Four Major Developments in Stop Animation
1900’s
The first major development in Stop Animation was introduced in the 1900’s. In later years a man called James Stuart Blackton produced a short stop animated film called Humorous phases of funny faces.” The animation was produced on a black boards using only chalk, in 1906. To obtain this he would draw an image then stop the film erase it and continue doing throughout.
Other Short films associated with James Stuart Blackton are films such as, “THE HAUNTED HOTEL” Produced in 1907. Which consisted of using 3-D objects for example a bottle of wine pouring into an empty glass and a table being set up without a person being present.
1913
An American cartoon artist Pat Sullivan created a cartoon series called “Felix the Cat” which was silent based. This character became one of the most popular cartoons of its time. The process of creating the character was simple, the creator figured the idea for a cat was modest, and to make him all black so he didn’t have to worry about the outlines, and give the character unique personality.
In the 1920’s Felix the cat became even more popular and was given its own comic book strip. In 1927 the cartoon decided to take a chance in adding dialog to the character however the movement from silent to sound did not bring much success to the table. This was around about the time when Disney new mouse character appeared and seemed to draw away and gain new audiences.
1920
The 1920s showed a important development stage for animation.
At only 19 years of age a young man, Walter Elias Disney stared working in animation at Kansas City Slide Company. One of his first short cartoons produced was called “Laugh-O-Grams” which he made in Kansas City with his close friend Ubbe Iwerks. Walter had a huge chance when he was offered to move to Hollywood and produce his Alice in wonderland Comedies which were printed in newspapers. Disney soon moved onto create one of its most well know characters to date Mickey mouse. The mouse caught its first appearance in the cartoon “Steam Boat Willie” black and white film. Disney skills soon developed when they were offered to use the new Technicolor in there new cartoons.
There are many other concepts of the idea previously to do with basic stop motion animation, such as using basic resources like match sticks and drawings, puppets and lots of different frames of pictures and combining them into short films.
A good example of a number stop motions developing are classic films such as King Kong, Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans and Wallace & Gromit. The 1933 film King Kong which used stop animation to animate the Kong, Dinosaur’s and other creature’s movement. The stop animation used in this is, short frames shown together at a speed that makes our vision process movement. The creation process was prepared by building an 18inch body miniature of the gorilla, whilst using sponge and rubber to create Kong’s muscular frame. Because of the different types of scenes in the films, fragments from the sculpture would were down, so double the amount of parts had to be made. Marcel Delgado one of the sculptures had to create two heads out of rubber latex, but both heads were slightly different. The two heads were used in different scenes i.e. Skull Island along with the New York scene and the T-Rex fight scene.
In the film Jason and the Argonauts they use a great amount of stop motion, in one of my personal favourite scenes, the skeleton fight. Two make it appear as if they were in the same scene as the characters they overlapped the two images to become one scene. I especially enjoyed the section were the skeletons up rooted themselves from the ground. I especially liked the effect of speeding up the action when replayed, but also the way they cranked the cameras to slow down smaller actions, in order to give the impression that the lightweight swords were in fact heavy battle weapons.
