Unit 33 - Stop Motion Animation Production

Aardman Born on December 6, 1958, in Lancashire, England, Nick Park made his first stop-motion film at age 13. After joining Aardman Animations Ltd. in 1985, he created the famed Wallace and Gromit Claymation shorts about a shortsighted inventor and his dog. Over the last twenty years Nick Park and Aardman Animations have become synonymous with 3-D stop-motion animation in the UK, successfully straddling advertising, music videos, TV series, Internet animations, Academy Award winning shorts and big budget feature films. Nicholas Wulstan Park was born in Preston, Lancashire on 6 December 1958 and started making amateur films in his teens, going on to gain a degree in Communications Arts at Sheffield City Polytechnic before being accepted at the National Film and Television School (NFTS). While studying at the School, Park asked Peter Lord and Dave Sproxton of Aardman to speak there and after graduating was invited to join the studio. Aardman was set-up in Bristol by Sproxt

Ray Harryhausen Raymond Frederick "Ray" Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013) was an American-British artist, designer, visual effects creator, writer, and producer who created a form of stop-motion model animation known as "Dynamation". His most memorable works include the animation on Mighty Joe Young (1949), with his mentor Willis H. O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), his first color film; and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), featuring a famous sword fight with seven skeleton warriors. His last film was Clash of the Titans (1981), after which he retired. Harryhausen moved to the United Kingdom, becoming a dual US-UK citizen and lived in London from 1960 until his death in 2013. During his life, his innovative style of special effects in films inspired numerous filmmakers including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, John Lasseter, Peter Jackson, John Landis, Joe Dante, Henry Selick,

George Pal George Pal, byname of György Pál Marczincsák (born February 1, 1908, Cegléd, Austria-Hungary [now Hungary]—died May 2, 1980, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), Hungarian-born animator, director, and producer who was a leading figure in the science-fiction genre, especially noted for his work with special effects. He also created Puppetoons, a popular series of animated shorts. Pal studied architecture before becoming a set designer at the UFA studio in Berlin. After the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, he left Germany and lived in several European cities before settling in the United States in 1939. The following year he signed a contract with Paramount. Continuing the screen experiments he had begun with stop-motion animated puppets, Pal developed the Puppetoons series. The innovative short films eventually totaled more than 40 in number and included Rhythm in the Ranks (1941), Dr. Seuss’s The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1943), and Jasper and the Beanstalk (

The Lumi è re Brothers The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, were sons of well known Lyons based portrait painter Antoine Lumière. They were both technically minded and excelled in science subjects and were sent to Technical School. During his experimentation, Louis discovered a process which assisted the development of photography. Louis developed a new 'dry plate' process in 1881 at the age of seventeen, it became known as the 'Etiquette Bleue' process and gave his father’s business a welcome boost, and a factory was built soon after to manufacture the plates in the Monplaisir quarter of the Lyons Suburbs. By 1894 the Lumières were producing around 15,000,000 plates a year. Antoine, by now a successful and well known businessman, was invited to a demonstration of Edison’s Peephole Kinetoscope in Paris. He was excited by what he saw and returned to Lyons. He presented his son Louis with a piece of Kinetoscope film, given to him by one of Edison’s

Jan Švankmajer is a filmmaker and artist recognised for his surreal animations, he was born on the 4 th of September 1934 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He has inspired many of today’s stop-motion animators, including Tim Burton and The Brother Quay. Jan is known for his dark reimagining of well-known fairy tales and for his avant-garde usage of three-dimensional stop-motion coupled with live-action animation. Several critics hailed him for favouring visual elements over plot and narrative, other for his use of dark fantasy.  He has achieved his reputation over the years for his creepy and surreal films, utilizing distinctive stop-motion technique, counting (Pixilation and Claymation). Jan still remains to produce stop-motion films today. Jan tends to project a moral within his stop-motion animations, the animation per say usually makes no sense, however, when watching it closely it emits a deeper meaning in it, and that is the purpose of surrealism. Jan’s stop-motion films