Stop motion (also known as stop action) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Motion animation using clay is called clay animation or clay-mation.
The term "stop motion", related to the animation technique, is often spelled with a hyphen (stop-motion). Both orthographical variants, with and without the hyphen, are correct, but the hyphenated one has, in addition, a second meaning, not related to animation or cinema. Stop-motion: "a device for automatically stopping a machine or engine when something has gone wrong" (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993 edition).[1]
Stop motion is often confused with the time lapse technique, where still photographs of a live surrounding are taken at regular intervals, and combined into a continuous film.
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Stop motion animation has a long history in film. It was often used to show objects moving as if by magic. The first instance of the stop motion technique can be credited to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1897), in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life. 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 true stop motion 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 J. 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. Italian animator Roméo Bossetti impressed audiences with his object animation tour-de-force, The Automatic Moving Company in 1912. 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).
One of the earliest clay animation films was Modelling Extraordinary, which dazzled 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.
In the turn of the century, there was another well known animator known as Willis O' Brien (known by others as O'bie). His work on The Lost World from 1925 is known, but he is most admired for his work on King Kong, a milestone of his films made possible by stop motion animation.
In the 1960s and 1970s, 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). Noyes also used stop motion to animate sand laying on glass for his musical animated film Sandman (1975).
In 1975, filmmaker and clay animation experimenter, Will Vinton, joined with sculptor Bob Gardiner to create an experimental film called "Closed Mondays" which became the world's first stop motion film to win an Oscar. Will Vinton followed with several other successful short film experiments including "The Great Cognito", "Creation", and "Rip Van Winkle" which were each Nominatied for Academy Awards. In 1977, Vinton made a documentary about this producess and his style of animation which he dubbed "claymation" and he title the documentary "Claymation". Soon after this documentary, the term was trademarked by Vinton to differentiate his team's work from others who had been, or were begindnning to do, "clay animation". While the word has stuck and is often used to describe clay animation and stop motion, it remains a trademark owned currently by Laika Entertainment, Inc.
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, made with the original pinscreen donated by Alexander Alexeiff and Claire Parker.
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 kittens Mio and Mao. Other European productions included 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.
One of the main British Animation teams, John Hardwick and Bob Bura, were the main animators in many early British TV shows, and are famous for their work on the Trumptonshire trilogy.
Disney 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. 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.
In the 1970s and 1980s, 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 the AT-ST walkers in Return of the Jedi were all stop motion animation, some of it using the Go films. The many shots including the ghosts in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the first two feature films in the RoboCop series use Phil Tippett's go motion version of stop motion.
In 1980, Marc Paul Chinoy directed the 1st feature-length clay animated film; a film based on the famous Pogo comic strip. Titled I go Pogo, it was aired a few times on American cable channels, but has yet to be commercially released. Primarily clay, some characters required armatures, and walk cycles used pre-sculpted hard bases legs.
Stop motion was also used for some shots of the final sequence of Terminator movie, also for the scenes of the small alien ships in Spielberg's Batteries Not Included in 1987, animated by David W. 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.
In 1985, Will Vinton and his team released an ambitious feature film in stop motion called "The Adventures Of Mark Twain" based on the life and works of the famous american author. While the film may have been a little sophisticated for young audiences at the time, it got rave reviews from critics and adults in general. Vinton's team also created the Nomes and the Nome King for Disney's "Return to Oz" feature, for which they received an Academy Award Nomination for Special Visual Effects. In the 80's and early 90's, Will Vinton became very well-known for his commercial work as well with stop motion campaigns including "The California Raisins".
Of note are the films of Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, which mix stop motion and live actors. These include Alice, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Faust, a rendition of the legend of the German scholar. The Czech school is also illustrated by the series Pat & Mat (1979–2004). Created by Lubomír Beneš and Vladimír Jiránek, and it was wildly popular in a number of countries.
Since the general animation renaissance headlined by the likes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Little Mermaid at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, there have been an increasing number of traditional stop motion feature films, despite advancements with computer animation. The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick and produced by Tim Burton was one of the more widely-released stop motion features. Henry Selick also went on to direct James and the Giant Peach and Coraline, and Tim Burton went on to direct Corpse Bride.
Toward the end of the 90's, Will Vinton launched the first prime-time stop motion television series called "The PJs", with creator Eddy Murphy. The Emmy winning show aired on Fox then UPN for 3 seasons.
Another individual who found fame in clay animation is Nick Park, who created the characters Wallace and Gromit. In addition to a series of award-winning shorts and featurettes, he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the feature-length outing Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Chicken Run, his first feature-length production, grossed over $100 million at the North American box-office, and garnered critical praise. Other notable stop motion feature films released since 1990 include Fantastic Mr. Fox and $9.99, both released in 2009, and The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993).
In December 2010, the NBC show Community had an entire episode in stop motion when character Abed wakes up to discover that everything is in stop motion animation, Professor Duncan and the study group help him try to discover the true meaning of Christmas.
Stop motion has very rarely been shot in stereoscopic 3D throughout film history. The first 3D 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 3D was The Incredible Invasion of the 20,000 Giant Robots from Outer Space in 2000 by Elmer Kaan[2] and Alexander Lentjes.[3][4] This is also the first ever 3D stereoscopic stop motion and CGI short in the history of film. The first all stop motion 3D feature is Coraline (2009), based on Neil Gaiman's best-selling novel and directed by Henry Selick. Another recent example is the Nintendo 3DS video software which comes with the option for Stop Motion videos. This will be released by December 8, 2011 as a 3DS system update.
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 1984 short film Prehistoric Beast, a 10 minutes long sequence depicting a herbivorous dinosaur (Monoclonius), being chased by a carnivorous one (Tyrannosaurus). 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). The 2009 film Fantastic Mr. Fox was also entirely filmed in stop motion.
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, 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.
Dominating children's TV stop motion programming for three decades in America was Art Clokey's Gumby series—which spawned a feature film, Gumby I in 1995—using 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.
Rankin/Bass is a very famous stop motion company. Since the 1960s it has been making many stop motion Christmas specials such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Year Without a Santa Claus, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and many others.
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 (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.
Another example is Pingu, a children's television program about a penguin who lives with his family in an igloo.
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. Moral Orel is another stop motion based show, along with Mary Shelley's Frankenhole, both created by Dino Stamatopoulos.
"A Little Curious" from 1999 has Stop-motion characters like Bob the Ball and Doris the Door.
A craze on the internet is animating with clay figures on public video sites such as YouTube and 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, thanks to the ease of modern stop motion software and online video publishing.[5] Many new stop motion shorts use clay animation into a new form.[6]
Also, singer-songwriter Oren Lavie's music video for the song Her Morning Elegance was posted on YouTube on January 19, 2009. The video, directed by Lavie and Yuval and Merav Nathan, uses stop motion and has achieved great success with over 15 million views, also earning a 2010 Grammy Award nomination for "Best Short Form Music Video".
Stop motion has occasionally been used to create the characters for computer games, as an alternative to CGI. the Virgin Interactive Entertainment Mythos game Magic and Mayhem (1998) featured creatures built by stop motion specialist Alan Friswell, who made the miniature figures from modelling clay and latex rubber, over armatures of wire and ball-and-socket joints. The models were then animated one frame at a time, and incorporated into the CGI elements of the game through digital photography. "ClayFighter" for the Super Nintendo and The Neverhood for the PC are other examples.
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