What Is Stop Motion?
Stop Motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The animation is captured one frame at time, with physical objects that are moved between frames. When you play back the sequence it creates the illusion of movement.
Use pioneers of animation to explain the principles of stop motion animation
Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883)
Joseph was a Belgian physicist, he was known as the first person 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 Phenakistoscope.
William George Horner (1786 – 22 September 1837)
William Horner was yet another animation pioneer, he invented the Zoetrope in 1834.
A Zoetrope is one of the many pre-cinema animation devices that produce the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings/photographs showing progressive phases of that motion.
Charles-Émile Reynaud (8 December 1844 – 9 January 1918)
Emile Reynaud is known as the inventor of the Praxinoscope and the Optical Theater. He is also known as the first person to create projected animated cartoons. On 28 October 1892 he projected the first animated film in public, Pauvre Pierrot, at the Musée Grévin in Paris.
The Praxinoscope was very similar to the Zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors which is placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared stationary in position as the wheel turned.
Eadweard James Muybridge (9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904)
Muybridge was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and his early work in motion-picture projection.
A groundbreaking piece of work from Eadweard James Muybridge was ‘The Horse in Motion’ this was a series of stills featuring a galloping racehorse, this was the first animal ever to be shown in a moving image format.
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931)
Edison was an American inventor and businessman.
He developed products including the telegraph, phonograph, electric light bulb, alkaline storage batteries and Kinetograph (a camera for motion pictures).
Use developers of animation to explain techniques of stop motion animation.
James Stuart Blackton was an Anglo-American film producer, his most notable achievement was making the first silent film that included animated sequences recorded on standard picture film – The Enchanted Drawing (1900) Because of this achievement he is considered the father of American Animation. He uses sequential animation as he is an animator that records sequences on stand picture film.
Charles Bowers was an American cartoonist as well as a slapstick comedian during the early ‘talkie’ and silent film era. Charles was forgotten for decades, his name was notably absent from most histories of the Silent Era. Although his work was highly reviewed by André Breton and a number of his contemporaries. In 1930 he made his first sound short, It’s a Bird, which was greatly admired by Surrealist artist Andre Breton.
Willis O’Brien was the special effects artist who pioneered the technique of stop motion animation. He was the main man behind the 1933 classic King Kong the movie. He also animated dinosaurs for the film version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lost World’ (1925)
Shaquille Chambers 