to view the sequence. When played at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster.

History

Stop-motion animation has a long history in film. Originally, it was often used to show objects moving as if by magic.

In 1902, the film Fun in a Bakery Shop used the stop trick technique in the "lightning sculpting" sequence.

French trick film maestro Georges Méliès used stop-motion animation once to produce moving title-card letters in one of his short films, and a number of his special effects are based on stop-motion photography.

In 1907, The Haunted Hotel was released by J. Stuart Blackton, and was a resounding success. 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. Italian animator Roméo Bossetti impressed audiences with his object animation tour-de-force, The Automatic Moving Company in 1912.

Influenced by Émile Cohl, the author of the first puppet-animated film (i.e., The Beautiful Lukanida (1912)), Russian-born (ethnically Polish) director Wladyslaw Starewicz (1892–1965), started to create stop motion films using dead insects with wire limbs and later, in France, with complex and really expressive puppets. Early works included The Beautiful Lukanida (1910), The Battle of the Stag Beetles (1910), and The Ant and the Grasshopper (1911). The Cameraman's Revenge (1912) is a complex tale of treason and violence between several different insects. It is a pioneer work of puppet animation, and the oldest animated film of such dramatic complexity, with characters filled with motivation, desire, and feelings.

One of the earliest clay animation films was Modelling Extraordinary, which impressed audiences in 1912. December 1916 brought the first of Willie Hopkins' 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, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Stop motion animation was also commonly used for special effects work in many live-action films, such as the 1914 Italian cult epic film Cabiria.