Willis O'Brien

Willis O'Brien was an Irish American Stop Motion and special effects pioneer. He is responsible for some of the most images in cinema history. He is best rembered for the films. The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young ( 1949).

O'Brien first worked on cattle farms when he was thirteen years old before going on to become a short lived boxer winning nine out of his ten fights. All through this he used to sculpt models a hobby that would thrust him into the film business.

In 1913 at the San Fransisco World fair he created a dinosaur and a caveman and with help froma local cameraman he aniamted the models into a 90 second test shot. An exhibitor called Herman Wobber saw this footage and comissioned O'Brien to make his first film called "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tradgedy" in 1915. This was immediatly picked up by Thomas Edison and he hired O'Brien to create several short films based on the Prehistoric theme. These were called R.F.D 10,000 B.C and Prehistoric Poultry which were both made in 1917. During his time working for the Edison Company O'Brien worked on other pieces namely "The Puzziling Billboard" and "Nappy's Nightmare" which both came out in in 1917. These were very important pieces as these were the first shorts to include both live action and stop motion together. These films are what secured his postion on "The Lost Worlds" creative team. Although he usually worked in clay the models in this film were made out of rubber over a metal armature to allow for a more realistic look.

During this work O'Brien worked on "King Kong" in 1933. This would go on to become his best film. It was a massive success and is a very iconic film, in fact it has been remade twice.

It was so popular that a sequel was demanded called "So of Kong" however O'Brien said it was too cheesy and gave the animating work to his is assistant and asked not to be be credited. 

O'Brien then started work at RKO and help create more films such as "The Lat Days of Pompeii" in 1935 and "The Dancing Pirate in 1936 the latter being his first film in Technicolour. 


O'Brien was also the Technical Creator of "Mighty Joe Young" (1949) won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 1950.

His final piece of aniamtion came in "Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" in 1963. He did a small scene within the film of characters runnign from a fire however he died before the film was released.

Willis O'Brien was a very talented special effects and stop motion user and his films are timeless classics that although have been remade are still remembered for their quality and creative flair.

Aardman Studios

Aardman Studios is an animation studio specialising in stop motion animation based in the UK. They work in claymation for their programs howver they have also used computer aniamtion for other productions. 

 Aardman was founded 1972 by Peter Lord and David Sproxton in their attempt to create animation motion pictures. Their first piece of animation came in the form of "Greeblies" in 1975. They used clay mation for this type of animation which would be the foundation for creating "Morph" later. Later more animators came to join Aardman one of them being Nick Park the creator of the famuous Wallace and Gromit.

Parks first short known as "Creature Comforts" was the first Aardman aniamtion to win an Oscar. The first Wallace and Gromit shorts "A Grand Day Out" (1989) "The Wrong Trousers" (1993) and "A Close Shave" (1995) were huge successed, in fact the final two won Academy Awards. 

In 1997 Aardman and Dreamworks studios teamed up to create Aardmans first feature film "Chicken Run" which was a stop motion animation made in clay. Chicken Run was a complete financial success and made $224,834,564 at the box office. 

Their second film was "Wallace and Gromit Curse of the Were Rabbit". This film was created 10 years after the last Wallace and Gromit short. This was an extremley successful film for Aardman and was awarded an academy award much like the other Wallace and Gromit shorts that were created earlier. 

Their final film was "Flushed Away" in 2006. This was not created in claymation isntead it was Aardmans first computer animation. This however was not as successful as the previous films and because of the Aardman and Dreamworks cut ties and no longer collaborated. 

Aardman also created other shorts such as "Shaun the Sheep" which is an off shoot of one character that stared in one Wallace and Gromit short namley Shaun. This has been very successful on TV spawning two seasons and a third one coming in 2013.

Currently Aardman is working on two films. One called "The Cat Burglars" and the otehr is anotehr Nick Park production however it has been confirmed as not another Wallace nad Gromit film.

Aardman is a cery good company that is rooted in stop motion and has made an impact on the film industry using stop motion.

Jan Svankmajer

Jan Svankmajer is a Czech stop motion director who has created many award winning films using his techniques.

He was born in 1934 in Prague. he studied at Pragues Academy of Performing Arts in the Department of Puppetry. He created his first surrealist film called The Garden in 1968 after this he joined Czechoslovakian Surrealist Group.

There he met his wife Eva Švankmajerová there. She was a surrealist painter and was internationally known. She helped collaborate with her husband on many of films such as Alice and Faust.  

He is well known for his surreal films that bring life to inanimate objects through stop motion. All his films have a surreal and nightmarish feel to them. His trademark is the use of exaggerated sounds within his films. Many of his films contain claymation and its use in creating charatcers and objects and food is a main subject and medium within his films.

Alice (1988)
Alice was Jan's first foray into feature filmaking. It was an adaptation of Lewis Carrols first Alice book and combines both stop motion and live action. It has a very dark design and was very distiguinshing.

 Faust (1994)
This was another feature film combining live action and stop motion. Again the overall theme was very dark but this time it was also humourous.  

Pioneers of Stop Motion: Auguste and Louis Lumière

One Pioneer in Stop Motion were the Lumiére brothers Auguste and Louis.

These were some of the early filmakers in existence. They created cinematography and infact theier first film was workers leaving the Lumiére factory.

They first worked on still photography using a process called "dry plate". They however did not start on moving pictures until much later after their father died. 

They created the cinematography method by using perforated images in a camera. The cinematograph was both a picture player, projector and film developer. The cinematograph created a very sharp images so it was a better projector than other designs at the time. 

The process was very simple compared to other designs as it used a film strip of images as its medium which is where early cinema came from. The film was held in place by forks that went the through the perferated sides of the film. This was play through the lens with light behind it which then projected the image through the lens creating early cinema.

Techniques: Zoetrope

The Zoetrope is another device that uses still iamges and persistance of vision to create an animation.

The device consists of a cylinder with slits cut into the side. The inner part of the of the zoetrope as images drawn on in varying poses. These poses will be the movements of the character inside the zoetrope. The cylinder is designed to spin. When the user views the slits the "animation" will play. This is because the images are moving so fast and through such tiny vision space it creates the illusion of movement.

History
The Zoetrope was first designed in China by Ting Huan in 180AD. This was created by using convection which uses heat to move the cylinder. When it moved at the right speed the images appeared to move. It was known as "chao hua chich kuan" which means
"The pipe which makes fantasies appear"

The modern zoetrope however was created by William George Horner a British mathematician which he called a daedalum. The zoetrope is based on the phenakistoscope however it was viewed differently. It also hada third drum to allow the aniamtion to be smoother. The zoetrope was a lot bigger and allowed for more than one person to view the animation.

Now
A Zoetrope known as the Subway Zoetrope was designed in 1980 by an independent film maker called Bill Brand. It was mural painted onto the wall of a subway in New York and was designed to be a linear zoetrope so when passengers travlled along the subway line they would be treated by an animation. This has caused many other artists to create these linear zoetropes or "Masstransiscopes" within the subway tunnels of New York.

Techniques: Phenakitoscope

The Phenakitoscope was a very early animation device. It relied on something called "Persistance of Vision" 

Persistance of Vision is where a human being snaps the previous iamge they saw and mixes it with the current one they are seeing. These images move so fast that it creates movement to the viewer making them believe the picture is moving fluidly. 


The Phenakitoscope was a very simple design. It consisted of a spinning disc attached to a handle. Drawings were placed onto the edge of the disk as shown here. In between were mirrors that refelcted the image to the user blending each individual drawin together to create the animation. As seen below.

This was a very simple and creative process however this could only be viewed by one person at a time. Its successors such as the Zoetrope would create it in such a way where tit could be viewed by multiple people.

Ray Harryhausen

Stop Motion is a very specific type of animation and there have been many pioneers that have used stop motion in new ways or formats.

One pioneer of Stop Motion animation was Ray Harryhausen a stop motion animator. He created a brand of Stop Motion called Dynamation. This new type of Stop Motion was designed to be inserted into film to show the models to be interacting with the actors on screen. This is designed to give the viewer a better and more immersive film to watch.

Dynamation: The Technique

Dynamation was a new technique to make stop motion models look and act more realistically within film.
The technique is done using a split screen with rear projection. This however was around for a time before hand but the method of dynamation was not. The first part was showing or filming the film on the rear screen behind anything. This where the film will be played and filmed. Once this was filmed it was placed into a projector and shown onto the rear projection screen.

The next part was using a second screen to add the claymation montser or other special effects to the film. These were added around a  black screen to concentrate on the monster itself. The monster was then moved to look as if it was interacting with the actors in the film. The monster moved frame by frame to give it a realistic motion. This is very time consuming but it gives the look of fluid motion.

They were some flaws with this technique. Including the example above where it took a logn tiem to process there were other flaws that couldn't be corrected. One example was colour and brightness of each scene. This would of caused a lot of continuity errors and could ruin the film or at least break the immersion value of the film. Another problem is that the actors could not go infront of the models only ever behind them. This however was changed when a back panel was added alloing the models to be placed behind the actors.

Some films that used Dynamation include

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

It came from Beneath the Sea (1954)  

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Clash of the Titans (1981)