The History and Development of Stop Motion Animation

Stop frame animation is a type of animation that involves photographing individual frames of an object to make said object appear to move when the frames are played sequentially. Animating with clay in this way is becoming popular and is known as clay-mation.

 Frame rates are the unit of measurement referring to the time it take to show a particular number of frames. Having a higher frame rate enhances the image and makes motion smoother; having a lower frame rate makes motion more jumpy.

In 1832 Joseph Plateau invented the Phenakitoscope, the first contraption to show the illusion of motionThe phenakitoscope uses a spinning disc attached to a handle. Positioned around the center of the disc were a series of drawings showing phases of the animation, and cut through it were a series of equally spaced radial slits.

In 1834 William George Horner produced the Zoetrope, It was a cylindrical spinning device with several frames of animation printed along the interior circumference. There are vertical slits around the sides through which an observer can view the moving images on the opposite side when the cylinder spins. As it spins the material between the viewing slits moves in the opposite direction of the images on the other side and in doing so serves as a rudimentary shutter. The zoetrope had several advantages over the Phenakitoscope. It didn’t require the use of a mirror to view the illusion, and because of its cylindrical shape it could be viewed by several people at once.

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. Someone looking in the mirrors would therefore see a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the zoetrope offered.

Eadweard Muybridge was an influential man in the field of motion and motion-picture projection.Muybridge produce over 100,000 images of animal and human motion, and made very important observations that revolutionised motion-picture at that time.

In 1891 Thomas Edison invented the Kinetoscope, the Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device. The Kinetoscope was designed for films to be viewed by one individual at a time through a peephole viewer window at the top of the device. The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector but introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video, by creating the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter.

The Lumiere brothers were two men who made a big impact on the face of early cinema and are credited to have made the first film; a film which featured workers leaving a factory.

George pal was an American animator and film producer, principally associated with the science fiction genre. He became an American citizen after emigrating from Europe. As an animator, he made the Puppetoons series in the 1940s, which led to him being awarded an honorary Oscar in 1944 for "the development of novel methods and techniques in the production of short subjects known as Puppetoons". Pal then switched to live action film making with The Great Rupert (1950).

Willis O’Brien was an Irish American motion picture special effects and stop-motion animation pioneer perhaps best known for his work King Kong (1933)

Ray Harryhausen is an American visual effects creator, writer and producer known for his work on films such as Jason and the Argonauts. (1963)

Jan Svankmajer is a Czech filmmaker who is known for his work on surreal animations. Svankmajer's trademarks include exaggerated sounds, creating an odd effect in some scenes. He used “fast-motion” sequences when people walk or interact. His films often involve inanimate objects being animated by stop-motion. Many of his films also include clay-mation.

The Quay brothers are two influential stop motion animators, their works mostly involved using puppets set to a dark backdrop. Their works were mainly visual and rarely relied on dialogue but were instead lifted by a musical score.

Tim Burton is an American film director renowned for his quirky, often surreal works. Films he has been involved with include Beetlejuice (1988) and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985). In films like Sleepy Hollow (1999) Burton used an effective blend of animation to achieve the scenes he wanted. He also recently used animation in Frankenweenie (2012) , as well as many other films that brought him success.

Aardman Animations is the animation studio behind Wallace and Gromit; they have made a lot of influential work in the field of clay-mation and produced many lovable clay characters. In recent years as new technology has been utilised Aardman even made a fully computer animatied movie called Flushed Away (2006)

There have been a great deal of animated films worldwide and animation is certainly a popular genre. Although animation comes in many forms it has always been an effective medium for communicating ideas through film and making the impossible, possible. Popular animated films include Toy Story (1995) and Fantasia 2000 (1999), animated films also tend to provide a good form of entertainment for children as the larger-than-life characters keep them amused.

Animated Television shows are also generally a genre grounded into the category of children’s entertainment, and there are many animated T.V shows intended for children however there are some shows that take on more mature themes, an example of this would be South Park (1997-Present) or Family Guy (1999-Present)

Channel Idents also often feature animation as it grabs the attention of the viewer and keeps them interested in what they’re watching; also live-action may seem long winded or hard to digest, therefore animation is the best way to approach an ident. E4 often features animated Idents and they even hold competitions to animate new ones.

Animated advertising is popular for both film and television especially for products aimed at children; but there are also plenty of adverts in general that feature animation, displaying details of their products. Also public information films often used animation to warn children of fire safety etc.

Animation in music videos is also quite popular; it was made fashionable by artist like Michael Jackson and Dire Straits who revolutionised animation in their videos. This use of animation continues to be popular to this day with many artists using animation in their videos; in fact it’s hard to imagine a time before music videos.

Animation is often used on websites for all sorts of reasons; some websites allow users to submit their own animations and work on their own ideas and this is just one way animation touches websites. Another way animation is used on the web is in advertising, most if not all adverts displayed on the internet will be an animation of some sort and the average person will see hundreds of these a day.