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 fi...

Thomas Edison  Thomas Alva Edison  (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman, who has been described as America's greatest inventor. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the  phonograph , the  motion picture camera , and the long-lasting, practical electric  light bulb . Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park", he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of  mass production  and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first. Edison was a  prolific inventor , holding 1,093  US patents in his name , as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. More significant than the number of Edison's patents was the widespread impact of his inventions:  electric light  and power  utilities ,  sound recording , and  ...

George Eastman  George Eastman  (July 12, 1854 – March 14, 1932) was an American entrepreneur who founded the  Eastman Kodak  Company and popularized the use of  roll film , helping to bring photography to the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film in 1888 by the world's first film-makers Eadweard Muybridge and Louis Le Prince, and a few years later by their followers Léon Bouly, William Dickson, Thomas Edison, the Lumière Brothers, and Georges Méliès. He was a major philanthropist, establishing the Eastman School of Music, and schools of dentistry and medicine at the University of Rochester and in London; contributing to the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the construction of several buildings at MIT's second campus on the Charles River. In addition he made major donations to Tuskegee and...

Introduction of Photography Eadweard Muybridge ,  original name  Edward James Muggeridge  (born  April 9, 1830 ,  Kingston upon Thames ,  Surrey , Eng.—died  May 8, 1904 , Kingston upon Thames), English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of  motion  and in motion-picture projection. He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name. He immigrated to the  United States  as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley,  California , made him world famous. Muybridge’s experiments in photographing  motion  began in 1872, when the railroad magnate  Leland Stanford  hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a  trotting  horse’s gait, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast...

Charles Emile Reynaud  Charles-Émile Reynaud  (8 December 1844 – 9 January 1918) was a French inventor, responsible for the  praxinoscope  (an animation device patented in 1877 that improved on the  zoetrope ) and the first projected animated  films . His  Pantomimes Lumineuses  premiered on 28 October 1892 in Paris. His  Théâtre Optique  film system, patented in 1888, is also notable as the first known instance of  film perforations  being used. The performances predated  Auguste and Louis Lumière 's first paid public screening of the  cinematographe  on 26 December 1895, often seen as the birth of cinema. Charles-Émile Reynaud was born on 8 December 1844 in Montreuil-sous-Bois (now a suburb of Paris). His father Benoît-Claude-Brutus Reynaud was an engineer and medal engraver originally from  Le Puy-en-Velay  and his mother Marie-Caroline Bellanger had been a school teacher, but stayed at ho...

William George Horner William George Horner  (9 June 1786 – 22 September 1837) was a  British   mathematician ; he was a schoolmaster, headmaster and school-keeper, proficient in classics as well as mathematics, who wrote extensively on functional equations, number theory and approximation theory, but also on optics. His contribution to approximation theory is honoured in the designation  Horner's method , in particular respect of a paper in  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London  for 1819. The modern invention of the Z oetrope , under the name  Daedaleum ( meaning Wheel of the devil)  in 1834, has been attributed to him. The eldest son of the Rev. William Horner, a Wesleyan minister, was born in Bristol. He was educated at Kingswood School, a Wesleyan foundation near Bristol, and at the age of sixteen became an assistant master there. In four years he rose to be headmaster (1806), but left in...

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau  Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau  (14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883) was a  Belgian   physicist . He was one of the first persons to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image.  To do this he used counter rotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the P henakistiscope . Joseph Plateau 's father was an artistic man with a great talent for painting flowers. He wanted Joseph to follow an artistic career and his schooling was arranged with this aim. After excelling at primary school, Joseph was sent to the Academy of Fine Arts. However Joseph became an orphan at the age of fourteen when his father died, his mother having died one year earlier. A brother of Joseph's mother who was a lawyer, A.M Thirion, took over bringing up Joseph and his two sisters. Joseph had a serious illness around this time and for...

Praxinoscope What is a Praxinoscope? The  praxinoscope  was an  animation  device, the successor to the  zoetrop e.  The Praxinoscope is a typical optical toy from the 19th century.  A Praxinoscope has mirrors in the middle with frames at the side that’s been placed inside a shallow outer cylinder, to see the movement of the animation you have to spin it and look at the mirrors. The number of mirrors are actually equal to the number of pictures so the images of pictures are viewed in the mirrors. The reflected pictures gives an illusion of moving pictures, when the outer cylinder rotates. Below shows how the mirror is placed. How does it work? It consists of a  cylinder and a strip of paper showing twelve frames for animation. As the cylinder  rotates, stationary mirrors in the centre reveal a ‘single image’ in motion. Who invented it and when? The Praxinoscope was invented in 1876 by Charles-Émile Reynaud ...

Zoetrope what is a Zoetrope? A Zoetrope is a 19th-century optical toy consisting of a cylinder with a series of pictures on the inner surface that, when viewed through slits with the cylinder rotating, give an impression of continuous motion.  A Zoetrope is a open cylinder with slits on the side of the open cylinder. The frame by frame drawings are inside the cylinder, so when the Zoetrope spins it will be able create a mini animation. In a Zoetrope there’s an animation reel, strobe effect, Zoetrope wall and a base. How does it work? When you place a strip of drawings inside the  zoetrope's  drum, spin it and look through the slots, you will see the images come to life. Of course, they are not really alive. This illusion of motion depends on two things; persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon. Who invented it and when? The early Zoetrope was originally made in China by a man named Ding Huan in 180 AD. The modern Zoetrope was invented in 183...

Phenakistoscope The  Phenakistoscope ( "spindle viewer"). The  phenakistoscope  (also spelled phenakistiscope or phenakitiscope) was an early animation device that used the persistence of vision principle to create an illusion of motion. What is it and how does it work? Persistence of motion is key for the Phenakistoscope to work. The illusion of motion was first theorised by the Greek mathematician Euclid and later by Newton. However, the true principle didn't become firmly conducted until 1829 by Joseph Plateau. The Phenakistroscope works by a series of two discs being mounted on the same axis. The first disc featured slits around the edge, and the second consisted of images drawn with successive actions. These discs both spin in the same direction to create the illusion of movement when viewed in a mirror through the first disc's slots. The phenakistoscope can only be used by one person at a time, however. The Invention Who invented it? Joseph...