Audio Project

media first assignment from Luis Cuevas on Vimeo.

Field trip to the MoMI

STOP MOTION ANIMATION

The stop motion animation activity was the most interesting part of my visit to the MoMI to me, which is why I have decided to speak more about it in this blog.

Naturally, stop motion animation is the art of photographing a non-moving object in a series of still frames. When all the images are taken and played, the object seems to have taken life and appears to be moving by itself. Stop motion animation can take weeks to film, which in conclusion can give us as far as five to ten minutes of footage from that period of time (the first episode of South Park was made via stop motion; it nearly took four months to do so, leaving the creators to continue producing the series digitally).

One of the first stop motion animation pictures dates back to 1909, with a film called “Princess Nicotine,” directed by J. Stuart Blackton, where he animated matches and cigarettes as they move around the screen by themselves in the film. Another pioneer of this field was Willis O’Brien, who had successfully filmed dinosaur themed animation early in his career, and later on would be hired as a special effects supervisor for the famous movie, King Kong.

To incorporate humans into the film along with the non-moving objects, filmmakers would shoot the already saved footage onto on side of a screen, and then with a second camera on the other side of the screen, decorations would be added to the frame, and the actors too would act along to whatever was happening in the rolling footage (Creation by O’Brien is a good example).

Ray Harryhausen was another big name introduced to the stop motion filming. He began with designing animation directed towards a young audience. As the years went by, Harryhausen paired up with O’Brien to produce more noteworthy films, such as Mighty Joe Young, which won O’brien an academy award. Afterwards, Harryhausen then introduced mythology into filming, along with producer Charles Schneer, with their most successful film, Jason and the Argonauts, a film that enthralled crowds all over the country.