Pioneers of stop motion
Stop Motion: a cinematographic technique whereby the camera is repeatedly stopped and started, for example to give animated figures the impression of movement. The first use of stop motion was in 1898 at the dawn of cinema. The Humpty Dumpty Circus was made in 1898 by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton. In the Guinness Book of World Records this is the first animated film after Albert E. Smith got the idea from his daughter’s toy circus. He borrowed the toy circus and shot the acrobats and animals moving one frame at a time. In 1916 Helena Smith Dayton began to experiment with clay to make stop motion. Previously stop motion animated household objects such as toys. In 1917 she released her first film, an adaption of Romeo and Juliet. Throughout the 20s she continued to make animations from clay such as Long Live the Bull. Stop motion became mainstream for the first time in 1925 with The Lost World by Willis O’Brien. This used a mixture of live actors and stop motion dinosaurs. This was the predecessor to O’Brien’s future work in King Kong. This used the same mix of live action and stop motion as The Lost World with improvement earning his title as the father of modern stop motion.
Joseph Plateau-a pioneer of stop motion was the first to establish the persistence of vision theory. This theory states that the human eye retains an image for around a fifteenth of a second. This means that we see a blend of what is happening now and what we saw a fraction of second. This means that when we blink we don’t see pitch black as what we have just seen is still retained in our brain. This is why we see moving objects as a blur as we are seeing the position it was in a fraction of a second ago and the position it is in now. The human eye can process around 12 images per second meaning that animators often shoot on twos. This means that two frames will show the same image- a new photo will be taken on the 1st frame, 3rd frame and 5th frame and so on- making the total number of images 12 per second, giving the illusion of life like movement. To move the model quickly animators can animate on ones to give the illusion of quick movement.
Joseph Plateau was a Belgian physicist who created the phenakistoscope in 1832. This is known as the first mechanism for animation. Using the persistence of vision principle that he established in 1829, he was able to create the illusion of motion with the Phenakistoscope. It was made with two disks on the same axis spinning in the same direction. The first disk had slits around the edge, while the second had the images on. The pictures would be viewed in a mirror looking through the slits in the first disk to create the illusion of a moving image. The slits in the first disk stopped the images all blurring together, while the persistence of vision notion means that we retain the previous image while seeing the new image, allowing the images to blur together enough to look like a continuous movement instead of separate images. This was the first device to create the illusion of movement from multiple still images, which lead to the development of stop motion into what we see today.
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When stop motion was initially introduced it was made from drawings that when spun appeared to be moving. This was developed as new technology to play the images was developed, such as the zoetrope. This was then developed to use photographs when Eadweard Muybridge took photos of a horse and was able to play them back quickly to show movement. The technology to play back animations quickly improved when photos were used and it was much more advanced than the intitial designs of spinning disks. This was a big improvement over about 30 years.