Stop motion animation is a technique which allows us to manipulate objects in a way that creates movement in still objects.
One of the earliest forms of stop motion was through the Zoetrope. The Zoetrope was first created by Ding Hu a Chinese inventor as early as 180 AD. The zoetrope is a device that moves faster than your brain and eyes can process therefore creates an illusion of action. Its frame is a cylinder with vertical slits around the side, by looking through the slits it creates movement through the pictures.
This is an example of a simple Zoetrope that uses a simple, short idea and creates movement. The advantages to the Zoetrope is that its a simple and easy way to create small animation, this was more usful when it was first created but with the technology we have today these factors are what also disadvantages to the Zoetrope. For example, Zoetropes cannot make much of a story to there animation because its only done on a small scale. The zoetrope was created initially for entertainment as when it was created there wasn’t much for people to look or any television. But with todays technology we have the Zoetrope’s can be used on much bigger scales:
The Magic Roundabout was created in France in the 1960’s by Serge Danot. The BBC used the original stop motion footage used and added English monolog. It was created as entertainment for children. As you can see from the footage below the older versions of Magic Roundabout are quite jumpy which was there only major disadvantage.
When the popular series came out with the 2005 film the graphics were a lot better than the original as the technology we were avaliable to allowed us to use computer animation rather than stop motion.
Corpse bride – stop motion with after effects
Although the technology was available for Tim Burton and Mike Johnson to create this film with computer animation they decided they wanted to sick to the traditional old fashion way of making people/objects move, saying stop motion doesn’t make the visuals too slick and perfect but keeping it live. The corpse bride was created purly for entertainment purposes, the disadvatage to using stop motion to create this film is that it took the team up to 10years to finish the final product.
The making of Corpse Bride:
The Brothers Quay
Advantage – The Brothers Quay liked the dark themes and the use of scary doll parts therefore the use of stop motion adds to the scary feeling they like to put across with the slight jumps between movements.
Disadvantage – very time consuming to create a smooth stop motion animation as there needs to be more frames per second.
Oren Lavie - Her Morning Elegance
This music video was created for visual entertainment while the song was being played. It’s a concept based music video purely made for entertainment. The camera has been set in a stationary position and is like this the whole way through. It’s a fairly easy concept and wouldn’t have needed much to create, 1 mattress, actress and the artist. Although the actual making of the video would have been harder than it looks. I like this music video as i believe it sounds out and sticks with the lyrics of the song as its very simple. The disadvantages to creating a music video like this is that it’s very time consuming. It took the producers 6 weeks of scripting, 3 weeks of storyboarding and 48hours of storyboarding. It would have also cost money as they printed 2096 photos out.