Stop-motion Animation

This is a book primarily for professionals and lovers of animation, but it can also be employed as a textbook for other fields of audiovisual media. Pikkov is a director of animated films who, in addition to creating animated films, teaches in the Department of Animation of the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Animasophy analyses the interrelations of the history, theoretical essence and practical expression of the animated film.

REVIEW: http://www.awn.com/blogs/10till6/review-animasophy-theoretical-writings-animated-film

Resumen:
Segundo de Chomón es sin duda uno de los grandes nombres de las primeras décadas de la Historia del Cine, merecedor de un sentido reconocimiento por sus indiscutibles y revolucionarios adelantos técnicos en materia de trucajes, efectos especiales, fotografía y otros apartados de la técnica cinematográfica. El estudio de su figura no ha resultado fácil por la escasez y parcialidad de datos sobre su carrera, pero hoy en día conocemos lo suficiente como para reconocer su enorme valía técnica y considerarle como uno de los pioneros del cine fantástico y de animación. Además, se trata de uno de los primeros profesionales del cine que pudo trabajar en las más prestigiosas compañías de la época y junto a algunos de los cineastas más recordados del cine mudo, siendo también uno de los más destacables pioneros del cine español.

Abstract:
Segundo de Chomón is undoubtedly one of the greatest figures of Film History’s first decades, worth of a deep recognition in order to his unquestionable and revolutionary technical improvements in tricks, special effects, cinematography and many other cinema technics. The studies about him haven’t been easy, due to limited and partial data about his career, but now we know enough to recognize his great technical value and to consider him as one of fantasy and animation pioneers. Furthermore, he is also one of the first cinema professionals who could work in the most renowned companies of his era and with some of the most remembered silent era filmmakers, as well as one of the most outstanding spanish cinema pioneers.

Abstrak: Teknologi 3D printing sudah mulai banyak digunakan di industri ani-masi terutama animasi stop motion. Penggunaan 3D printer untuk animasi stop motion paling banyak digunakan pada teknik replacement animation. Perangkat lunak yang digunakan untuk membuat aset animasi stop motion tidak terbatas pada jenis perangkat lunak untuk animasi 3 Dimensi (3D) saja, Teknik 3D digital sculpting juga dapat digunakan untuk membentuk 3D model yang kemudian bisa diproses menjadi aset untuk animasi stop motion dengan 3D printer. Penelitian ini membandingkan pembuatan model 3Dimensi yang menggunakan metode polygon modeling (memakai perangkat lunak Softimage) dengan pembuatan 3D model yang menggunakan metode digital sculpting (memakai perangkat lunak Zbrush). Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui kelemahan serta kelebihan metode poly modeling dan digital sculpting untuk membuat 3D model, dari proses modeling awal sampai ke tahap converting file perangkat lunak native menjadi file .stl yang siap diproses dengan 3D printer.

-Provides a firm foundation in the techniques, elements, and principles of 4D art and design for majors and non-majors alike
-Builds upon the basic elements of 2D and 3D design to identify 4D elements as they relate to emerging practices
-Thoroughly explores the principles of causality, duration, intensity, interactivity, musicality, spatial relationships, speed, and transitions as they impact the creation of 4D artworks
-Features over one hundred exercises and interviews with contemporary artists
- Available at https://goo.gl/bK3SH0

Stop-motion is a technique as old as cinema itself, and objectual nature, while the other animation techniques are purely imagetical. Always dependent history of this hybridization of knowledge is presented here under the concept of spatiotemporal resolvability. It is a proposal of parametrization of analysis of the techniques and respective technologies in its capacity to modulate the formal dynamism of the structures and materials for the frame-by-frame animation. The neologism presented here concerns both the original meaning of the term and the ability of a process to resolve demands satisfactorily, but it also approaches the meaning of the term resolution-borrowed from of the realization of space along the time. in the sense that the technique refers to its artistic purpose, using technologies and materials that in the case of stop-motion were not designed for this art form. However, this constant and historical lack of seems to constitute the technical inventiveness that characterizes it. The spatiotemporal resolvability characterizes how these adaptations have been given up to the present, and beckons us to be living a privileged moment for the puppet animation due to the conditions that converged on it.

Beginning with Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, feature-length animated films have amazed and delighted viewers—to a point. Beyond that point, their appeal fades into predictable, family-oriented adventures with enough music, mischief, or merriment to satisfy stereotypical expectations. What once brought animation to life now leaves a stale, déjà vu aftertaste, while the same core stories and visuals continue to roll through American cinemas. Forbes writer Scott Mendelson fired point-blank at this repetition with his “Still a Genre, Not Yet A Medium” analysis of the animation industry, noting how most films “target the same audience with many of the same tools” and are thereby consigned to a genre (Mendelson). Animation should be recognized as an artistic medium instead of a genre, because it can serve all types of audiences—despite American mainstream animation forcing itself into a kids-only box—and can tell stories through techniques unique from live-action films, rather than only acting as visual effects. Further, relegating animation to a genre denies its intrinsically equal value among other forms of visual media, while treating it as a medium allows its potential to be fully explored.

With the rapid development of digital technologies, although there are still successful examples such as Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, traditional stop-motion animation seems to have lost its popularity, due to the fact it requires more time and resources than today's CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). The aim of this article will be to suggest new and advanced material use for the educational use of stop-motion animation (Slowmation). Relying on the fact that it can be a cost-efficient way of making animation with the right materials, it still has the potential of becoming a tool for media to support sustainability. Stop-motion animation must be made by hand, therefore it requires lots of time, various materials and human effort on it. In this study, after looking at the brief history of this promising type of animation, relevant works are going to be presented to suggest Stop-Motion Animation as a suitable field to apply sustainable materials and as an effective tool for media and education to support sustainability.

A pesquisa se propõe a analisar a técnica de animação pixillation como linguagem específica, traçando relações deste tipo de animação com estudos ligados à imagem e ao movimento. Para isto, proponho atribuir ligações do pixillation com os trickfilms do early cinema, no âmbito da perspectiva mágica dos truques da técnica; estabelecer paralelos entre a prática fotográfica e a prática cinematográfica, utilizando-me de ambas as linguagens para avaliar questões do pixillation sob aspectos que dialogam com o conceito de magia e sua relação com as imagens técnicas; e, com base nos trabalhos em pixillation de Norman McLaren e Jan Svankmajer, entender a técnica como proposta poética e estética de linguagem audiovisual. Assim, através dos aspectos técnicos do pixillation, destacarei as potencialidades mágicas desse tipo de animação.

The stop-motion armatures in contemporary times have apparently new and specific solutions to demands of the characters that they allow animate efficiently, but we can trace its heritage to an historically specific project: a 1:8 scaled version of the starring Gorilla from Mighty Joe Young, 1949, designed by Ray Harryhausen under the supervision of Wilis O'Brien and manufactured by Harry Cunningham between 1947 and 1949 who earned the nickname " Jennifer " by Harryhausen, one of their animators together with Pete Peterson. Skeletons of stop-motion for feature films are internal structures to the figures of characters who often have compound metal joints-articulations with more than one mechanic component to provide controllable friction by pressure adjustment. The compound metallic joints allow both accurate angular variation (drive function, muscular system) and adequate support of the structure and coverage (structural function, skeletal system). New characters require new solutions but do not derive as much of anthropomorphic aspect invariably referring to developments present in Jennifer. The variation in body elements is that they have brought a solution or another in articulation strategy, where equating three features: support capability, the positional variability, ​and volume of all parts of the joint. It is the influence of the culture of illustration in stop-motion starting from Tim Burton and Henry Selick who radicalize the formal variations of the characters, making them mechanical challenges that Jennifer paradigms still manage to answer. In extreme cases happens the use of external support mechanisms, now easier to hide by digital imagery manipulation. Published in AVANCA | CINEMA 2015. http://www.avanca.org/

Acclaimed Australian animator Adam Elliot dedicated his career to illustrating the experiences of people with disabilities. Elliot’s first trilogy – Uncle (1996), Cousin (1999) and Brother (2000) – is a black and white claymation accompanied by narration reminiscing beloved family members with disabilities. The article intersects disability studies, phenomenology and film studies in an analysis of the disabled body in Elliot’s claymations and the crip ethics they may evoke in spectators. The author argues that Elliot’s clayographies disorient the past by yearning for it and crip the future by criticizing the marginalization of people with disabilities, and focusing on the desire for life ‘out-of-line’. The hybridity of the trilogy is an infusion of documentary ‘domestic ethnography’ or home videos, centering familial ‘others’ with fictional film-noir that allows entrance into the dark realm of recollection. The viewers are offered bodily experiences that emphasize the body’s vulnerability and perishability, presented not in a tragic or inspirational fashion, but as inseparable from human existence. By conjuring these oppositional cinematic styles and genres in clay, disability is represented as the definition of the human experience through an ethical remembrance.

This dissertation proposes an analytical view on artistic expression rarely addressed in brazilian academic circles: Animation. Considered only a “genre” film, it came before of what is known by “cinema” and is characterized by its technical variety developed over time: Drawing on paper, Stop motion, Pixilation, Rotoscope, 2D and 3D. But even with all the technological advances and the development of its nowadays heavy industry, it still follows the same principles developed by historical figures such as Winson McCay, the Fleischer brothers, Walt Disney, Tex Avery, Norman McLaren and remains the art of giving soul to whom has not one. The objective of this research is to analyze how the technique affects the materiality of visual information complementing and assisting the animation narrative. To that goal, it was developed a case study, in which were selected the following shorts Stop motion animation films: Neighbors (1952, McLaren Norman), From Window to the Cinema (1999, Quiá Rodrigues), The Old Man and the Sea (2000, Alexander Petrov), Adagio (2000, Garri Bardin) and Aria (2001, Pjotr Sapegin). Theses were examined under the concepts of semiotics, the simulacrum, film, narrative, communication theory; and based on information obtained from primary sources and the research office. Thus, it was established how the expression may be presented, by representative and/or symbolic usage of the material (or object) used in the preparation of the image, in producing an animated narrative; and how the aesthetics variety of these ways of animating definitely affects the result of the final work, often visually helping “to tell the story”. Consequently, the study expands the understanding of the aesthetic richness of the Animation – as art, technology end medium of message.

This book explores the Czech composer Václav Trojan (1907-1983) and his compositions for Jiri Trnka's films, a very influential puppet stop-motion animator. Trnka is regarded as one of the finest outcomes of Czech art in the aftermath of the Second World War and inspiration for contemporary directors like Tim Burton and companies such as Aardman or Laika. Trojan's music for animation sets a great artistic model in European animation, at least as meaningful as Carl Stalling's music for Warner Bros. cartoons in the USA. Trojan was an eclectic artist, which encompassed folk songs, jazz and blues influences, neoclassical symphonic and chamber works, opera and more.

bit.ly/2NLtB0v

Abstract

This article examines how animated films re-present and re-interpret real world occurrences, people and places, focusing on an area that has been overlooked to date: the process of performance and how this manifests itself in animated documentary films. Not simply a notion of ‘performance’ as we might understand it in an ‘acting’ sense (someone playing a role in a re-enactment), but that of the animator performing specific actions in order to interpret the factual material. The central questions addressed are: how does an understanding of ‘performance’ and the related term ‘performativity’ help us to frame animated/nonfictional acting? What ontological questions are raised by thinking about notions of acting in animation (and the performance instantiated in the very action of animating)? How do viewers relate to, interpret or ‘believe in’ animated films that are asserting real/factually-based stories? The article uses a recent film, the ten mark, as a case study to explore possible answers to these questions.

Keywords

animation, documentary, nonfiction, performance, performativity, puppets, alief.

A tin box belonged to the artist’s mother becomes animated for a movie based on Greek traditional children’s songs and acts as an intermission between two performances of a talking doll, and as an interpretation of the music instruments and their improvisation into animation. Old super 8 footage from the artist’s archive runs during the animation.

Este Trabajo Final de Graduación, enmarcado en la modalidad de Práctica Dirigida de Graduación, consiste en la aplicación de una estrategia de mediación pedagógica en III Ciclo de Educación General Básica, para la comprensión lectora del texto "Alicia en el País de las Maravillas" de Lewis Carroll, con el apoyo de la técnica stop motion.

The project of this dissertation is to investigate the way in which Czech animator Jan Švankmajer gives expression to the inner-life of 'objects' and 'things' in his film-work of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; although work from outside of this period will help contextualise the discussion. Through this enquiry we will establish the difference between what we might regard as an 'object' and what we might regard as a 'thing' within his work and question whether their animation expresses a response to the Czech political situation at the end of the Cold War. This practice of 'letting objects speak' will be understood within the terms of the surrealist movement (both in its French and its specifically Czech incarnations), universal animism, and Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection. My framework for this investigation will be 'thing theory', with particular consideration paid to the work of Bill Brown, due to the special attention afforded to objects within Švankmajer's films.

Today facial animation reaches a broad spectrum: from visual to physical, in visual effects (VFX), games, animatronics, robotics, machine vision and forensic science.
Whatever the field of study and application, the main concern about the face remains the emotional response of moviegoers, video game players or people in the presence of automats, animatronics, and androids.
In isolation, each field has given its steps, but the longest and most successful experience in achieving sympathy is undoubtedly the synthetic language of cartoon animation also present in puppet animation.
Although cartoon animation is also synonymous with two-dimensional animation as a technique, since Fleischer and Disney it is aesthetically perspectivist, anticipating in decades the visual paradigm of computer graphics and always having parallels in the stop-motion of puppets.
This common language of the three techniques offers contributions towards the emotional response problems faced by robotics and entertainment with animatronics. Even more so when facial animation in stop-motion uses internal mechanisms, converging art, entertainment, and science.
To this interface are added the knowledge about Human Facial Gestures studied in face recognition (machine vision) and in forensic science in its analysis of testimonies.
The design of internal mechanisms for facial animation in stop-motion takes advantage of animatronics and robotics studies, can have its operation simulated in computer graphics, and apply the possibilities that come from cartoon animation, and payback to all the fields involved.
Published in AVANCA | CINEMA 2018.
http://www.avanca.org/

This essay examines the aesthetics and artistic contexts of the majority of the Quays output up to 1998, from Nocturna Artificialia to Institute Benjamenta.

The Quay Brothers' striking decors and unique puppets, their attention to the 'liberation of the mistake' and their casual and lingering closeups combine to create an ingenious alchemy of animated cinema. Watching any of their animation films means entering a dream world of visual poetry. In their own words: «Puppet films by their very nature are extremely artificial constructions, even more so depending at what level of 'enchantment' one would wish for them in relation to the subject, and, above all, [depending on] the conceptual mise-en-scène applied.». Whether their first documentary or literary-inspired puppet animations or the more recent STILLE NACHT shorts, the ambiguousness of the anachronistic world of their puppets has attracted a loyal if select following.

Animation is a technique as old as cinema itself, and objectual nature, while the other animation techniques are purely imagetical. Always dependent history of this hybridization of knowledge is presented here under the concept of spatiotemporal resolvability. It is a proposal of parametrization of analysis of the techniques and respective technologies in its capacity to modulate the formal dynamism of the structures and materials for the frame-by-frame animation of three-The neologism presented here concerns both the original meaning of the term and the ability of a process to solve demands satisfactorily, but it also approaches the meaning of the term resolution-borrowed from of the realization of space along the time. in the sense that the technique refers to its artistic purpose, using technologies and materials that in the case of stop-motion were not designed for this art form. However, this constant and historical lack of seems to constitute the technical inventiveness that characterizes it. The spatiotemporal resolvability characterizes how these adaptations have been given up to the present, and beckons us to be living a privileged moment for the puppet animation due to the conditions that converged on it.