Assessment 1 - Stop Motion!!!

Stop Motion animation

Kazu Yon (no.4)

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!!!! Stop Motion!!!! one of my favourite forms of animation! First off I'm gonna apologise for now for any spelling errors the may come forth with, really just from excitement form talking about Stop Motion!!! So so so! lets begin! Stop Motion, is and awesome technique that uses pictures or images to show an image of movement i.e., getting a clay model, and take a picture of it standing there, then another picture of the leg slightly moved forward, and another with the leg moved ever so slightly more, and so on and so on, until the pictures can be put together to create an animation. Think, Flip Book combined with 3D Zoetrope, but your only limited to your patience and your model's! The name itself is pretty self explanatory, Stop Motion, since you need to stop in-between pictures to move it, eh? get it? 

The Making of!!!

Now I've already gave a quick description on how the stop motion animation is done, as such im not gonna give you a step by step guide to start you off, I am actually gonna post a video that shows a pretty cool technique that will help you (and me) a lot! so what you need is pretty simple, you will need, a camera, some sort of software to compile the images together, like Flash for example, next you will need your model, whatever it may be, from Lego, to old toys or even just as simple as a pencil rolling down a table! Then you need a place to set everything up! I would highly recommend, no i demand you use a tripod stand for your camera! you need to keep the camera steady at all times, unless the shot needs you to move it! The main thing's that should be moving is your self and your model of choice! Just Remember that you can use almost anything for a stop motion animation! as long as you have a camera and some imagination it can be done! clay, plastercine, or even just old toys laying around!

Heaven's and Hell's (ups and downs)

The upside is, damn is it awesome!! So..freaking....awesome! you can make it look pretty damn professional too with enough time and practice! The Downside I hear you ask? It can potentially be very time consuming, you are sitting staring at a model, moving it inch by inch, frame by frame, Rome wasn't built in a day, and any good Stop Motion wasn't either unfortunatly. Aside from the time consuming nature of it, its also pretty complex as opposed to the previous animation styles, it sounds simple in theory, but depending on what software you use, what your aiming to do with it, how long it will be, you may need to edit a lot of your pictures, if not all of them....that's....a lot of pictures! Personally I think the pay off for it though is worth it! and I will show you why at the end! Be prepared to be overwhelmed with examples!

Here Stop Motion Cometh!

So for the History of Stop Motion I'm gonna change things up a notch, I'm gonna talk a little about how it came to be, how its aged over the years, then give a list of how its been used over the years too! The Examples page this time is gonna be covered in images, and videos of Stop Motion examples! Did I mention how much I loved Stop Motion? No? Okay then moving on. So lets begin at the beginning as they say! So the first example of it being used was in the movie industry (where else) and the credit for this awesome animation goes to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for a movie called "The humpty Dumpty Circus" where a toy circus of animals and acrobats come to life magically! This movie was realised back in 1898, making this young animation style only 118 years old! After this there was a few movies that used the stop motion, but I want to focus on the first Women animator. Back in 1916 a women by the name of Helen Smith Dayton, started messing around with Clay stop animation (we'll come back to that in a second) she realised her movie "William Shakesepeares Romeo and Juliet" I tried finding images to see if she used the animation technique in the movie, unfortunalty I couldn't find anything for it I'm afraid. Back to the Clay Stop Motion, now, my first intro to this was in an old 1925 movie call "The Lost World" I remember seeing this as a kid thinking, wow this looks awesome! Its as if its a toy that's came to life! Sitting there with my older brother just in awe of it! The man who made that awesome movie was Willis O'Brien, he went on to make a few other movies using the animation technique as well! Here is the list i promised earlier too! The reason I'm doing the list here rather than in the examples is, this is a history of the animation movies listed, giving the year of release, then I'm gonna give and example of the first listed and last to show a comparison, then other examples in videos!

• King Kong 1933
• Mighty Joe Young 1949
• Jason and the Argonauts 1963
• Clash of the Titans 1981
• Star wars Trilogy (1977, 1980, 1983)
• Terminator 1984
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit 1988
• The Nightmare Before Christmas 1993
• Fantastic Mr Fox 2009
• Kubo and the Two Strings 2016

Examples All Around!

Okay I've fan Boyed enough about the history of it, lets get some examples on the go for everyone! So a lot has changed from the late 1890's to modern day stop motion, the first two images are from King Kong (1933) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) just to show how advanced its become!

I know they aren't the sharpest of pictures, but King Kong is pretty damn old now! Wasn't even in 1080p! What kind of TV where people watching back in the day??? Next I'm gonna link two videos of some awesome stop motion TV series, Robot Chicken and Celebrity Death Match!

Celebrity Death match was me and my brother's reason for staying up late at the weekend growing up! Just think of how many frames are in these videos! Crazy!

Robot Chicken is still ongoing to this day and does awesome spoofs of Star wars and DC stuff! they're pretty clever on how they do the lip sinks, by using simple mouth cut outs, you can even see how they've increased the frames per seconds with they're newer stuff too! its so smooth and fluid in its motion!