Stop Motion

Stop Motion Animation is a technique used in animation to bring objects to life on screen. This is done by moving the object in frame while taking a picture of it in different stages. When all the frames are played it shows movement. Clay figures, puppets, miniatures and Lego are often used in stop motion animation as they can be handled easily. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEgTzfiafhU

Joseph Plateau

Joseph Plateau was the creator of the phenakistiscope.  Plateau describes the construction and the action of a disc with 16 slits and 16 intermediate sectors. When 16 identical drawings are put in the sectors, one sees a stationary image, when looking through the slits at the revolving disc in a mirror. This is in fact the experiment of Faraday. The brilliant contribution of Plateau comes when in stead of putting 16 identical images in the sectors he draws 16 images, which change little by little. Because of the visual persistence the images seen in swift succession will fade into each other and a suggestion of movement is created. It is for this reason that Joseph Plateau is cited as the precursor of the movie, more accurately he is the precursor of the animation film.

Wills O'Brien

The father of stop motion animation, Willis O'Brien was a Hollywood special effects innovator most famous for his work using miniature models of a gorilla in King Kong. O'Brien's work ended up changing the way we thought about film animation. He then won an Academy Award for the special effects in Mighty Joe Young in 1949.

Raymond Harryhausen

Raymond Harryhausen was an American visual effects creator, writer, and producer who created a form of stop-motion model animation.

His most memorable works include the animation on Mighty Joe Young , with his mentor Willis H. O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for special effects; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad , his first color film; and Jason and the Argonauts, featuring a famous sword fight against seven skeleton warriors. His last film was Clash of the Titans, after which he retired.

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge's photography of moving animals captured movement in a way that had never been done before. His work was used by both scientists and artists. Known as the 'father of the motion picture', Eadweard Muybridge's early photographic experiments laid the foundation for modern cinema. Quickly establishing a reputation for landscape work, he was appointed director of photographic surveys for the U.S. Government in 1868, conducting studies of numerous remote areas, including the newly purchased Alaska. 

William George Horner

William George Horner was a British mathematician; he was a schoolmaster, headmaster and schoolkeeper, proficient in classics as well as mathematics, who wrote extensively on functional equations, number theory and approximation theory, but also on optics.

Emile Reynaud

Photographer, teacher and artist, Emile Reynaud is known as the inventor of the Praxinoscope, of the Optical Theater and as the creator of the firsts animated cartoons. He was one of the pioneers of cinema. During this time he invented the praxinoscope which is an instrument that creates optical illusions. He returned to Paris with the invention, and it was a sucess. He perfected the praxinoscope and came up with a large praxinoscope which enabled him to project a strip of film. He hand drew his cartoons onto film paper, which he then projected to audiences.

Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison rose from humble beginnings to work as an inventor of major technology. Setting up a lab in Menlo Park, some of the products he developed included the telegraph, phonograph, electric light bulb, alkaline storage batteries and Kinetograph. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park", he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

George Pal
George Palwill be remIf only for his unforgettable feature films, such as The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, When Worlds Collide, and tom thumb, George Palwill be remembered as one of the most gifted directors of fantastic cinema in history.

Pal's Puppetoons started as advertising films in Europe. These short films were so much fun to watch that theaters soon billed them in the lobby and played them for free . Eventually, Pal and his wife moved to Hollywood, USA, and was able to make the Puppetoons without advertisements, instead being sponsored by Paramount Pictures. Remembered as one of the most gifted directors of fantastic cinema in history.



Jan Svankmajer
Czechoslovak animator extraordinaire, Jan has been making intensely bizarre films since the mid 60s. Most of his work is a mix between 3-D stop-motion animation, puppets and live-action, but it can involve any mix of the above. His stories are delightful, and surreal. His actors include real people, machines, socks, clay figures, antique dolls, pencil sharpeners, and skeletons or stuffed corpses of animals, among other things. His sets are usually decaying Czech buildings or landscapes, decorated with waste of the industrial age.

Stop motion animation is animation that is captured one frame at time, with physical that are moved between frames. When you play back the sequence of images rapidly, it creates the illusion of movement. If you understand how 2D drawn animation works, stop motion is similar, except using physical objects instead of drawings.

























Persistence of Vision refers to the phenomenon where the retina retains an image for a brief split-second after the image was actually seen, and lends itself to animation by fostering the illusion of motion when we view images in closely-timed sequence to one another. We don't notice the fractional skips between images because that persistence fills in the momentary gap to make the motion seem seamless.


Frame rate. Think of a motion picture camera as a relentless still camera, taking loads of still photographs every second. Movies create the illusion of motion by showing still images in rapid succession. The number of images photographed per second is referred to as the frame rate of the movie and is measured in FPS. Frame rate describes both the speed of recording and the speed of playback. The more frames recorded per second, the more accurately motion is documented onto the recording medium.

Story Board

Step 1

Once you've written your script and have an idea of what will happen in your movie, get yourself some paper or even poster board to assemble your storyboard on.

Step 2

Start with the beginning of your film and draw the first shot. Remember, you don't have to be a skilled drawer to draw a storyboard. The most important function of the storyboard is to show how the shot is going to look.

Step 3

Make a new frame for each significant change in action or location.

Step 4

Once you get the hang of it, all you need to do is create the rest of the story board whilst sticking to the steps i've shown you.