Research

Stop motion animation is the art of taking a photograph of an object, puppet, model, armature etc, and then moving the subject very slightly, then taking another photograph. Working on the premise of 24 photographs, or frames, can produce one seconds worth of 'moving image', multiple photographs are taken to produce a scene where action takes place and characters are brought to life. Where this differs from traditional film production, is that instead of actors moving about a setting and a camera taking photographs continuously, between each photograph a slight adjustment is made to an inanimate object. 

While Edward Muybridges' experiment with a racing horse is a good example of how seperate photos played together in sequence can give the illusion of movement, with stop motion, the subject is usually some sort of model or puppet, which when combined with the 12 principles of animation, and slight adjustments between each photograph, appear as living, things on screen.

Even though stop motion is animation, it has strong links with live action films in a variety of ways. Before computer animation or visual effects, stop motion was often used to create what could not be dont for real on a live action set. For example, in Fritz Langs 1927 science fiction epic 'Metropolis, stop motion was used to create a sense of movement in the scaled down models of the city, using animation to move model cars along model roads. It has also been used to create larger than life creatures and monsters for a range of films, notable in Don Chafey's 1963 film. 'Jason and the Argonauts' where Ray Harryhausen created the famous skeleton fight sequence. 

Below are some animations of my own, where i began to learn the process of this technique.