The Origins of Stop Motion

Stop motion was originally a form of film and was the very first attempt at animation. This technique is done to create the feeling of motion using a physical object i.e. a rock or a piece of paper. This is done by taking photographs of the object and then moving the object before taking yet another photograph, after you have done this multiple times and you put these photographs together in a sequence, you will eventually get the sense of motion.

The first use of stop motion was used around the same period that film was first introduced, with film very much going along the same line of animation, this is obvious through the very first film in 1879 in which Eadweard Muybridge, the inventor of the Zoopraxiscope, wanted to see the motion of a horses legs when it gallops, to do this, he created the "Zoopraxiscope", a camera that utilised his fast camera shutter , this captured a series of images that represented the sequences of motion.

However, the real use of object manipulation and stop motion began around 1897, this was a small animation by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton by the name of "Humpty Dumpty Circus" in which a toy circus of animals and acrobats suddenly come to life and perform. In 1902, a second film "Fun in a Bakery Shop" was released by Georges Melies and performed the technique "Lightning sculpting", however, he never used this process again in any of his other pieces. 

In 1907, Stuart Blackton returned with yet another animation by the name of "The Haunted Hotel", this film was a massive success and gained much popularity, so much so that a Spanish film maker by the name of Segundo de Chomon created a film along the same lines with the name "El Hotel Electrico" later that year, using the very same process. 

One of the original uses of clay animation would be a film called "modelling extraordinary" and audiences were blown away by the experience. And in 1916, Willie Hopkins introduced the first of his 54 episode series "Miracles in Mud" to the big screen. Later that year, the first female animator by the name of Helena Smith Dayton brought out her own film which was an adaption of the famous novel/play Romeo and Juliet. 

Later in the century, we were finally introduced to some of our more famous animators i.e. Willis O' Brien, an animator best known for his work on "The Lost World" and more importantly "King Kong". 

His protege and successor Ray Harryhausen, after working under O' Brien during the film "Mighty Joe Young" (1949), Harryhausen would eventually create three of the biggest films in history: "Jason and the Argonauts", "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" and "Clash of the Titans". These gave birth to one of the biggest scenes in stop motion - the skeleton fight in "Jason and the Argonauts", a scene in which actors and stop motion skeletons would interact with one another seamlessly, and audiences were dazzled by the work.