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.

Developing Stop Motion Animation

George Pal was born on February 1st 1908 in Hungary was and an animator and film producer. From 1931-1933 he worked on patenting Pal-Doll, a series of puppet films made using hand carved wooden puppets. He made multiple adverts for Phillips and Horlicks Malted Milk before he began work for Paramount Pictures. Being an animator, he made the 'Puppetoons' series in the 1940's, each Puppetoon needed almost 9000 individually carved wooden figures or faces.
Despite their ever growing popularity due to financial issues, it wasn't possible to continue with the series and it was cut short in 1939. Pal also used the Puppetoon name to create characters in a selection of his live action feature films towards the start of his live action career.

Developing Stop Motion Animation

Willis O'Brien was an American special effects artist for motion pictures, born on March 2nd 1886 in Oakland. During his teenage years he started to make models of dinosaurs and cavemen and with the help of a local newsreel cameraman he animated them. Herman Wobber, a San Francisco exhibitor, saw his short film and in 1915 he helped fund the production of 'The Dinosaur and the Missing Link; A Prehistoric Tragedy'
In 1925 'The Lost World', was released, in this sequence clay models of dinosaurs were added to live action footage used to show the adventure of two explorers finding living dinosaurs in the South of America. This was the first feature length film made in the United States that featured model animation.
He later developed King King in 1933, which told the story of a prehistoric ape named Kong who attempts to possess a young woman and dies in the process. It was a Hollywood hit, its often said to be 'one of the most iconic movies in the history of cinema'.

Developing Stop Motion Animation

Emile Cohl was a French animator, born on January 4th 1857, who brought stop motion animation to America, he used drawings, puppets and other inanimate objects to create his stop motion films. As a teenager he discovered Guignol puppet theater, Fantoche and caricature, this was a form of drama where all the characters involved are puppets of marionettes.

In his 50's Chol found work at 'Gaumont', a mini-major film studio, during his time there he collaborated other directors, learning cinematography from Arnaud and how to direct comedies, 'fairy pieces' and pageants, despite all this, his specialty was animation. He was asked by his boss to figure out the mystery of 'The Haunted Hotel', Chol studied the film frame by frame and in this way discovered  the basic techniques of animation.
His first animated film was titled 'Fantasmagorie', it was released in 1908 and used 700 of his drawings, all individually photographed to create the animated sequence lasting two minutes. This was considered the first fully animated film ever made

Developing Stop Motion Animation

The first example of stop motion animation was created by Albert E. Smith and Stuart Blackton.
Blackton was born on January 5th 1875 in Sheffield and was a film producer and director of silent film. He worked for most of his life as an illustrator whilst producing, directing, writing and starring in his own films. Whilst working for the 'New York Evening World' he was sent to interview Thomas Edison about his Vitascope, it was suggested that Blackton and Smith buy a print of the films, as well as nine others and a Vitascope.
Albert was born on June 4th 1875 in Kent, and was a stage magician, film director and producer, in 1897 he founded 'Vitagraph Studios' with his partner, James Blackton.
In 1898 'The Humpty Dumpty Circus' was created, it was the first of its kind, in this film a toy circus of acrobats and animals come to life with the kelp of jointed limbs and stands. This animation has since been lost, and now only the ideas and information about the short film are available.

Developing Stop Motion Animation

In March of 1895, Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat made an agreement, their aim was to develop a motion picture device. Jenkins had already invented a device for viewing motion pictures, the Phantoscope, a device similar to the Edison Kinetoscope. Because of his knowledge with motion pictures, he and Armat were able to create a version of the Phantoscope that projects its short films.
Despite them working well together the pair split, and Armat took the device to Edison, with the intention that he would develop the machine.
Edison agreed and in he February of 1869, the projecting Phantoscope was given a new name, the Vitascope. With the quick success of the device, other competitors started to develop their own projection systems in American theaters

Developing Stop Motion Animation

Auguste Lumiere was born on October 19th 1862 and Louis Lumiere, born October 5th 1864, were brothers from France who are credited to be the first filmmakers in history. Together they patented the Cinematograph, a motion picture film camera, which was also used as a film projector in the early 1890's. Together they then created their first film 'Sortie de l'usine Lumiere de Lyon' in 1894, it was shown at the worlds first and oldest cinema in the September of 1894. They created numerous films, each one is 17 meters long, which when manually put through the projector, runs for about 50 seconds.

Developing Stop Motion Animation

Charles-Emile Reynaud was born on December 8th 1844 in Montreuil and was a French inventor, responsible for the first animated cartoons. In 1877 he created the Praxinoscope, an animation device much more advanced than the Zoetrope. It was similar to the Zoetrope in that i used a strip of images that had been altered slightly, but instead of having small slits around the outside, it had an inner circle, made up solely of mirrors, placed so the reflection was brighter and less distorted than that of a Zoetrope.
Then, in 1888 Reynaud developed he Theatre Optique, an improved version of his Praxinoscope that was capable of projecting images onto a screen from a longer roll of pictures. This allowed him to show hand drawn animated cartoons to larger audiences.

Developing Stop Motion Animation

Eadweard Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames on April 9th 1830, he lived as a bookseller before taking up his passion for photography. He was hired in 1872 by the governor of California, Leland Stanford, a racehorse owner for photographic studies. He wanted to know whether all four of the horses' feet came off the ground at the same time when it galloped. Muybridge was able to answer the question with a single photographic negative showing the trotting horse to be airborne between each bound. The negative itself has since been lost but the image survives through woodcuts made at the time.
In 1878 Muybridge had managed to photograph the horse at a trot, he also managed to photograph the horse at a gallop.
To take these photographs he placed numerous large glass plate cameras - these cameras work by using a light sensitive compound, that when exposed to light and then developed dark areas appear where the light has fallen, making a negative image, this is then turned into a positive image  by shining light through the developed plate onto paper covered in the same light sensitive compound - along the edge of the track, each shutter was triggered as the horse passed by by a thread, the path was also lined with white cotton sheets so that as much light was reflected as possible, making the image clearer. These images were then copied in the form of silhouettes onto a disk to be viewed in a machine he had invented in 1879, the zoopraxiscope, which was the first movie projector in history.

Development of Stop Motion Animation

William George Horner was born in 1786 in Britain and was a mathematician, in 1833/34 he developed the almost drum like shape of the Zoetrap, who was already aware of the recently developed Phenakistoscope disk, Joseph Plateau's invention. Horner's revolving drum had viewing slits between each of the pictures, he renamed it the 'Daedaleum'. It creates the illusion of action because of the fast movement, this made animations easy to see and it still often used today.

Joseph Plateau, an introduction

Joseph Plateau was born on October 14th, 1801 in Brussels, his father was an artist and Joseph continued to follow in his footsteps. Despite a passion for science, his is widely known for developing the, 'phenakistiscope' in 1832, its a stroboscopic device that gives the illusion of a moving image, the first of its kind. It consisted of two small disks, one with small windows so the viewer can see through them, and another containing a sequence of images, this mean that when the two disks rotated at the correct speed, it made the images seem as if they were animated.

An Introduction To Stop Motion Animation

Stop motion animation, also known as stop frame animation, is an animation technique used to make objects appear as if they're moving on their own. The object is moved a slight bit between each photograph that is taken so that when the images are put together in a sequence, it gives the illusion that the object is moving. Stop motion originally used non-drawn objects, such as dolls, blocks and cars.