Animation Techniques: Stop Motion

Stop motion is an animation technique to make a object appear to move on its own. Photographs will be taken for every frame, moving the object slightly every time, and then the frames are played back as a consecutive sequence to make it appear that the characters are moving.

Stop motion technique can be applied in a number of different ways and one of my favourites is puppet animation and this typically involves stop-motion puppet figurines that interact with each other and things in an environment. Usually they have small joints so that there arms or leg are able to move in a way in which normal limbs would, they also have the ability to be firm and steady this way.Probably one of the best examples of this can be seen in most Tim Burton animations, and my favourite being The Corpse Bride.

Another interesting example of stop motion animation is using clay, known more popularly as claymation.  This concept uses figures made of clay or a similar material to create the frame by frame animation. Like the puppet animation the clay models could have a wire frame inside of them to be able to keep them steady and upright and so that they can be manipulated effectively. Probably the most well known animation for using clay models, which coincidentally is also one of my favourites, is Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit.