Stop Motion Animation

“A Close Shave took 10 months to shoot, and that was with 5 animators working full-time, producing approximately 5 seconds a day each…. One frame of film is taken for each move made. When you have taken 25 of these frames, that constitutes 1 second of film.” - Nick Park (indiWIRE, 1996)

Stop motion animation uses manipulation of physical objects to give the illusion of movement. By moving these objects by fine amounts, and photographing each of these steps, the illusion of movement is created when shown in a continuous sequence (Wikipedia, 2007c).

Materials commonly used in stop motion animation includes wire-frame models, plasticine, cardboard cut-outs or in amateur films, Lego (known as brickmation).

Stop motion animation can give films a very rich visual appearance, as the texture and depth of objects can be captured by the camera. This helps ensure the techniques ongoing popularity amongst film-makers - most notably Britain’s Aardman Animations, the studio behind Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run and Creature Comforts (BBC, 2002a).

Influential Stop-Motion Films

Given the huge volume of stop-motion films released since the first use of the technique in The Humpty Dumpty Circus released in 1908. This section will look at a few examples of stop motion which have dramatically developed the techniques or found widespread popularity amongst audiences (Wikipedia, 2007c)

Wallace & Gromit

Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out was created by British animator Nick Park in the late 1980s. It outlined the story of an eccentric inventor and his dog, who take a trip to the moon in a homebuilt rocket. The film gave a realistic effect of motion and an extremely rich and detailed animation style using its plasticine models.

The second and third Wallace & Gromit films, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave further extended this animation technique, including complex special effects such as lighting and explosions. The feature film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2006) combined stop-motion animation with 3D computer-generated imagery (CGI) for the most complicated scenes.