OUAN05 - Understanding - Stop Motion

Making of, Coraline

Stop motion animation, which is also referred to as stop frame animation is a technique where you physically manipulate or move an object and record its movement each time you alter it in order to compile a sequence of images that give the illusion the object is moving on its own. Objects made of clay are often used in stop motion animation because of the ease in which they can be altered and repositioned, this is called clay-mation. Not all stop motion animation has to be made using figures like this though, and people or other inanimate objects are often used to 

produce animation.

Sometimes stop motion animation is confused with time-lapse techniques where photographs of live surroundings are taken and compiled to form a film. The intervals these are taken at are less than normal viewing speed and when played back at a normal speed it creates the illusion that things are moving much faster than normal, and thus, lapsing.

In film, stop motion animation has a long history. Willis O'Brien's work on 'The Lost World' and 'King Kong' in the 1920s and 30s was groundbreaking in the world of motion effects in films. O'Brien's protege, Ray Harryhausen also took the world of motion effects in film a step further in the 40s all the way up to the 80s and worked on films such as 'Mighty Joe Young', 'Jason and the Argonauts' and 'Clash of the Titans.' From the 80s, stop motion was used on films such as Star Wars in order to simulate large scale scenes and objects such as space ships.

A more modern and more technologically involved variation of stop motion is called go-motion. It was first used in films such as 'The Empire Strikes Back' in 1980 and utilised a programme computer to move an object between frames certain distances between each exposure of the frame, in order to create a more realistic blurring effect.

The more recent innovations in stop motion come from companies such as Aardman, creating hugely successful series of stop motion animation including; Morph, Wallace & Gromit and creature comforts as well as popular feature films in collaboration with Sony Pictures and Dreamworks. Another studio that specialises in stop motion animation and in particular stop motion animation feature films is 'Laika', which has also produced some of my favourite animated features. The films they have produced include, Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls, which were all received extremely well on release and in my opinion have set the bar for stop motion features in terms of quality of production and writing.