Stop motion animation - Research Paper Example

The primary trick of the trade is that the actions of the characters are divided into sequences or increments, and each increment of sequence is then filmed individually, with each shot making up one frame in a continuous collection of frames that mimic true movement (Quinstreet Inc.). The technique is said to involve moving and stopping the characters and then taking shots of the movement on a frame to frame basis, utilizing either plastic or clay puppets in most cases. A variation of stop motion animation is said to be the emergent art of pixilation, where human movements are photographed on a per frame basis (National Film Board of Canada).

The observation is that while the practice of stop motion animation seems to be of recent origins, with the popularity of some mainstream films done using various forms of stop motion animation, the art itself is said to have been around for over a century, with so-called object animation being among the earliest forms of stop motion animation to gain traction among artists and film makers. Object animation is as described above, with objects moved minutely and then photographed one frame at a time, and then played together to give the illusion of movement on the screen.

It takes a lot of time but is also considered to be among the least difficult among the different forms of stop motion animation too. The difficulty level, however, skyrockets with the addition of more and more characters, whose movements then need to be synchronized to make the animation successful and life-like (Kelly; Priebe). II. History The literature notes that most of the stop motion animation productions that were made in the past one hundred years of the existence of stop motion art were those that were one of two kinds: those that were made in order to accomplish some special effects incorporated into films, or else they were short films formats.

Among the primordial films that employ stop motion animation were said to be just experimental setups to explore movement of different kinds of objects that were placed in front of cameras. These included the 1912 production entitled “The Automatic Moving Company” as well as the 1913 production called “Bewitched Matches”. The latter was a production made part of a short film making use of stop-motion animation embedded within a live action feature for the duration of just twelve minutes at the most.

This latter production was made with Kinex Studios as the producer for the purposes of being viewed from homes, even as the distribution to theaters was done by George Pal. During the time of these productions' releases the Eastern Europeans experienced the ascension of their own kind of stop motion art, making use of puppets to make short films, pioneered in particular by the Czechs. Elsewhere, there was a simultaneous ,movement to include stop motion sequences in films that were properly classified as belonging to the genre of live action.

These were made possible by the early innovations of such pioneers as Ray Harryhausen as well as Willis O'Brien, with among the most prominent among the productions in this lineage being the Star Wars films and many other productions in the decade of the 1980's. Meanwhile the industry would go on to give critical acclaim and Academy citations to works such