11JAN2016

Animation World Network provided the class with this article on "The Advanced Art of Stop-Motion Animation: History of Stop-Motion Feature Films: Part 1". The man who wrote this article is Ken Priebe. Priebe, metaphorically speaking, gave the class a history lesson on stop-motion features. This is brief info from his book The Advanced Art of Stop-Motion Animation. Stop-motion is mainly used for short films or special effects. The earliest films were dated to have been published around 1913. Puppet films lasted anywhere between seven and twelve minutes and were for theatrical distribution and home viewing. The main theme of these stop-motion animations were to capture the audience's attention for a short amount of time. One of the best stop-motion animations is Harryhausen;s five minute fight between skeletons in 1963: Jason and the Argonauts. The reason for the films being so short is that it took a long time to produce a short amount of film and the quality was not the best, so the audience's patience with the film was short. In 1951, which was around the time puppet animation became popular, Lou Bunin contributed to the making of Wonderland. Some early examples of stop motion films and techniques can be seen in the "The Humpty Dumpty Circus" (1898) and in "Fun in a Bakery Shop" (1902). In 1907 "The Haunted Hotel" was a very successful movie with the cinema audience of the time. In 1912 one of the first clay animation movies using stop motion was released to great critical acclaim. It was called "Modeling Extraordinary" In 1916, the first woman animator, Helena Smith Dayton, began experimenting with clay stop motion. She released her first film in 1917, Romeo and Juliet. December of 1916, brought the first of Willie Hopkin's 54 episodes of "Miracles in Mud" to the big screen. To put into perspective of how long just over one minute of film takes, it is over 50 hours. Ray Harryhausen received the Gordon E. Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his technological contributions in 1991. Stop-motion has changed dramatically since the early 20th century. It is rarely used anymore, only in children's TV shows do you see stop-motion films. The development of digital 3D animation is much easier and faster, which is a favorite. 3D animation allows unreal characters to seem to be alive. Stop motion animation is one of the earliest forms of filmmaking. The basic manipulation of time and space necessary for stop motion is also necessary for narrative film. In 1896, Georges Méliès’ camera jammed, and when the film was developed objects magically disappeared on screen. Quick to exploit this error he and many others began to stage their own illusions. While much of technique has gone into special effects, some artists have refined the general grammar of stop motion into creates its own genre. Indeed now stop motion has many different schools and directions. There's clay animation, in which malleable clay characters are used as subjects; time lapse animation, where single frames are taken at periodic intervals to show, for example, the changing weather over the course of a day; puppet animation, where wired character creations are used; and pixilation, which employs human subjects moving frame to frame.