StopMotion iMap: 2011

Friday, April 1, 2011

another interesting clay motion

a clay motion ipad.

Clay Animation VS Stop Motion !!!!

When I doing research on clay animation, i found out some commentaries said that all stop motion are same as clay motion. This is entirely wrong. Clay motion is actually a term by Will Vinton to describe the process of using modeling clay, plasticine for stop motion, allowing animator to have freedom in squash and stretch technique and changing facial expressions. It is often used for simple children type show.

Even clay motion usually isn't done entirely in clay. There's usually at the very least a wire armature inside the puppets, unless they're extremely suimple and squat, with no arms or very short thick ones. The other 2 common ways to make puppets is foam latex and cushion foam. The foam latex method is very involved and takes a good deal of skill and practice to master, as well as some pretty expensive equipment. You need a good scale, a mixer and an oven, plus the multi-component foam itself is fairly expensive. And ofcourse these methods can be mixed up in various ways, and you can make heads from a hard material like Sculpey or wood and hands can be wire dipped in regular latex.

Example:

Nightmare Before Christmas - NOT clay
KingKong by Ray Harryhausen and Jim Danforth - NOT clay
Chicken Run - hybrid puppet with a clay head and arms while body made by silicone

Stop Motion technique - Clay Motion

Clay animation is one of the stop motion. His technique is quite simple. The object or character sculpted in clay or other material, plasticine. When the object or character are in place, frame taken, then the object or character move slightly by hand, another frame taken. This cycle will keep repeating until process is done. When we rapidly playing image as motion, hence making it appear that the object is moving itself, and of course hand must not the seen in picture, this can be avoid when we taking picture. To achieve the best result, a consistent shooting environment is needed. For example the lightning of the scene, object placement, even single dirt, hair, dust can disturb the process. Extra caution must be taken.

Normal film runs 24 fps(frame per second). For 30minutes long film, there would be 21,600 frames, that means we need to stop 21,600 to change the object or character for the frame. Great care must be taken in this process, the lightning & environment position and the object position. Some frame may able to overlap but it is not advisable.

List of the films featuring Clay Motion:

"Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" 2010
"Mary and Max" 2009
"Weasel Stomping Day" 2006
"Moral Orel"
"Taiko no Tatsujin" 2005
"Gary and Mike" 2001
"Chicken Run" 2000

Small research on Time-Lapse

Time lapse photography is a cinematography technique whereby frames are captured is much more slower than actual film. When played at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and lapsing. Timelapse photography include cloudscape, plant growing and flower opening, fruit rotting, construction building project, people in the city. The first use time lapse photography is in a feature film by Georges Melies' motion picture Carrefour De L'Opera (1897).

Time lapse construction building.

Time lapse sunset

Time lapse flower opening

Time lapse plant growing

Continue the research...

The Automatic Moving Company in 1912 that i mention in earlier post. A film by Romeo Bossetti. This film was in fact produced by Bossetti for Pathe Company. This is a short movie yet charming film depicting actual furniture uloading from a truck and arranging itself in a second-floor apartment without the aid of human.

The Dinosaur and The Missing Link in 1917, a Conquest Pictures production distributed by Thomas Edison.

Work of Willis O'Brien as promised. O'Brien designed sets and dinosaur figures which were built by Marcel Delgado for a shot-lived project Creation in 1931. The plot was to have featured a submarine discovering a lost island where dinosaurs still roam.

This is not clay, it is wooden man. Kinex Studio created Chip In The Land Of Whiz in 1929 is a toyland adventure. Gingerbread man and Doodlebugville all feature character crafted out of wood and other materials in a much more "cartoon" like style, where as realistic bugs and human dolls were predominant characters in earlier stop-motion film.

An animator named Ladislaw Starewicz produced second film, The Revenged of the Kinema ToGraph Cameraman in 1912. This film showed a lecherous couple, the Beetles has a humorous edge in that a grasshopper cameraman provides the climax by showing his secretly-captured film at a cinema where the Beetles are in attendance. Husband and wife betray each other and yet they remain together in the end of the story with a bottle of wine. Starewicz used actual preserved insects as subject in this film.

another question on facebook

I created a question poll, question is "Do you know what is stop motion?"

So far I have 45votes, 21votes on "Yes", 17votes on "No",5votes on "Heard of It" and 2 votes on "I don't want to know StopMotion". I'm not happy with the result, was expected "yes" vote far more than "no" vote, guess that stop motion is not very famous now a days. It's hard to find stop motion on film now because technology and equipment is improving, people starting to stop using stop motion technique. Some people only apply this technique in music video (mostly) and some apply on tv channel, kids movie.

Small Survey on Facebook

Question: What is stopmotion?

I did a small survey on social networking (facebook) and got positive feedback.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

The Pen Story

Modern stop motion.

60,000 pictures, developed 9,600 prints and shot over 1,800 pictures again.

They were inspired by Mr Takeuchi's work

Enjoy.

The IMPORTANT Principles

Squash and Stretch

This applies primarily to clay animation. It could be used with other kinds of puppets or objects, but only if they're made from the right materials and can be manipulated properly. The concept is when a rubber ball hit the floor, it squashes out - it flattens a little. Then when it bounces back, it will stretch. This is also the basic principle of animation. This is easy when you're working with clay, because you are actually using a solid mass.

Anticipation

Also know as the biggest problems in beginner animation. It's often hard to tell what is going on, because things all seem to happen at the same time and characters just do things suddenly for no apparent reason. Example if a puppet is just standing there and suddenly his arm flies out and he throws something, the viewer was probably looking at whatever the current point and was caught off guard. And by the time they look at the new action, it is already over. There are times when it is best to not use anticipation, but that's a case of every rule having its exception.

Follow-Through and Overlapping Action

Follow-through is the countermeasure to anticipation. It occurs after an action, and is the direct physical result of it. Personally, I think I would have grouped Follow- Through with Anticipation, and put Overlapping Action with Secondary Action, but alas, I didn't create the list. For Follow-Through, lets continue using the example of a man throwing a ball. Wow, that ball has sure got a workout so far, hasn't it? After releasing it, his hand won't just stop dead, it will continue in its arc a little ways. Actually his entire body will continue in its action, though that might be very subtle. Even if it barely shows in the animation, you should be aware of it when animating and getting the feel of follow-through into the puppet or the object.

Now Overlapping Action is one of those things that, as written by the Disney guys, applies primarily to drawn animation - becauseit's generally done in several passes by the artist(s). First they'll draw in the major forms of the body and get the main action (let's say that windup and throw again); and then they'll come back over those drawings, and do a second pass, drawing in the smaller forms like flowing hair or loose clothing that will sort of drift and follow the major forms of the body in their arcs. And while a stopmotion animator can't go back and add in secondary actions after already shooting his major pass, you can still keep the basic idea of secondary, smaller forms in mind and think about how they would follow along.

Arcs

Everything in nature will tend to move in arcs. The main reasons being the jointed nature of the skeleton - and gravity.Walks are full of arcs... the body moves up and down as well as forward, so the head and every other part will describe a series of arcs. As for gravity, if you throw something it will tend to arc up toward its high point, and then arc down toward the ground.The Disney dudes basically decided that everything looks better if it all moves according to arcs.

Ease in and Ease out

Also alternately known as Slow-in and Slow-out, or Acceleration and Deceleration.

Timing

When it's wrong, you'll know it. When it's right, you'll know it!!

Secondary Action

Secondary Actions are little movements that aren't essential but that help to add meaning to an action. Example: a boy is lifting a sandwich up to his mouth to eat it. If he licks his lips along the way, it adds a shade of meaning to the action. Hence this is a secondary action.

Exaggeration

Exaggeration is a good way to add emphasis to certain movements and thereby draw attention where you want it. Filmmaking (including animation of course) is basically the art ofdirecting the viewers' attention where you want it.

Staging

It's a director's tool, used in all kinds of filmmaking. Staging is one aspect of Cinematography, which is the art of using camera angle, camera movement, lighting, composition, placement of figures and etc to direct the viewer's eye.

Early stop motion video

This video contain famous animator Romeo Bossetti film. I was very glad when i found that this video still exist. It shows that how people started stop motion.

Brief History during early age of Stop Motion

1912, an Italian animator called Romeo Bossetti film The Automotic Moving Company. The great European stop motion artist was Wladyslaw Starewicz who animated The Beautiful Lukanida (1910), The Battle of the Stag Beetles (1910) and the Ant and the Grasshopper (1911).

Here is some mindmap I done for stop motion.

Who started stop motion???

I did some research on the web. Here it is, stop motion was started at 1898 by Albert E.Smith and J.Stuart Blacton for Toy Circus. The acrobat and animals comes to life. It is quite surprise for me myself because I was expected it to be some sort of film? But i guess it is pretty much the same.

Stop motion this technique never stop. After that in 1902, one of the sequence in the film Fun in a Bakery Shop used stop motion technique.

J.Stuart Blacton created a stop motion film called The Haunted Hotel in 1907. It was a success when it was released. Blacton seems to be very important role in early stop motion age. He started stop motion in a circus and then a stop motion film. Segundo de Chomon from Spain use the same technique as Blacton for his film El Hotel Electrico later in same year.

What is Stop Motion?

Stop motion also known as stop action. It's fun, creative, able to do a lots of different nice special effects but it is also very time consuming and very hard to do, for example you need to plan very well, maybe practice few shot before actual shot. But overall it goes pretty well if you plan and prepare everything.

There's some questions bought up, time lapse and stop motion.

Some of them said there are pretty much the same but from my opinion, they are very similar, but they're not quite the same. Time-lapse is putting a camera on a spot and capture a frame at set intervals, then playing the frames back at normal speed (24fps). Stop motion is an animation technique, where a frame is taken, objects are then moved/manipulated within the scene, another frame is taken. Conclusion, one is passive (taking pictures) and another is active (changing or manipulating).

Time-lapse

Stop Motion

StopMotion iMap

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