Stop-Animation (Research & Information)

Stop animation (also known as stop-motion or frame-by-frame) is a popular animation technique that makes a inanimate object appear to move on its own. The object is moved small amounts between individual photo grams, creating the illusion of movement when the pictures are pieced together and played as a continuous sequence.
This is my favorite animation technique because of the interesting way it is made, and i am excited to use it on our own music video production.

The most widely known stop animation made, is usually with clay figures (clay-animation) and a famous example of this would be the "Wallace and Gromit" movies or episodes.

Recently Caroline and I attended a film festival at the forum in Norwich, which has a selection of animations, and some BAFTA animations. One of these BAFTA's was "Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death". The trailer shown below:



These Wallace and Gromit animations have always interested me, and a few years ago in Art classes we made our own clay animations to go with a song of our choice.
The animations take an extremely long time to create, as each second of the short films or the feature length (by Nick Park) takes 24 individual photo frames. The short films are about 20 to 30 minutes long, meaning that overall a maximum of 43200 pictures are shot for each short film made, and each picture has a minimal amount of movement to the previous one in the series, making the end film run smoothly. Reports from the animators have shown that they take about 30 frames a day, making just over a second of footage each day of shooting, as between each photograph they have to carefully change the position of everything in the shot by a tiny amount, including the figures in the foreground, and any background motion happening along with the main characters. The feature film they have made, "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" took them 5 years to create, showing how much time and effort goes into these animations.

Another type of film shown at the film festival was stop-animation using drawings, which was smoothly shot and i was amazed by it. It included a drawing of a girl (that developed later into 3 or more girls) dancing and moving across the page. I think a camera must have been set up over the page, and the drawing of the girl was shot in one frame, then some of the picture rubbed out and moved for the next frame, as we could see where the picture had been rubbed out, which left a grey smudge that looked like an effective shadow.

These animations that we saw showed us how much hard work we will have to put into our animation, and after recently shooting the introduction to the music video, we have prepared ourselves for how much time is needed to shoot short lengths of footage. However, even though its hard work, its extremely fun and we are enjoying making the animation, and hope that it will all fit together when we edit it, creating a great stop-animation mixed with shadow puppetry.