Stop motion animation has been around since 1890’s. Stop motion is when you take a number of
pictures that are captured in a different time frame, with objects that are moved between each
picture. This creates an illusion of movement when you look back through the pictures at a quick
pace. Originally stop motion included animating drawings which was the first type of animation from
which the pioneers then went on to use different objects such as toys, block or objects that could be
moved. More recently animators started to experiment with stop motion with clay animation and
puppet animation which created characters like Morph and films such as Wallace and Gromit. In
1898 J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E Smith created the first American stop-motion film called The
Humpty Dumpty Circus. The film was created out of Albert Smiths daughter’s set of small circus dolls
which consisted of acrobats and animals. The dolls had jointed limbs which made it easier to move
them into different positions.
In 1910 Helena Smith Dayton used stop motion and clay animation techniques to make films. She
was the first female to use this technique which made her extremely popular. She made an
animation version of Romeo and Juliet where she beautifully expressed the art of bringing things to
life – the art of the animator.
Joseph plateau was a Belgium physicist. He went to university and became a doctor of physical and
mathematical scientist. He did substantial research into the human eye focusing his research on the
retina of the eye and how it was able to allow us to see in colour. Though this research and his
interest in how we perceive objects, he invented the “Phenakistoscope” a strobe-like animation disc,
with his sons in 1832. The phenakistoscope uses two discs which are put on the same axis. One of
the discs has little consistent slots all around it and the other discs has pictures on it. The discs are