Essay Plan

Introduction



In the introduction i will give an overview of everything about the essay. i will be talking about the following below:

1. What stop motion is 
2. stop motion history
3. Variations of stop motion
4. stop motion in television
5. stop motion in other media
6. stop motion artist

Mian Body of essay

Paragraph 1

• i will be talking about stop motion history, talking about what has happened in the past
• and how technology have feveloped from the very beginning.

Paragraph 2

• will be talking about big animation company such as Pixar, Disney
• what they have done
• how the audience consume animation, for example Cinema, iMax, Home
• will be discussing the different formats of exhibition of animation

Paragraph 3

will also be be talking about the feature animated films

type of technologies producers using at the moment

how this affect the industry.

Conclusion

• intention of the essay
• issue raised in the introduction
• explain the overall significance of the conclusion.

List of stop motion artists

Henry Selick

Director Henry Selick is a well-known force in the world of stop-motion animation, with Coraline – based on Neil Gaiman's best-selling novella and released in 2009 – being his most recent and successful work. Coraline, the first stop-motion animated feature to be shot entirely in stereoscopic 3-D, received lavish critical praise and became the second highest grossing stop-motion feature in history. Kenneth Turan, writing for the Los Angeles Times, said, "The third dimension comes of age with 'Coraline.' The first contemporary film in which the 3-D experience feels intrinsic to the story instead of a Godforsaken gimmick, 'Coraline' is a remarkable feat of imagination, a magical tale with a genuinely sinister edge." Coraline, released by Focus Features, is the first feature film made by LAIKA, an animation company based in Portland, Oregon and headed up by Travis Knight. Selick made his feature film directing debut in 1993 with The Nightmare Before Christmas, the first full-length, stop-motion feature from a major studio. An instant holiday classic based on producer Tim Burton's brilliant story, "Nightmare" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and Selick won the International Animated Film Society's Annie Award for Best Creative Supervision. In 1996, Selick followed with a second feature, James and the Giant Peach, again produced by Burton, which combined stop-motion animation with live-action book ends. The film received widespread critical acclaim and won first prize at the world-renowned Annecy Film Festival in 1997.

Selick studied animation at CalArts in California in the late 1970s with classmates John Lassiter, Brad Bird, and John Musker. Joe Ranft, Tim Burton, Jorgen Klubien, and Rick Heinrichs also attended CalArts, and both groups worked together at Disney Studios, with Ranft, Burton, Klubien, and Heinrichs collaborating with Selick in the years that followed on his feature films. While an animator at Disney, Selick received a grant to make an experimental short film, Seepage, that combined hand-drawn animation with life-size cut-out human figures that he animated with stop-motion. Leaving Disney in the early 80's, Selick moved to the Bay Area of California to work on the cut-out animated feature, Twice Upon A Time as a sequence director. He went on to direct many stop-motion TV ads including nine Pillsbury Doughboy spots, but it was his work on his stop-motion ads for MTV and his short pilot episode, Slow Bob In The Lower Dimensions, that caught the public's eye and reunited him with his old friend Burton, who, fresh off his success as a live-action director, revived his brilliant idea for a film, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and asked Selick to direct it. Selick put together a studio in San Francisco called "Skellington Productions" with producer Kathleen Gavin and production manager Phil Lofaro and grew his small band of story artists, animators, puppet makers, set builders, and lighters – including Ranft, Eric Leighton, Trey Thomas, Anthony Scott, Paul Berry, Pete Kozachik, Bo Henry, Bonita DeCarlo, etc. – into a full-fledged production team who spent three years making the film. Burton, directing first "Batman Returns" and then "Ed Wood Jr." in Los Angeles while "Nightmare" was being made up north, reviewed storyboards and footage every weeks and sent his talented collaborator, Rick Heinrichs, up north to develop the look of Halloween Town in the film.

Fifteen years after the first theatrical release of "Nightmare", Selick has come full circle with Coraline, leading a brilliant team of artists, animators, lighters, and technicians – many of them veterans from "Nightmare" – to create another hand-made, all stop-motion feature film.

Tim Burton

Tim Burton is very active in the field of stop motion animation. One of Burton's first films, Vincent, is a six minute stop motion animation about a young boy who wants to be Vincent Price. Several of his early live-action films such as Pee Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice made use of stop motion. In 1993, Burton produced the all-stop motion animation The Nightmare Before Christmas. The film was in production for three years due to the length of time it takes to shoot stop motion. The main characters in the film were puppets that in order to create realism in the film were structured hundreds of face models with different expressions. The film is based on a poem Burton wrote inspired by "T'was the Night Before Christmas" — it was then directed by Henry Selick. Selick later directed the adaptation of James and the Giant Peach, a blend between stop motion animation and live action film. In 2005 Corpse Bride was released, another stop motion piece from Burton. Computer animation of the aliens for his 1996 science fiction comedy, Mars Attacks! was deliberately made to look like stop motion when the film's budget did not allow for the use of the actual stop motion process, blurring the line between the two forms of animation.

Nick Park

Nick Park and the Aardman team also produce commercials and music videos, notably the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", which uses many different animation techniques, including pixilation involving Gabriel holding poses while each frame was shot and moving between exposures, effectively becoming a human puppet. More recently Aardman used this technique on a series of short films for BBC Three entitled Angry Kid, which starred a live actor wearing a mask. The actor's pose and the mask's expression had to be altered slightly for each exposure. Aardman has also created many films, of which some have become household names. Nick Park joined Aardman after they took interest in his college project, A Grand Day Out. Since then, Nick Park has directed the following films for Aardman: The Wrong Trousers, Creature Comforts, A Close Shave, "Cracking Contraptions", the feature film Chicken Run, and more recently, another feature film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, co-produced with DreamWorks Animation. Nick Park's latest work is the new Wallace and Gromit short (30 minutes) called A Matter of Loaf and Death, broadcast on BBC One on Christmas Day 2008. Nick Park has won several Academy Awards for Best Animation.

Ray Harryhausen

Willis O'Brien's student Ray Harryhausen made many movies using a more elaborate version of puppet animation called model animation, first pioneered by O'Brien, mainly for his feature length films, the difference being that model animation strives to be "photo-realistic" enough to be able to be combined with live action elements to create a final fantasy sequence that allows the audience to suspend their disbelief that they are watching animation elements. Example of his model animation techniques; most famously, are the seven-skeleton sequence from Jason and the Argonauts (1963). But aside from the more "disguised" stop motion efforts of O'Brien and Harryhausen, America and Britain were slower to embrace the stop motion film, and so its use mainly grew out of other locations and sources.

Phil Tippett

In the mid-1970s, Phil Tippett, a stop motion animator inspired by the works of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, was tapped by George Lucas to work on Star Wars. After creating the Chess Set sequence and participating in the Cantina scene as a member of the monster band for the seminal movie, Phil was enlisted to join Lucas when he relocated ILM from Los Angeles to the Bay Area. During Tippett's tenure at ILM he earned an enduring place in the Star Wars galaxy by animating the Imperial Walkers and Tauntaun in The Empire Strikes and then was knighted as head of the studio's creature shop for Return of the Jedi. In addition to his artistic contributions Tippett's technical ingenuity was evident with the invention of the 'Go-Motion' animation technique in 1982 – a forerunner of today’s computer graphic imaging. He earned his first Academy Award© nomination for Dragonslayer and by 1983 received his first Oscar for Return of the Jedi. In 1984, Tippett left ILM and, along with his partner Jules Roman, founded Tippett Studio in a garage in Berkeley to create a 10-minute experimental film called Prehistoric Beast. The Emmy award winning CBS special, Dinosaur!, quickly followed it. Fast forward several decades, the company now occupies four buildings in Berkeley, employs up to 200 artists and technicians and is best known for its outstanding CG character animation work. The early days of Tippett Studio saw sequences designed, built and animated using stop-motion for movies like Robocop, with the out of control robot ED209, and later Robocop 2, with the evil mayhem created by the Cain robot.

George Pal

One acclaimed European puppet animation producer to break out in America was Hungarian animator George Pal, who, partially working in The Netherlands, produced a series of films in Europe during the 30s before coming to Hollywood to create more shorts in the 40s, now called Puppetoons under the Paramount banner, seven of which were nominated for Academy Awards for best animated film. In the late 40s, Pal evolved into feature film production, incorporating puppet animation into a live action setting in such films as The Great Rupert (1949),tom thumb (film) (1958), and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1963). Pal used model animation (animated by Jim Danforth) in two other feature films, The Time Machine(1960) and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), the latter nominated for a Special Effects Oscar, and the former winning the EFX Oscar award. Pal's work is documented in two feature films by Arnold Lebovitt, released in the mid-80s, The Puppetoon Movie and The Fantastic World of George Pal which are currently available on DVD. More of Danforth's skilled model animation can be seen in Jack the Giant Killer (1962), the ending fire ladder sequence for It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), "The Zanti Misfits" and "Counterweight" episodes of the originalThe Outer Limits TV series (1963), and, with equally prolific model animator David Allen, in Equinox (also titled "The Beast") (1967, 1970), Flesh Gordon (1974), and the prehistoric comedy Caveman (1981).

Cuppa CoffeeStudios

Cuppa Coffee Studios is based in Toronto and has also pioneered many of the modern techniques associated with stop motion. Started in 1992 by Adam Shaheen and Bruce Alcock, the company has grown to now the single largest producer of stop motion for TV with over 250 employees and 38 Studios. They have produced the classic Celebrity Death Match, Rick and Steve, Starveillance, A Very Barry Christmas and JoJo's Circus

Suzie Templeton

Suzie Templeton is most Famous for her work on the film Peter and the Wolf in which she won the Academy Award for Best Animation.

Adam Jones

Adam Jones, Grammy Award-winning guitarist/musician/visual artist for the Grammy Award-winning progressive rock band Tool,^[1] uses stop motion capturing techniques for the majority of Tool's music videos as well. The band members of Tool do not appear in their videos, but rather use a combination of clay animation and stop motion. Jones' studies began in 1983 at the Hollywood Makeup Academy by learning "straight make-up". His focus of interest shifted to film, and he began to work as a sculptor and special effects designer for such films asJurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It was here where he learned the stop-motion camera techniques he would later apply in Tool's music videos: "Sober" (on which he collaborated with Fred Stuhr), "Prison Sex", "Stinkfist", "Ænema", "Schism", and "Parabola".^[2] The techniques and style of Tool's music videos, particularly Sober and Prison Sex, borrow heavily from the work of The Brothers Quay.

Willis O'Brian

The great pioneer of American stop motion was Willis O'Brien. In 1914, O'Brien began animating a series of short subjects set in prehistoric times. He animated his early creations by covering wooden armatures with clay, a technique he further perfected by using ball & socket armatures covered with foam, foam latex, animal hair and fur. Birth of a Flivver (1915),Morpheus Mike (1915), The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1916), R.F.D. 10,000 B.C.: A Mannikin Comedy (1917/18), The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1919),The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), The Son of Kong (1933), and, with the assistance of a young Ray Harryhausen, Mighty Joe Young (1949), yet these were but a few of the many films he animated. O'Brien's Nippy's Nightmare (1916) was the first film to combine live actors with stop motion characters. His partnership with the great Mexican-American model makers/craftsmen/special effects artists/background painters/set builders, Marcel Delgado, Victor Delgado and Mario Larrinaga, led to some of the most memorable and remarkable stop motion moments in film history.

O'Brien's imaginative use of stop motion, and his ambitious and inventive filmmaking, has inspired generations of film greats such as Ray Harryhausen, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg,Peter Jackson, Jim Danforth, Art Clokey, Pete Kleinow, Tim Burton, David Allen, Phil Tippett and Will Vinton, as well as thousands of lesser known animators, both professional and amateur. Many leading science fiction and fantasy writers also credit him as a great source of inspiration.

Lou Bunin

Puppeteer Lou Bunin created one of the first stop motion puppets using wire armatures and his own rubber formula. Another early stop motion piece by Bunin, also in the 1930s was Bury the Axis, a short, satiric film about World War II probably commissioned for the US Government as a WPA grant. Bunin went on to produce a feature length film version of Alice in Wonderland with a live-action Alice and stop motion puppets portraying all the rest of the characters. Bunin was blacklisted in the 1950s, putting an effective end to his commercial career. He then turned his attention to painting and drawing, while still creating numerous TV commercials using stop motion techniques, as well as a number of children's short films.

Ladislas Starevich

The great European stop motion pioneer was Ladyslaw Starewicz (1892-1965), who animated The Beautiful Lukanida (1910), The Battle of the Stag Beetles (1910), The Ant and the Grasshopper (1911), Voyage to the Moon (1913), On the Warsaw Highway (1916), Frogland (1922), The Magic Clock (1926), The Mascot, (aka, The Devil's Ball) (1934), In the Land of the Vampires (1935), and the feature film The Tale of the Fox (1937), to name but a few of his over fifty animated films.

Starewicz was the first filmmaker to use stop motion animation and puppets to tell consistently coherent stories. He began by producing insect documentaries which, in turn, led to experiments with the stop motion animation of insects and beetles. Initially he wired the legs to the insects' bodies, but he improved this substantially in the ensuing years by creating leather and felt-covered puppets with technically advanced ball & socket armatures. One of his innovations was the use of motion blur which he achieved, most likely, by the use of hidden wires, which, because they were moving, didn't register on film during long exposures of each frame.

Charles Bowers
One of the more idiosyncratic early users of stop motion techniques was the American comedian and cartoonist Charles Bowers who employed stop-motion techniques (which he called the "Bowers Process") in his series of silent short comedies in the 1920s and early 1930s. In his 1926 film Now You Tell One, he skillfully uses stop-motion to create such effects as a straw hat growing on a man's head, cats growing out of a plant, and a mouse firing a gun. His color film, "Pete Roleum and His Cousins", a promotion piece about the importance of oil in contemporary life, debuted in the 1939 New York World's Fair.


Disney

The Walt Disney studio dabbled with puppet object animation in 1959 with the release of a 21-minute experimental short, Noah's Ark, nominated for an animated film Oscar for that year. Disney didn't exploit the technique until their associations with Mike Jittlov in the 1970s.

Disney once again experimented with several stop motion techniques by hiring independent animator-director Mike Jittlov to do the first stop motion animation of Mickey Mouse toys ever produced for a short sequence called Mouse Mania, part of a TV special commemorating Mickey Mouse's 50th Anniversary called Mickey's 50th in 1978.

Jules Bass

In North America, Jules Bass produced a series of popular Christmas specials such as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer using 'Animagic', their trade name for their version of stop motion puppetry. The specials were animated in Japan by Japanese stop-motion pioneer Tadahito Mochinaga. Another clay animated children's TV series Davey and Goliath, produced by Art Klokey, lasted from 1960 to 1977. Rankin/Bass also produced the puppet animation feature length film Mad Monster Party in 1967, and combined puppet animation with live action in The Daydreamer, their 1966 feature film.

Corky Quakenbush

Corky Quakenbush created three dozen stop motion animated films for Fox network's Mad TV in the late 1990s that helped fuel a movement of comic stop motion for adults. Parodying famous feature movies and TV shows, the shorts drew their humor from the mixing of the innocence of puppets and the profanity of violence in mainstream contemporary situations. One example is Raging Rudolph, written by Spencer Green and Mary Vilano, a re-telling of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer as if directed by Martin Scorsese. Quakenbush also created "reality animation" to mimic hand-held documentary newsgathering for Clops, written by Blaine Capatch, a parody of the groundbreaking reality show, Cops in which puppet police bust famous stop-motion characters. Other parodies followed, such as Furious George, a spoof of the innocent Curious George children's book series.

Stop motion in astronomy

Stop motion photography is used to observe diurnal motion. Circumpolar stars close to the celestial pole move only slowly. Conversely, following the diurnal motion with the camera, to eliminate it on the photograph, can best be done with an equatorial mount, which requires adjusting the right ascension only; a telescope may have a motor to do that automatically (sidereal drive).

A specific example of stop motion photography in astronomy is photographing the solar analemma, which requires a camera to remain stationary for an entire year, with exposures taken at the same time every few days.

Stop motion in other media

A craze on the internet is animating with clay figures on public video sites such as YouTube and Google Video. They are often extremely simple, bordering on "freeform", but effective. Some barely have a face, but the comedic or violence proportions exceeding those of conventional clay puppets, with grisly crime scenes riddled by clay gunfire and hapless victims falling in a sniper's cross hairs. The comedy helps the viewer enjoy the animation without noticing the simpleness of the clay puppet. Many younger people begin their experiments in movie making with stop motion, thanks to the ease of modern stop-motion software and online video publishing. Many new stop motion shorts use clay animation into a new form.

Also, singer-songwriter Oren Lavie's music video for the song Her Morning Elegance was posted on YouTube on January 19, 2009. The video, directed by Lavie and Yuval and Merav Nathan, uses stop motion and has achieved great success with over 15 million views, also earning a 2010 Grammy Award nomination for "Best Short Form Music Video".

Stop motion has occasionally been used to create the characters for computer games, as an alternative to CGI. the Virgin Interactive Entertainment Mythos game Magic and Mayhem(1998) featured creatures built by stop motion specialist Alan Friswell, who made the miniature figures from modelling clay and latex rubber, over armatures of wire and ball-and-socket joints. The models were then animated one frame at a time, and incorporated into the CGI elements of the game through digital photography. "ClayFighter" for the Super Nintendo andThe Neverhood for the PC are other examples.

Stop motion in television

Dominating children's TV stop motion programming for three decades in America was Art Clokey's Gumby series—which spawned a feature film, Gumby I in 1995—using both freeform and character clay animation. Clokey started his adventures in clay with a 1953 freeform clay short film called Gumbasia (1953) which shortly thereafter propelled him into his more structured Gumby TV series.

Rankin/Bass is a very famous stop-motion company. Since the 1960s it has been making many stop-motion Christmas specials such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Year Without a Santa Claus, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and many others.

In November 1959 the first episode of Sandmännchen was shown on East German television, a children's show that had Cold War propaganda as its primary function. New episodes are still being produced in Germany, making it one of the longest running animated series in the world. However, the show's purpose today has changed to pure entertainment.

In the 1960s, the French animator Serge Danot created the well-known The Magic Roundabout (1965) which played for many years on the BBC. Another French/Polish stop motion animated series was Colargol (Barnaby the Bear in the UK, Jeremy in Canada), by Olga Pouchine and Tadeusz Wilkosz.

A British TV-series Clangers (1969) became popular on television. The British artists Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall (Cosgrove Hall Films) produced a full length film The Wind in the Willows (1983) and later a multi-season TV series The Wind in the Willows based on Kenneth Grahame's classic children's book of the same title. They also produced a documentary of their production techniques, Making Frog and Toad.

Another example is "Pingu" (1986) about a penguin who lives with his family in an igloo.

In the 1990s Trey Parker and Matt Stone made two original shorts and the pilot of South Park almost entirely out of construction paper.

The animated series Robot Chicken continues to primarily utilize stop motion animation, using custom made action figures and other toys as principal characters. Other action figures, called Stikfas, are very popular stop motion figures and are not extremely expensive. Morel Orel is another stop motion based show, along with the upcoming Mary Shelley's Frankenhole, both created by Dino Stamatopoulos.

Variations of Stop Motion

Stereoscopic stop motion

Stop motion has very rarely been shot in stereoscopic 3D throughout film history. The first 3D stop motion short was In Tune With Tomorrow (also known as Motor Rhythm) in 1939 by John Norling. The second stereoscopic stop motion release was The Adventures of Sam Space in 1955 by Paul Sprunck. The third and latest stop motion short in stereo 3D was The Incredible Invasion of the 20,000 Giant Robots from Outer Space in 2000 by Elmer Kaan and Alexander Lentjes. This is also the first ever 3D stereoscopic stop motion and CGI short in the history of film.

The first all stop motion 3D feature is Coraline (2009), based on Neil Gaiman's best-selling novel and directed by Henry Selick. The film is produced by Nike shoe founder Phil Knight's Laika animation studio in Portland, Oregon, formerly Will Vinton's claymation studio.

Go motion

Another more-complicated variation on stop motion is go motion, co-developed by Phil Tippett and first used on the films The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Dragonslayer (1981), and the RoboCop films. Go motion involved programming a computer to move parts of a model slightly during each exposure of each frame of film, combined with traditional hand manipulation of the model in between frames, to produce a more realistic motion blurring effect. Tippett also used the process extensively in his 1983 short film Prehistoric Beast, a 12 minute long sequence depicting a herbivorous dinosaur, being chased by a carnivorous dinosaur. With new footage Prehistoric Beast became Dinosaur! in 1985, a full length dinosaurs documentary hosted by Christopher Reeve. Those Phil Tippett's go motion tests acted as motion models for his first photo-realistic use of computers to depict dinosaurs in Jurassic Park in 1993. A lo-tech, manual version of this blurring technique was originally pioneered by Wladyslaw Starewicz in the silent era, and was used in his feature film The Tale of the Fox (1931).

Computer generated imagery

The almost universal use of CGI (computer generated imagery) has effectively rendered stop motion obsolete as a serious special effects tool in feature film. However, its low entry price, and still unique "look" and "feel" on film means stop motion is still used on some projects such as in children's programming, as well as in commercials and comic shows such as Robot Chicken. The argument that the textures achieved with CGI cannot match the way real textures are captured by stop motion also makes it valuable for a handful of movie makers, notably Tim Burton, whose puppet-animated film Corpse Bride was released in 2005.