Unit 33 - Stop Motion Animation

Techniques And Development

Of Stop Motion Animation

There are 12 principles of stop motion animation and they are as follows:

Squash And Stretch

1) Squash and Stretch

2) Anticipation

3) Follow-Through and Overlapping Action

4) Arcs

5) Ease-In and Ease-Out


6) Timing

7) Secondary Action

8) Exaggeration

9) Staging

10) Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose

11) Solid Drawing

12) Appeal


1) SQUASH AND STRETCH

Secondary Action

This one applies to clay animation. It could be used with other kinds of objects, but only if they're made from the right materials and can be manipulated properly.

2) ANTICIPATION

One of the biggest problems in beginner's animation is that it's often hard to tell what's going on, because things all seem to happen at the same time and characters just do things suddenly for no apparent reason.

3) FOLLOW-THROUGH AND OVERLAPPING ACTION

Follow-through is the countermeasure to anticipation. It occurs after an action, and is the direct physical result of it. Personally, I think I would have grouped Follow-Through with Anticipation, and put Overlapping Action with Secondary Action.

4) ARCS

The main reasons being the jointed nature of the skeleton - and gravity. Because the skeleton is a system of jointed forms, those forms will rotate around the joints in a series of arcing motions.

5) EASE-IN AND EASE-OUT

Timing

Also alternately known as Slow-in and Slow-out, or Acceleration and Deceleration. It refers to the tendency things have to start and stop moving gradually.



6) TIMING

It can't really be described in a simple way like most of the others can. It's something that you'll be constantly struggling with, trying to come to terms with and use to your advantage.

7) SECONDARY ACTION

Secondary Actions are little movements that aren't essential but that help to add meaning to an action.

8) EXAGGERATION

Exaggeration

This depends largely on what kind of animation you're doing. If it's realistic you might want to keep exaggeration to a minimum, but obviously for something more crazy or comical you can exaggerate a lot.

9) STAGING

Staging is really not animation-specific. It's a director's tool, used in all kinds of filmmaking and stagecraft. As an aspiring animator, it behooves you to study the greater aspects of filmmaking in general.

10) STRAIGHT AHEAD ACTION AND POSE-TO-POSE

What this means is that you must start at the beginning of a shot and progress through it straight ahead, one frame to the next, with no going back and no jumping ahead - no second pass.

11) SOLID DRAWING

Solid drawings don't apply in stopmotion, but we can try to keep to the spirit of the concept by changing it to solid fabbing.

12) APPEAL

Appeal means what something looks like for example, if i liked something because of what it looks like i would want it more because it looks good.







Joseph Plateu

                           Pioneers Of Stop-Motion

 Animation

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau was a Belgian physicist. He was the first person to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this he used counter rotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistoscope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Plateau

William George Horner



William George Horner was a British mathematician and schoolmaster. The invention of the zoetrope, in 1834 and under a different name, has been attributed to him.

A zoetrope is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_George_Horner

Charles Reynaud

Charles-Émile Reynaud was a French science teacher, responsible for the first projected animated cartoon films.
Reynaud created the Praxinoscope in 1877. The praxinoscope was an animation device, the successor to the zoetrope. It was invented in France in 1877 by Charles-Émile Reynaud. Like the zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles-%C3%89mile_Reynaud

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard J. Muybridge was an English photographer who spent much of his life in the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge

Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor, scientist, and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison

The Lumiere Brothers

The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas and Louis Jean were among the earliest filmmakers in history.

Their father, Claude-Antoine Lumière ran a photographic firm and both brothers worked for him: Louis as a physicist and Auguste as a manager. Louis had made some improvements to the still-photograph process, the most notable being the dry-plate process, which was a major step towards moving images.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_and_Louis_Lumi%C3%A8re

George Pal

George Pal, was a Hungarian-born American animator and film producer, principally associated with the science fiction genre. He became an American citizen after emigrating from Europe. He was nominated for Academy Awards no less than seven consecutive years and received an honorary award in 1944. This makes him the second most nominated Hungarian exile after Miklós Rózsa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pal

                

     Development Of Stop-Motion

Animation

Willis O'Brien

Willis Harold O'Brien was an Irish American pioneering motion picture special effects artist who perfected and specialized in stop-motion animation. He was affectionately known to his family and close friends as "Obie".

O'Brien was hired by the Edison Company to produce several short films with a prehistoric theme, most notably The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy and the nineteen minute long The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, the later of which helping to secure his position on The Lost World. For his early, short films O'Brien created his own characters out of clay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_O'Brien

Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen is an American film producer and a special effects creator and created a brand of stop-motion model animation sometimes called Dynamation.

Among his most notable works are his animation on Mighty Joe Young, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, featuring a famous sword fight against seven skeleton warriors.

Before the advent of computers for camera motion control and CGI, movies used a variety of approaches to achieve animated special effects. One approach was stop-motion animation which used realistic miniature models, used for the first time in a feature film in The Lost World , and most famously in King Kong .

Svankmajer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Harryhausen

Švankmajer was born in Prague. An early influence on his later artistic development was a puppet theatre Švankmajer was given for Christmas as a child. He studied at the College of Applied Arts in Prague and later in the Department of Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. In 1958 he contributed to Emil Radok's film Doktor Faust and then began working for Prague's Semafor Theatre where he founded the Theatre of Masks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%A0vankmajer




Quay Twins

 Stephen and Timothy Quay are American identical twin brothers better known as the Brothers Quay or Quay Brothers. They are influential stop-motion animators. They are the recipients of the 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play The Chairs.

The Quay Brothers reside and work in England, having moved there in 1969 to study at the Royal College of Art, London after studying illustration at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Quay

Timothy Burton

Timothy W. Burton is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and for blockbusters such as Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Batman, Batman Returns, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland, his most recent film, that is currently the second highest-grossing film of 2010 as well as the sixth highest-grossing film of all time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Burton

Aardman Animations, Ltd., also known as Aardman Studios, or simply as Aardman, is an Academy Award-winning British animation studio based in Bristol, United Kingdom. The studio is known for films made using stop-motion clay animation techniques, particularly those featuring Plasticine characters Wallace and Gromit. However, it successfully entered the computer animation market with Flushed Away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardman_Animations

Genre is the term for any category of literature as well as various other forms of art or culture, e.g., music, based on some loose set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre

Walt Disney

Walt Disney Television Animation is the animated television production studio of The Walt Disney Company. It was formed in 1985 as Walt Disney Pictures Television Animation Group, the name was then later changed to Walt Disney Television in the mid-1980s then back to its present name in 2003.

It is headquartered since 1998 in the Frank G. Wells Building on the Studio Lot across from the Team Disney Burbank building The Frank G. Wells building was specifically designed for Television Animation, and has a film reel and filmstrip across the front of the building facing Team Disney Burbank across the parking lot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_Television_Animation

Channel 4 Logo

The first set of indents showed the channel 4 logo broken down into its 9 blocks subtly disguised as elements found in each environment shown. While the blocks are static in each of their surroundings, our first person perspective camera moves through the sequence to reveal the Channel 4 logo at the midpoint. The 12 different locations of these events dictates what the actual moving material is and include a privet hedges gliding through a bowling green, hay bales stacked on a stubble field, looming pylons trailing from a nuclear power station, road work signs on the motorway and neon hoardings for an American diner.

http://www.moving-picture.com/index.php/awards/341.html

Cinema

The United Kingdom has had a major influence on modern cinema and has produced some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful films in cinema history. The first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park, London in 1889 by William Friese Greene, a British inventor, who patented the process in 1890. It is generally regarded that the British film industry enjoyed a 'golden age' in the 1940s, led by the studios of J. Arthur Rank and Alexander Korda. Despite a history of successful productions, the industry has often been characterised by a debate about its identity and the influences of American and European cinema.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_the_United_Kingdom

Advertising is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience to purchase or take some action upon products, ideas, or services. It includes the name of a product or service and how that product or service could benefit the consumer, to persuade a target market to purchase or to consume that particular brand. These messages are usually paid for by sponsors and viewed via various media. Advertising can also serve to communicate an idea to a large number of people in an attempt to convince them to take a certain action. For example if i was advertising a car i would advertise it on the TV and the internet so that more people can see the car and be intrested in it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising

A music video or song video is a short video or film that accompanies a piece of music or song. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. Although the origins of music videos date back much further, they came into prominence in the 1980s, when MTV based their format around the medium. Prior to the 80s, these works were described by various terms including illustrated song, filmed insert, promotional film, promotional clip or film clip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_video

Video Game

A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device. The word video in video game traditionally referred to a raster display device. However, with the popular use of the term video game, it now implies any type of display device. The electronic systems used to play video games are known as platforms; examples of these are personal computers and video game consoles. These platforms range from large mainframe computers to small handheld devices. Specialized video games such as arcade games, while previously common, have gradually declined in use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game

Mobile Phone

A mobile phone is an electronic device used to make mobile telephone calls across a wide geographic area. Mobile phones differ from cordless telephones, which only offer telephone service within a limited range of a fixed land line, for example within a home or an office.

A mobile phone can make and receive telephone calls to and from the public telephone network which includes other mobiles and fixed-line phones across the world. It does this by connecting to a cellular network owned by a mobile network operator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone

A website is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed relative to a common Uniform Resource Locator, often consisting of only the domain name and the root path in an Internet Protocol-based network. A web site is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network.

A web page is a document, typically written in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext mark-up Language. A web page may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable mark-up anchors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website