Stop Motion Animation

What is it? Animation technique which makes static objects appear to move. The object is moved by very small amounts between individual frames, producing the effect of motion when the film is played back.

Persistence of Vision The brain’s opto-chemical reactions are much slower than the speed of light The eye retains images shown even for a split second, and when the next image is shown, the brain stitches them together seamlessly. What was once just a series of static images becomes a moving image across your eyes.

Persistence of Vision (cont’d) Anything shot on film or video is actually stop- motion animation. You have a series of frames with each one being slightly different than the next, and when you display them at a steady rate of speed, the human eye perceives this as being in fluid motion

Object Manipulation Animation Object manipulation is the earliest form of stop- motion animation, and involves photographing an object and moving it a tiny bit, and then photographing it again. Although this is very time-consuming, it’s also one of the easiest forms of stop-motion The first example of object manipulation and stop- motion animation was the 1898 short film by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton called The Humpty Dumpty Circus.

Direct Manipulation Animation This is a process similar to standard animation, but rather than changing each image entirely, only a portion of the image is erased or added to in-between each frame. One of the earliest examples of this form of animation is also from J. Stuart Blackton - Humorous Phases of Funny Faces Humorous Phases of Funny Faces

Pixilation This is a live-action form of stop motion, which uses actual people being posed frame by frame instead of inanimate objects or drawings. The earliest known example of this is from 1911 in the short film Jobard Cannot See The Women Working.

Puppet Animation Not long after object animation appeared, filmmakers began experimenting with using different forms of objects that were easier to manipulate. Puppets were one solution, which led to the popular rise of stop-motion animation known as puppet animation.

Animation in Special Effects Both stop-motion and puppet animation gave rise to legendary special effects artists and filmmaker Willis O’Brien Initially he used clay to make models for his stop- motion short films, but he soon began developing full armature skeletons and putting rubber skin and fur over them. This is how he came to create the iconic stop- motion shots of King Kong atop the Empire State Building.

Animation and Live Action O’Brien’s work inspired his young assistant Ray Harryhausen who followed in his footsteps by creating sequences and films that further blended stop-motion model/puppet animation with live- action footage. One of his finest pieces of work was the sequence in Jason and the Argonauts featuring a fight with seven skeletal warriors who are all performed via stop-motion animation.Jason and the Argonauts