When was stop motion created

When Willis O'Brien invited Ray Harryhausen to join him in animating on the version of Mighty Joe Young, this allowed the young Harryhausen to develop his skill and range as an animator. He would go on to produce visual effects for many films such as The Beast from 20, Fathoms , It Came from Beneath the Sea , 20 Million Miles to Earth , along with a ton of others.

His work on The 7th Voyage of Sinbad , Mysterious Island , First Men in the Moon , The Valley of Gwangi , The Golden Voyage of Sinbad , and Clash of the Titans are considered some of the best stop motion animated work in the world to this day, and in most cases Harryhausen animated the entirety of the visual effects by himself.

By the 's, stop motion had hit a fever pitch by being one of the most utilized visual effects techniques, as well as a medium for commercials. By the 's stop motion had hit its peak with feature films, animated television series, highly profiled commercials for major brands, and the newest of mediums: the music video.

The 80's were truly a golden age of stop motion world wide. The amount of animation produced during this time can be viewed as mind boggling.

Cable television networks like MTV would hire artists to make their station ID's completely out of stop motion, and music videos for artists like Peter Gabriel would have their music videos completely produced in stop motion.

Soon it looked like clay and puppet animation was everywhere. Will Vinton, who won an Academy Award for Closed Mondays , opened up an animation studio in Portland Oregon that would produce some of the most iconic characters to this day.

The Noid and The California Raisins would be two huge clay animated commercial characters that would later become bigger than the brands they were trying to promote.

Films such as, Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back , Dragon Slayer , and Robo Cop would be filled with stop motion visual effects to the point that the lines between reality and the imagined were so well blurred, many people thought it just couldn't get any clearer. By the early 90's things started to fall apart in the stop motion animation industry.

With the growth of desktop computers and the advancement of technology, handmade animation was quickly disappearing as the preferred medium of choice for commercials, visual effects, and movies. The 90's were considered a strange time since the hand animated films like The Nightmare Before Christmas , Chicken Run , and James and the Giant Peach were hits and fan favorites; but because of PIXAR's success with their first feature film Toy Story , the whole industry from music commercials, television shows, to feature films quickly abandoned the once-loved handmade art forms.

No one was immune; 2D cel animation quickly disappeared, bringing about dark times for traditional animators.

Many left the industry completely to never return, but for the lucky few that believed in the process, they remained and eventually saw things get better.

Television production seemed to be the only outlet that would keep the flame alive for stop motion longer than 10 years. Television shows like Pingu , Bump in the Night , The Pj's , along with a few others allowed for stop motion to have a place of residency while the world looked away towards the horizons of new technology. One new medium that should be noted that took hold in the 90's and is very much alive today is video games.

Clay Fighter , which was released in , was one of many video games which used the stop motion animation technique of photography in production. An early example of Claymation, a form of stop-motion animation using plasticine clay, was American film-maker Edwin S. Ladislas used dried insects with wires for limbs as puppets, slowly moving their limbs to give the illusion of motion.

In , Clokey created Davey and Goliath, a Christian show that was produced by the United Lutheran Church in America and aimed to teach children lessons.

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Join a Reading Challenge. Later, special video machines allowed the animator to view the last one or two frames, and compare those to the live video from the camera.

This allowed them to get a sense of how their animation was progressing. Early DSLRs did not have live view, a feature where the camera can provide a video stream of the image through the lens. So, the studio had to use a secondary video camera to provide the video assist. Since then, DSLRs have been used to capture most of the professional quality stop motion that you see, from feature films to music videos to broadcast television series and commercials.

Dragon 1. This meant that the animator could see a fairly accurate through-the-lens preview of their animation as they went. Dragonframe is the premier frame-grabbing software for stop motion animation and time-lapse photography.