Jan Svankmajer is an animator whose work is often made from objects rather than clay, however, he does use clay animation on occasion. He also uses pixilation, where live actors move frame by frame. This helps to give his work a surreal feel-which he is known for-as it makes the movements jolty which can look unsettling with live actors as they are normally filmed in one fluid movement. His animation often centres on children using dolls and toys while also using violent imagery creating disturbing viewing. His animations are distinctive as they are stop motion but often use fast motion too. Alice 1988 uses this technique to make the movement quick and jolty. To film in fast motion, Svankmajer would shoot on ones instead of twos as is common. Instead of telling an obvious story in his films he prefers to represent morals. His work is important to the history of animation as he introduced new techniques-fast motion and pixilation which has been used by contempary animators such as the Brothers Quay.
(Alice 1988)
Lotte Rieninger is said to be the pioneer of silhouette animation. Instead of using objects or clay to animate as many artists have she used black card and wire to create silhouettes of characters. She placed them on a light box to enhance the silhouette. She would move the card frame by frame to animate the characters. She is well known for animating fairy tales. The Adventures of Prince Achmed 1926 is one of her most well-known pieces. This was made using her famous silhouette technique. At an hour and twenty minutes long it took three years to film. This was filmed at 24 frames per second. This has been the standard frame rate since 1927 for film. This standard frame rate hasn’t changed and techniques used by animators like Pal, O’Brien and Rieninger haven’t changed only improved. This can make animation a lot more ageless than live action videos as with live action it easy to have an idea of when it was made but with animation it is much harder to tell. Her work is important as she developed 2D stop motion compared to the 3D animation which is much more common. By introducing a new style of stop motion it would influence more animators as there are more options as to what kind of stop motion video to make.