Pioneers, their Discoveries and the Process’ of Stop Motion
There are many pioneers of stop motion, each with their special methods and discoveries that were vital to what stop motion is today. The modern definition of stop motion is by physically moving and altering real-world objects and photographing them at each stage, when these photographs are played back one after another with a minute transition time in between each frame (referred to as FPS or frames per second) it creates the illusion that the object is moving by itself. Modern stop motion would not have been possible if it were not for the pioneers in this essay.
Joseph Plateau was a Belgian physicist and he invented the phenakistoscope in 1832, possibly one of the earliest inspirations for stop motion animation. The phenakistoscope works by having two discs on the same axis, the top disc having slots on its edges while the bottom disc has pictures around the edges, each successive picture slightly different to the one before it. When the user wished to use the phenakistoscope, they would look through the slits in the top disc at the reflection of the bottom discs images in a mirror, the reason this works is because of the principle of the persistence of vision. The persistence of vision is the principle that each image stays on the retina for 1/25 of a second, this was originally perceived as the reason why we see motion but it was disproved in 1912 and the reason we see motion was now explained by the phi phenomenon. The phi phenomenon is explained by the brain filling in the gaps between images, making it look like the images are moving.
Another pre-stop motion animation pioneer was William Horner and his Zoetrope, Horner was a British mathematician born in 1786. While he was widely noted for his writings on number theory, functional equations and approximation theory, he is also known for his work on optics, particularly the Zoetrope. The Zoetrope works in the same principle as the phenakistoscope with it’s spinning mechanism, the difference was that the zoetrope could be viewed by more than one person at a time because of the numerous slits, because of these slits it also meant that the viewer didn’t have to look through a mirror to be able to use the device. Similar to the phenakistoscope, the zoetrope relies on the persistence of vision theory to.
The Process of Stopping The process of stopping was first used by Thomas Edison in his short clip - The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, stopping is the process of stopping a video recording and changing something while the camera is off and then starting the recording again to make it seem as though nothing has changed within the scene. With stop motion, the process of stopping is done by taking pictures of an action happening, then in one frame you change something and then keep the change in every new frame/ picture you take. Stopping was first used in 1895 by Thomas Edison in his -really- short film, The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. In this, Edison uses the stopping method to swap out the actress who played Mary Queen of Scots for a mannequin, Edison stopped the frame before he swapped the actress and then started again when the mannequin was in place, the same place as the actress was. This process, to the viewer makes it look like the actress who had her head chopped off when in fact, it was just the mannequin.
Stop Motion Animation
Stop motion us the method of animating using multiple images played one after another with a miniscule transition time to create the illusion of movement. One of the first examples of the principle of stop motion was The Horse in Motion by Edward Muybridge in 1878. The Horse in Motion started off as a way to see if horses, while gallopping and trotting, were ever off all four legs at any point during their movement. For the experiment, still cameras were placed at various points on a racetrack and as the horse reached each camera, they took a photograph. Although not strictly stop-motion as they weren’t animated it started an important principle of taking pictures in succession but slightly changing something in each one to create movement. The Humpty Dumpty circus was the first real stop-motion animation to be created, it was made in 1898 by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith, there are accounts that state that the pair used Smith’s daughters dolls since they had jointed limbs so they could be easily positioned. Unfortunately, there is no remaining evidence of the Humpty Dumpty circus so it is often left out of stop motion reports, however, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (HPOFF) by the same creators still has remaining evidence, in fact it is available to watch on the internet. The HPOFF is the first sequencial animation that exists today, it sets the principle of playing continuous images one after another in order to create the illusion of movement. HPOFF starts of by a man drawing a man on a blackboard, then the female is drawn without being able to see the artist so it looks like she is just appearing on the blackboard, this is repeated with different faces on each of the repetitions.
Frame Rates Because of his work with the Horse in Motion, Muybridge is also known for being the first person to use frame rates, he realised that it took 11-12 frames per second for motion to be seen. For different types of video there are different frame rates (FPS), as a general rule children’s stop motion animation is 12 fps, such as Postman Pat or Noddy. For motion picture films it has been a tradition to film in 24 fps, this is for various reasons, sometimes because visual effects workers edit on a frame by frame basis and a higher frame rate would put too much work into it, another common reason is that most cinema projectors display at the same speed and it would be hard to change it this far into using 24 fps. Stop motion animation feature films such as Coraline are also filmed at 24 fps, this means that there are lots of frames taken, 1,440 images have to be taken to create just 1 minute of film. Although motion picture films are usually filmed at 24 frames per second, some modern films break this tradition, the Hobbit being a new film that was actually recorded at 48 frames per second which is categorised along with 60 fps as “High Frame Rate”/ HRF. Peter Jackson, the director of The Hobbit posted a Q & A post on Facebook about the frame rate topic, when asked why he made the decision to film in 48 fps he said
“I started shooting The Hobbit films in HFR because I wanted film audiences to experience just how remarkably immersive the theatrical cinema experience can be.” https://www.facebook.com/notes/peterjackson/qaonhfr3d/10151299493836558
Later in the post in response to his other questions he explains how HFR creates the experience, the main point was that lower frames per second offer motion blur and strobing within 3D, Jackson said that 48 frames per second eliminates the strobing effect that many people suffer from in 3D and the motion blur. Having less of a motion blur means that the video will look sharper and more crisp, and this is how Jackson says 48 fps helps immerse the audience.
Developers and Techniques of Stop Motion Animation
Techniques
● Sequential animation ● Movement ● Style ● Visualisation ● Narrative ● Working Methods
Sequential Animation
Sequential animation is another name for stop motion animation, stop motion animation is the process of taking images, changing something in the scene, then taking another image and repeating this process so when they’re played back one after another with a tiny transition time, it creates the illusion of movement. The first sequential animation was created by James Stuart Blackton, it was called the Humpty Dumpty Circus (THDC) and it was made in 1898, although, unfortunately there is no evidence of this stop motion. There is however another stop motion which was also created by James Stuart Blackton, this stop motion was called the Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (THPOFF), this was created in 1906. The production of THPOFF was initially launched in 1904 but was only completed by 1906, the reason this production took so long was because of the amount of frames in it, it was produced at 12 frames per second so there were 12 frames shown every second which means that 2,160 photographs were taken and considering the fact that Blackton had to draw something new every time he took a photo, it is easy to understand why it took two years. THPOFF is often referred to as the first stop motion animation so it can be said that the common method of animating in stop motion originated from James Stuart Blackton, the way he developed it was drawing a person, then taking a picture, then drawing a consecutive movement onto the original drawing and then repeating the last two steps over and over again so that when they are played back, they look like they are moving. [1] This is due to the frame rate that Blackton used, he 12 fps is the standard to make stop motion look like motion, this tradition has carried on for decades as the original Postman Pat and Noddy childrens television shows were both still 12 fps, although some stop motion films such as Coraline are created in 24 fps since it gives the makers more freedom with what they can do.
Date and Storyline Reference - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000554/
Movement
There are many important aspect to stop motion animation, movement is one of the most important things since it can affect the reality of an animation, the makers of Coraline did something special in the production - they included the movement of the hair of the characters. Coraline was filmed at 24 fps which means that the movement of the characters is more life-like than other stop motion animations, Coraline’s hair played a big part in how the film looked so they paid special attention to it, they even had a hair department. Coraline’s hair was fitted with thin metal paper clip type things in between the hairs, this made it easier for the animators to move the hair and keep it in a position so that they can take an image without the hair falling back into it’s original place. One of the reasons the animators wanted to animate the hair on Coraline was so that they could create the feeling of the sense of danger that she was in at some points during the film. Another important principle of the movement in stop motion animation is the acceleration and deceleration of the objects and characters in the animation, if cars in real life don’t move at a constant speed, the speed of a car rather starts slow, and then speeds up, this is known as acceleration. To create the illusion of acceleration stop motion animators start off by moving the car a small amount in between each photograph taken, then slowly increasing the distance between each car movement each time taking a photograph. An example of acceleration in stop motion animation is Postman Pat, in Postman Pat there are various cars like Pat’s truck and the police officers car, in Postman Pat there are small parts where cars slow down or speed up. Deceleration is just the opposite of acceleration, so to make it look like the car is slowing down, animators must start off by moving the car with bigger distances in between, then slowly decrease the amount of space in between the car movements. - [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXl81VPcjZI Weight is something that animators also pay close attention to, weight is related to acceleration and deceleration in the fact that weight can affect acceleration and deceleration. To show weight, animators have to show momentum in their animations, weight can be shown by smaller movements within larger ones, feet might move as well as legs or a character may jiggle in the outer regions of their bodies as well the whole body moving. An example of how weight can be shown is in the music video for Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie, some parts in this music video show the woman’s character show weight. In Her Morning Elegance when the woman is hanging from a window, instead of her body just moving downwards her feet flick a little bit making it look like she has some weight rather than just paper or a toy. Similar to weight, force is also important to show in a stop motion animation, an example of force in a stop motion animation is also in Her Morning Elegance, when the woman from the music video is walking into the wind, you can see the force of the wind blowing into he. Although there is no wind in the stop motion, the animator makes it look like there is by making her lean forward and having little whisps of hair moving as she walks. [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY
As well as all the movement that isn’t always thought about, there is also the obvious movement that stop motion animators need to pay attention to, when walking, a character's legs have to move like the legs of real people depending on the animator like Henry Selick or Tim Burton. While Henry Selick and Tim Burton were working on The Nightmare Before Christmas they used metal skeletons inside of the molds of the characters so they could hold the positions of the characters and make it easier to accurate photographs. Another thing they did to improve the accuracy of the characters movements is creating different mouthpieces for the different sounds that they were making, so they had over 100 different interchangeable pieces to put in place of the mouth for for the character Jack, these were for sounds like “o” “ooh” and “p” and numerous other sounds[4]. Another movement to pay lots of attention to is while moving, it isn’t just a person’s legs that move, their shoulders also move, and their head and also their hands. It is important to make all the little movements that a real person would make when making a stop motion, otherwise it could look unprofessional, unless that’s the style a person is aiming for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLw-Fo8uhis
The mouthpiece method was also used in Coraline as in the picture above.
Styles of Stop Motion Animation
Like most art forms, there are many different types of stop motion animation with each of them having different codes within them, some of the types of stop motion are; pixelation, clay-mation, toy-mation
Pixelation is a style of stop motion animation in which people are the things being animated, this is one of the harder styles of stop motion animation because it requires the people being animated to stay in position while the photograph is being taken and for them to move or be moved into a new position over and over again. There are two places that we see this type of stop motion animation; in music videos and in experimental personal/indie films, an example used earlier in this essay Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie is an example of a pixelation music video while The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb are an example of experimental film. Tom Thumb is different to a normal film because the characters are animated by photographs being taken and them moving, then another photograph taken and it has a different look to normal stop motion because it has more realistic 3D features like depth and shadowing. [5] Her morning elegance is a great example of pixelation since the actions that the woman performs in it are more impressive as a human doing it rather than an animated object[6]. Pixelation isn’t named in any relation with pixels or resolution, it’s more to do with pixies, since pixies are said to have magical powers, the way that people move in pixelation is said to resemble what a person being “pixied” would look like.
(Her Morning Elegance)
Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3YKBOkfmbU Her Morning Elegance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY
Clay-mation is another style of stop motion animation, in this style the characters and sometimes the background as well are made of of clay or clay like substances like plasticine, with the plasticine the animators or art department will make models out of it. Sometimes animators will encase metal wires inside of the clay to make it easier to mold the model and keep it in the position so it is easier to photograph. Like all types of stop motion animation, it is a long process since the animators have to take a picture move something, then take another picture and repeat the process over and over. A prime example of a clay-mation stop motion is Pingu, an animated children’s TV show from 1986 to 2000[7]. While Pingu was about a penguin, there’s also another popular claymation style stop motion film, The Nightmare Before Christmas which is about a man who is a skeleton who finds Christmas, since these two examples are so different it just shows how versatile the claymation style can be.[8]
Pingu - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingu
What is Claymation? - http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-claymation.htm
Toy-mation is similar to clay-mation except for the fact that instead of using clay to make characters, animators use toys such as lego minifigures or action figures to play their characters. Toy mation hasn’t had much success in the commercial side of media since there are very few popular films or shows about on television containing toy mation, although it has had moderate success on in internet in places like YouTube. Examples of toy-mation on YouTube are the Halo game series Mega Bloks where animators use the Halo minifigures to act out scenarios in a stop motion format[9]. Lego is also sometimes used with their minifigures but they tend to have more of a wider choice for storyline since they aren’t topic specific like Halo.
Halo Toy-Mation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICuzmBYFGxk
There is also another style of stop motion animation, one where the animator uses everyday objects like spoons or dice to tell a story, an example of this is PES, PES is a stop motion animator that uses this style of stop motion, as well as using everyday objects PES uses claymation and toymation. In one of his stop motion animations, in Western Spaghetti he used clay substances to make tomatoes and tomato sauce, toy Rubiks cube to represent some kind of vegetable, dice to show another vegetable, post it notes to represent butter and a whole manner of things. In Western Spaghetti, PES uses every day objects and transforms them into
“His uncanny knack for transforming familiar objects through stopmotion animation has earned him global recognition and dozens of honors” [10]
-PESFilm YouTube Channel About Section
Visualisation of Stop Motion
Visualisation is the way that a person can try to recreate an idea from in their head to put it into real life, different animators have different methods of doing this but one example is Ray Harryhausen. In a film that he animated - Jason and the Argonauts- Harryhausen wanted to create a scene where some foot soldiers fought a group of undead skeletons however the technology for computer generated skeletons was not around, so Ray Harryhausen developed his own method inspired by Willis O’brien, this method was called dynamation. The simple way of explaining Dynamation is that a live action scene with live action people is projected onto a screen and then the animator animating models in front of the screen and moving the scene a frame at a time while taking images of the models, this makes it look as though the actors in the live action scene in the background look like they are interacting with the stop motion models off screen in front of them.
Before Ray Harryhausen, there was Willis O’brien, O’brien used a similar method to Harryhausen except the opposite way around so he used stop motion in the background and live action in the foreground, he used this method in his version of King Kong where King Kong is fighting the T-rex. Willis O’brien had the actress who played Ann Darrow perched in a tree and recorded her shriek and scream while in the background on a “black velvet screen” was previously animated stop motion of Kong fighting the T-rex
Dynamation - http://www.rayharryhausen.com/dynamation.php How they Filmed King Kong - http://archive.org/stream/movieclassic04moti#page/n241/mode/2up/search/king+kong
Working Methods
Working methods are ways that animators choose to work, they can be certain methods that they like to use to animate with Tim Burton has working methods, as does Henry Selick. In the making of The Nightmare Before Christmas, one of the animators under Tim Burton used an interesting method in the way that he took photos, instead of keeping the camera stationary and then cutting to different scenes when he needed to show something else, he used a piece of equipment that was programmed moved the camera frame by frame so it looked like the camera was moving when they played it back, this was called motion control or motion controlled camera. Without the equipment[4], it could have been easy for each frame to be in a different place which would make it look jumpy and unprofessional when it was played back.
(Motion control machine using Canon EOS Mark II)
Another working method of a stop motion animator is to do with planning a stop motion animation, instead of just storyboarding what they want to take pictures of, some animators will make an animatic which is just a stop motion of all the storyboard photos that have been taken. In Her Morning Elegance, Oren Lavie was also the director for the music video as well as being the musician so he decided to make the animatic. The animatic for Her Morning Elegance was spanned over three weeks and it looks like it was made in a 3D modelling program, this is useful because it allowed them to see which parts of the body went where while they we taking the actual photos for the stop motion[3]. Animatics are a very practical, although they may take a while to complete, the final production will be much simpler since what needs to be done is specific and not just guess work on the day of shooting.
Motion control camera in nightmare before christmas http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/188767%7C0/The-Nightmare-Before-Christmas.html
Channel Idents There are many places that stop motion animation appears, it can be in idents, films, music videos adverts, music videos and various other places. Stop motion has become more popular in recent years in channel idents, an ident is just something that allows you to identify something, in this case TV channels. A popular stop motion channel ident were the BBC Christmas idents from 2008 with a Wallace and Gromit theme, the 2008 idents were made by Aardman with various scenes of stop motion with Wallace and Gromit followed by the BBC 1 logo, these idents were effective because they contained something easily recognisable other than BBC 1 so people were intrigued to see something different. Other channels to use stop motion in their idents was Channel 4, they even launched a campaign to encourage people to upload their own animations (not only stop motion) to a webpage called 4motions on the Channel 4 website.
Bibliography
1. IMDb and Kemie (estimated 2006) Humourous Phases of Funny Faces, Internet Movie Database, Available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000554/ written 13th December 2005 (Accessed 29th November 2014) 2. Postman Pat S5 EP11 Runaway Train, video, October 18th 2010, (accessed 3rd December 2014),