Stop Motion Animation

Tim Burton's new animated feature 'The Corpse Bride' is to be released next month, hot on the heels of the first Wallace and Gromit film. Cinemas-Online takes a look at the history of the trick behind these films - stop motion animation.

Like many motion picture techniques, stop motion animation can be traced to Georges Méliès. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, this eccentric French magician went to see a pioneering film show given by the Lumière brothers. Amazed by what he saw, he purchased a movie camera as soon as he could afford it. One day, whilst filming a street scene, his camera briefly jammed then restarted. When he played back the film he was surprised to see a fantastic transformation at the point his camera stuck, pedestrians jumped across the road and a bus turned into a hearse! From this accidental beginning it became apparent that by exposing a frame of film, moving the subject, then taking the next frame, on-screen life could be given to any inanimate object. Méliès went on to invent and refine many more techniques, making films of dazzling creativity. Sadly, he saw little reward for his his films, which were widely pirated and his style rapidly dropped out of fashion, by 1910 he had ceased production, and eventually went back to work as a stage magician.

As Méliès was shutting up shop, across the continent in Russia a young entomologist named Wladyslaw Starewicz was struggling to make a short documentary film. Despite his best efforts, the nocturnal stag beetles which he hoped would fight before the camera steadfastly refused to co-operate under studio lights. Starewicz hit upon an ingenious solution, taking dead beetles, he first removed the legs and mandibles before re-attaching them with sealing wax. By filming a frame at a time, and moving the beetles himself, he was able to recreate their movements. This film was the first to use animated 'puppets' and proved a great success, Starewicz went on to make many more films, both with insects and later with purpose built models. His work was briefly interrupted by the Russian revolution, when he escaped his homeland to set up a studio in France. He remained a fiercely independent filmmaker, producing his own films until his death in 1965, despite many lucrative offers from American studios.

The Americans were not without their own talented animators, though. Willis O'Brien was a technician who produced revolutionary effects for Hollywood. His earliest experiments with stop motion were in 1915, but his work didn't come to the attention of moviegoers until the 1925 version of The Lost World. In order to achieve the illusion of full-sized moving dinosaurs, complex miniature sets had to be built to house the puppet 'actors' and the shots interspersed with live action footage of the explorers. This expensive technique was also used in O'Brien's greatest success, King Kong (1933). To add a greater level of realism to the effect, areas of the miniature were set up as screens, so that previously filmed live action sequences could be projected into the scene, frame by frame and rephotographed along with the animation. Though laborious and expensive to create, King Kong made a worldwide impact, inspiring filmmakers everywhere.

One of the audience members for the premiere of King Kong was a youngster named Ray Harryhausen. This proved to be a pivotal point in his life, stop-frame animation became his passion. Luckily, Harryhausen's parents were keen to encourage their son with his interest and helped to provide him with the required equipment. His mother's old coat was cut up and made into a model cave bear and he spent much of his youth experimenting with animation, learning from trial and error. By the late forties Harryhausen was working under Willis O'Brien, putting together most of the animation in the film 'Mighty Joe Young'. His skills were much sought after, but stop motion, with its associated miniatures was a costly process.

In 1953, when he was hired to add the creature to the low budget movie The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Harryhausen needed to develop a new technique to keep costs down. He called the process he came up with 'Dynamation'. It was an extension of a process first developed by Georges Méliès, and known as split-screen. In this technique, an area of the film is masked off and the rest of the film exposed, before rewinding the film, masking the previously unmasked part of the film and shooting onto the unexposed part of the film to create a whole. Split screen enabled Méliès to create multiple copies of himself on screen at the same time. Harryhausen took a live action film taken from a firmly fixed camera into which the creature was to be inserted. He then used back projection to throw each frame up behind the subject he was animating. In front of the subject was a sheet of glass onto which he carefully blacked out areas of the shot which were to be in front of the model. Once the animation was complete, the mask was reversed and the blank areas of the film exposed. With Dynamation it became possible for animated creatures to interact with live action footage, ducking in and out of buildings and even interacting with actors. Costs were also much reduced as it was no longer necessary to build miniature sets. He was to create more and more elaborate effects, producing such films as Jason and The Argonauts and a string of Sinbad adventures.

In 1981 Harryhausen produced his final feature, Clash of the Titans. It was a stunningly elaborate achievement but perhaps his stop-frame technique was beginning to look a little tired. Dragonslayer, another film released that year, used a new refinement which put new life into the process. Effects boffins at Industrial Light & Magic had developed a system they would call Go-Motion. Stop motion's flaw lay in the absence of any blurring. When a live action actor swings a sword it blurs as it travels across the frame during the shot. When an animated skeleton swings a sword it remains crisp each step of the way, a slightly jarring effect. In Go-Motion, the model is moved and exposed several times onto each frame, thus blurring the image and giving an impression of speed. This extra dimension earned Dragonslayer an Academy Award nomination.

Throughout the eighties and into the early nineties, stop motion and go-motion remained the only viable effect technique for bringing to life all manner of creatures, but there was a competing technology. Computer animation first began to make an impact in films like Tron in the early eighties. The results were initially crude, but by the early nineties computers could generate near photographc realism. By the time Steven Spielberg, initially an enthusiast for go-motion, switched to computer animation for his feature film Jurassic Park (1993), stop motion was beginning to look like an extinct technology.

A strange thing happened, at a time when animators were putting down their clay models and getting to grips with computers, along came the very first entirely stop motion feature film. The 1993 fantasy, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, written by Burton and influenced by the work of Wladyslaw Starewicz, used the century old technique to create a box-office smash. Other films followed - stop motion was no longer just the effect, it was the whole film.

With the future looking rosy for stop motion features we can look forward to many more plasticene and puppet movies. Next on the release schedule is Wallace And Gromit In The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit and Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride. Stop motion is at its highest profile for years, and may it continue to entertain for many years to come.

Article by: Andrew Paul

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