Patrick Berry Unit 5 & 33 Task 1

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Script on Techniques and development of Stop-motion

Introduction
Stop motion is an animation technique that physically manipulates an object that appears to
move on its own. A photo is taken of a scene, an object would then move a certain distance,
and then another photo would be taken. This is repeated over and over again creating the
illusion that the object is moving once all the photos have been put together. The first use of
stop motion was in 1898 by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton, creating a production called
Humpty dumpty circus. In 1907, a stop motion film came out called The Haunted Hotel which
was created by J. Stuart Blackton, it was resounding success when released and become one
of the first uses of Stop Motion to bring to audiences. In the 1960s and 70s Eliot Noyes Jr.
refined the technique of free-form clay animation with his Oscar-nominated film Clay. The
first clay animation stop motion to win an Oscar came in 1975 by experimental animators Will
Vinton and Bob Gardiner, creating closed Mondays. In the 1980s Industrial Light & Magic
often used stop motion model animation for films such as the original star wars trilogy to
create the chess sequence in Star Wars and the AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back. In
the UK Aardmen animation had been a company since 1976 and were growing constantly. In
1980 the first feature length clay animated film was created by Marc Paul Chinoy titled I go
Pogo. There have been an increasing number of traditional stop motion feature films like The
Nightmare before Christmas which was produced by Tim Burton. Nick Park who created the
Wallace and Gromit series holds the record for highest grossing stop motion animated movie
grossing nearly $225 million worldwide. This was Chicken Run.
Link Paragraph
Stop motion uses a variety of techniques such as Persistence of vision, stop-frame, frame
rates and movement of models. Persistence of vision is the theory which states that the
human eye always retains images for a fraction of a second. This means that everything we
see is a subtle blend of what is happening now and what happened a fraction of a second ago.
It was developed by roman poet Lucretius with stroboscope experiments performed by Perter
Mark Roget in 1824. Stop-frame is where the movement of an object is captured one frame
at a time, with physical objects that are moved between frames. When you play back the
sequence of images rapidly, it creates the illusion of movement. It was developed by J. Stuart
Blackton. Frame rates is where number of images photographed per second is referred to as
the frame rate of the movie and is measured in frames per second. The more frames recorded
per second, the more accurately motion can be seen. When the frame rate of a movie is to
low, your mind will no longer be convinced that the content of the movie are continuous, and
the movie will appear to jump. This was also developed by J. Stuart Blackton. Movement of
Models is the movement of inanimate models and bringing them to life by using stop frame,
the right frame rates and persistence of vision.

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1st section, 2 pioneers

Charles Emile Reynaud was a French inventor, responsible for the first projected animated
cartoons. Reynaud created the Praxinoscope. This was animation device created after the
Zoetrope It used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The
difference between the Praxinoscope and Zoetrope was that there were inner circles, so the
picture was much clearer and easier to see. Here you can see that the Praxinoscope has
multiple mirrors within the frame of the structure. This is so you were able to see the moving
image from any angle and it would make the image a lot smoother to watch, making it seem
like a moving image.
Thomas Edison was an American Inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that
influenced life around the world, one of them begin the Kinetoscope. As you can see the
kinetoscope lets you view through the top of the machine enabling you to see a clear picture.
This was a motion picture exhibition device. It was designed for films to be viewed by one
individual at a time through ha peephole viewer window at the top of the device. It introduced
the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the
advent of video.
All off these creations are very simplistic and purely focus on the movement of animation,
theres no narrative, a very low frame rate, with each creation creating short pieces of
animation. The pioneers focused on the persistence of vision. Because the animation was very
simplistic the animation only worked so well because of the persistence of vision. The stopframe was a very simply design at this point, it was mainly used just to show the simple idea
of how stop-motion animation could work.

2nd section, 2 developers

Over the years technology evolved to create more impressive pieces of work. Stop motion
started to become extremely important within creating new films and being able to use stop
motion within feature length animations. Willis Harold OBrien was an American motion
picture special effects and stop-motion animation developer who could be classed
responsible for some of the best-known images in cinema history. His best known work were
pieces like The Lost World, King Kong and the Mighty Joe Young. OBrien was employed by
the Edison Company to animate a series of short films with a prehistoric theme. Whilst this
was happening he worked on Sam loyds The Puzzling Billboard and Nippys Nightmare, which
were the first stop-motion films to combine live actors with stop motion models. OBrien
created his own clay models in the early shorts, however for his feature career he employed
Richard and marcel Delgado, who created much more detailed stop-motion models. The
models contained articulated metal armatures and a bladder inside so they could create the
illusion of breathing. The use of animation over paintings moved stop motion along. It showed
that stop motion can be brought to look like real events. There would be a solid background
which would enhance the visual narrative of the stop motion animation helping with the
evolution of how a narrative could be created through stop motion animation. (King Kong
Clip) as you can see from the scene of King Kong he is moving a lot more realistically than the
early stop motion animation like what was used within the Haunted House, showing the

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evolution of stop motion and how much of a significant jump it has made. (show clip of the
Haunted house)
Raymond Frederick Ray Harryhausen was an American visual effects creator, writer and
producer who created a form of stop-motion animation known as Dynamation. Dynamation
was used to combine stop-motion footage with live action by using split-screen ad rear
projection. Harryhausen was inspired by OBrien and his work on King Kong. It was the film
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms where he first used the technique he called Dynamation. The
background would be used as a miniature rear-screen with his models animated in front of it,
re-photographed with an animation-capable camera to combine those two elements
together, the foreground element matted put to leave a black space. Then the films was
rewound, and everything except the foreground element matted out so that the foreground
element would now photograph in previously blacked out area. This created the effect that
the animated model was sandwiched in between the two live action elements. When
Harryhausen began working with colour film to make The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, he
experimented extensively with colour stock to overcome the colour-balance-shift problems.
With the evolution of technology and use of movement of models, the stop-motion animation
used was a lot more detailed and impressive. Stop motion would start being used in feature
length films like King Kong. Frame-rate made the animation a lot more impressive. Instead of
just having a frame rate of 1 it drastically increased to 1400 per minute, making the animation
used within King Kong that much more realistic and impressive. Using dolls to create King
Kong meant that the movements of the animal were a lot more realistic and made it seem
like the animal was real. (Show clip of the dolls in King Kong) having this clip would show the
audience what makes the Gorilla move and show how much more effective the use of dolls
has been within the stop motion evolution. They can also see how elaborate the dolls are and
what the process was to make them easy to move and easy to create.
3rd section, 2 contemporary
Technology has now made a huge leap. Every aspect within stop motion had drastically
improved. Feature length films are now being created which show how far technology has
become. New styles of stop motion were starting to be created like The Brothers Quay also
known as Stephen and Timothy Quay Are American Identical Twins. Most of their animation
films feature puppets made of doll parts and other organic/inorganic materials, often partially
disassembled into the dark atmosphere. One of their most famous pieces of work is Street of
Crocodiles, which is based on the short novel of the same name by the Polish author and artist
Bruno Schulz. This was selected by Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best films for Sight and
Sounds 2002 critics poll. Two feature length films have been created by the Brothers Quay,
both produced by Keith Griffiths, these are; Institute Benjamenta and The Piano Tuner Of
Earthquakes. Most of their animations have no speaking dialogue except for The Comb, which
has multilingual background mumbling. In 2000 they contributed a short film to the BBCs
Sound on film series. The Quay Brothers are also known for creating music videos like His
Name Is Alive by Michael Penn or 16 Horsepower by the Black Soul Choir. The Brothers
focused on creating this scary, confusing, realistic stop motion. With the use of dolls and
materials they have focused on the narrative. Because the dolls were very easy to move
around it was easy to make the stop-motion effective and smooth, giving the production a

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much more professional look. (I will have clips of the music video shown). The Brothers Quay
made a huge advance within stop motion animation and stop frame within feature length
films. You can see that within the use of Street of Crocodiles they use organic materials. The
brothers quay are able to bring everything to life and give everything a meaning making that
much more important within stop frame because of how the brought meaning to everything
you see on the screen.
Another contemporary artist would be Michael Please started off his directing career by
ignoring the syllabus on his BA special Effects course at University of the Arts London
producing several technically experimental narrative animated shorts. During his second year
of University he set up a team to create his first film, which was a translation form a graphic
novel that he had written. However his breakthrough happened when he was studying his
masters. This was when the Eagleman Stag was created. This short film ended up premiering
at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, but also earning his BAFTA. Please is currently working on
his first feature length film Marilyn Miller. The story is about a female sculptor whose works
are frankly unpopular until she starts destroying them, she subsequently finds a way of acting
negatively whilst getting positive results. Mikey Pleases other work is; Nine Types of Light,
The animation Tag Attack and Goodness, Newness, Oldness, Badness. Please creates his
animations by using paper, which gives the animation a whole new look, he creates these
feature length animations with the newest technology and the newest narrative within
animation. He was able to sculpt the movements of each creation a lot more precise than the
clay models from King Kong or other developers animations. Michael Please was interviewed
after his BAFTA win in 2011 and talks about how animation technology will develop over the
next few years. He states that the more perfected that technique gets the more people will
lose interest and it will cease to be impressive. It somehow feels too easy. Personally Im far
more impressed when I can see some practical effort has into physically making something.
For me thats a much more exciting spectacle. The most exciting thing developing at the
moment I think is 3D printing, that what Im keeping my eye on. This shows that even though
CGI has travelled huge distances to get to where animators are now, there is still more to pe
perfected and as time goes on, the harder it would be for stop motion animators to keep up
with the demand of the public, keeping their interest into how clever and different stop
motion can be, like using paper as your main source of material.
Seeing as technology had drastically evolved from the work of OBrien or Harryhausen, CGI
had become a lot more popular and so with the use of stop-motion, animations could be
created to be a lot more professional and smooth. The frame rates became even bigger and
are going into the 1000s simply the technology is so far advanced that a lot of the animation
could be done through computers. The movement of models became a lot more popular as
they could be line with wiring so each movement could be made that much more precise, and
make the movements of the objects/models realistic.

Stop motion evolved through technology. At the beginning with Reynaud and Edison, the only
way stop motion was distributed was through the creations they made. These toys started off
as the small idea that brought in stop motion, dynamation, feature length animations and
creating a whole new genre. Without these inventions, stop motion wouldnt be close to how

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evolved it is now. These creations brought the start of the animation could be created. Once
cinema came out stop motion would be shown throughout films like King Kong, this would
introduce the audience to stop motion. Making future creatures aware of what they can do
and how they could evolve these techniques. As technology evolved and stop motion became
more popular feature length films would keep on being created, then released on DVD like
Wallace and Gromit Curse of the Ware Rabbit or the Nightmare before Christmas. When the
internet was created and YouTube came out stop motion became popular to a whole new
genre. People would be constantly uploading stop motion that they have created. PES is a
YouTube account that focuses their videos on being stop motion, broadening the popularity
of the genre. Through technology stop motion has been able to become a world known genre,
bringing in the imagination and creation of brand new narratives. It has continued to grow
and will keep on bringing new creations and new ideas on what you can do with stop motion.