Stop Motion Animation in Channel Idents

A channel ident is a form of identification of the station, they're played between programmes and show the channels logo and usually have a voice over of what will be aired on the channel for the next hour.
Channel idents are a good way for new animators to show off their work, E4 for example, have new animators submit their work to their website where the general public can vote for them and decide which is aired on the channel. Most of the productions are 24 frames per second but some are more detailed.

Stop Motion Animation in Cinema

Stop motion animation is very popular in the movies, it has been used for hundreds of years and is still used today. Now that technology has progressed often only childrens films are made with stop motion animation, Chicken Run is one of the most iconic childrens films, produced by Aardmans Animations is is the chicken version of The Great Escape. Robocop features stop motion animation and is a perfect example of how much stop motion techniques have progressed over the past few years.

Stop Motion Animation in Television Adverts

Television adverts are often digitally animated, but there are some that are made with stop motion animation, these tend to be the most memorable and most expensive adverts. The John Lewis  advert,'The Bear and The Hare' is the most recent, launched for Christmas 2013, the production cost over £7 million and shows the tale of a hare bringing a Bear a Christmas present. This production has 34 frames per second, to enhance the detail and persistence of vision.
The Natural Confectionery Company are also widely known for their stop motion animations of sweets, despite not being as detailed as other adverts, they still have 24 frames per second and cost half as much money.

Stop Motion Animation in Music Videos

Stop motion animation has been used in music videos for a number of years. This The White Stripes video, titled 'Fell In Love With A Girl' is stop motion, it's made with different lego bricks to represent Jack and Meg. This video has been recorded at 24 frames per second, meaning that every second contains 24 different pictures in which the characters move slightly. Recently stop motion animation has become very popular in music videos because of mass media and the unique final product that you get out of it which makes the audience remember it because it's a very hard thing to replicate.

Developing Stop Motion Animation

Tim Burton was born August 25th 1958 in Burbank, he's a film director, producer, artist, writer poet and stop motion artist. He's known or his dark, gothic and quirky horror and fantasy films. From a young age he as interested in the arts and a age 13 produced his first short film 'The Island of Doctor Agor'. After graduating from the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, he produced the shorts 'Stalk of the Celery Monster' and 'King and Octopus'.
These shorts attracted the attention of the animation department at Walt Disney Productions and offered him an apprenticeship in the studios. He worked on many films during his time there, including The Black Cauldron, but preferred to work on his own. Because of this he went on to produce shorts alone, this led to him being fired because the films he was working on were too dark and scary for children to see.
In 1993 he produced 'The Nightmare Before Christmas', it's a musical fantasy film based on a three-page poem written a few years previous by Burton. Because of this film he became close friends with Henry Selick, a director and producer for Disney, who later helped him produce Coraline. Coraline was one of the largest productions yet, it was staged in a 140,000 square foot warehouse. the stage was divided into 50 sections which hosted almost 150 sets. The film needed 450 people to get it complete.

Developing Stop Motion Animation

Aardman Animations was founded in 1972 in Bristol. The studio is well known for its films made using stop motion clay animation techniques. It was found by Peter Lord, born on November 4th 1953, and David Sproxton, born on January 6th 1954, both gentlemen were keen animators.
Their first production as a company was a television series for deaf people named 'Vision On', this planted the idea for the very famous 'Morph', a clay character.

In the late 80's Lord and Sproxton started to hire more animators, one of these employees was Nick Park, a filmmaker from Preston, he created the first Aardman production to win an Oscar, 'Creature Comforts'. He then went on to develop clay modeled shots showing the adventures of 'Wallace and Gromit', two of these shorts also won Academy Awards.
Aardman got a contract with Dreamworks Animation in late 1997, they teamed up to create 'Chicken Run' which would then become Aardman's first feature film when it was released in June 2000. Because of the financial success of Chicken run and the new bridges with Dreamworks, Aardman were able to bring back 'Wallace and Gromit' in 2005, which again because an Academy Award Winner.
Despite the success with stop motion animation, Aardman decided to start using computer animations, releasing 'Flushed Away' as their first film.

Developing Stop Motion Animation

Jan Svankmajer was born on September 4th 1934 in Prague, from a young age he was working with Puppets and puppet theater, then studied puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. His work is considered to be dark, humorous and bizarre, he uses a wide selection of techniques ranging from stop motion animation, claymation, puppet animation and live action to create his stories.
His first short film was released in 1964, not long after he'd left the Academy, and he soon became allied with the Czech surrealist movement. One of his most famous pieces was an adaption of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland', that combined stop motion animation and live action. Alice was Svankmajer's first venture into feature length film-making as he had spent the previous two decades directing short films.