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Sunday, December 02, 2007

link: some stop motion sites

I've always been fascinated with the process of translating thought to image. And ever since I was a small boy I loved starting with an idea and laying it out as a story. Writing was wonderful, I always loved the sound and texture of words; guiding the reader - as well as myself - through the landscapes of the story. But as the many ruined toys reduced to rubble can attest, I was definitely a hands-on sort of kid. And nothing was better at enabling that than art or animation.
When I was in Mrs. Kubrick's class in junior high we got to play with an old 8mm camera and pieces of construction paper. My first animated piece! Who knows what became of it, but I remember it involved aliens attacking the earth.

And I grew up breathing in the styles of Ray Harryhausen and George Pal and Rankin-Bass. There was an immense richness to their world. An insane attention to detail that swam against the current of mass-produced animation of the 70s and 80s.

So, when I saw a collection of links on MetaFilter I thought I'd put up a post.

Stop motion (or frame-by-frame) animation is a general term for an animation technique which makes a physically manipulated object appear to move. The object is moved by very small amounts between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. ( ref: wiki )

A few general types of stop motion:

Puppetoon ::
Puppetoon animation is a type of replacement animation, which is itself a type of stop-motion animation. In traditional stop-motion, the puppets are made with movable parts which are repositioned between frames to create the illusion of motion when the frames are played in rapid sequence. In puppetoon animation the puppets are rigid; each is typically used in a single , frame and then "replaced" with a separate, near-duplicate puppet for the next frame. Thus puppetoon animation requires many separate figures. It is thus more analogous in a certain sense to cel animation than is traditional stop-motion: the characters are created from scratch for each frame (though in cel animation the creation process is simpler since the characters are drawn and painted, not sculpted). ( ref : wiki )

Animagic ::
A figurine-style stop-motion technique similar to puppetoons and primarily used by
Rankin-Bass ( wiki , Rudolph)

Claymation ::
While often employing some measure of replacement modeling techniques, this style is mainly characterizes by objects which are themselves deformable. ( wiki , Aardman Animation site, Aardman Animation wiki )

General links:
Brothers Quay ( wiki )
Nick Hilligoss
Mike Bent, aka DarkStrider
StopMotionAnimation
StopMoShorts
Stop Motion Works
Stop Motion/puppetry swicki
Metafilter stop-motion link page

1 comment:

Amy said...

awesome post! Thanks!