Stop Motion, A New Oxymoron

Well, “the silence whistles” kinda makes sense, but isn’t stop motion just plain ridiculous?  Things cannot stop and move at the same time. Well, in the world of stop motion films or movies, that can happen.

What is Stop Motion? Simply put, it is an animation techniques also known as stop-action or frame-by-frame during which a physically manipulated object appears to move on its own. The object basically is being moved a small increment per frame, creating a somewhat choppy movie.

How can a stop motion film be made? The answer to this question really depends on what the artist wants. Traditionally, the stop motion film is made by shooting lots and lots of still pictures, creating a series of pictures that motionally relate to each other, and are joined together and played; it is like a flip book, which is quite time consuming to make. Stereoscopic stop-motion is what they call it. Coraline would be a movie made using that technique, although it is being played in 3D.

However, as technology advances, people get smarter and start to manipulate small motion changes using computers instead of using their hands to physically moving the objects, which is called go motion. Then, the ultimate computer generated imaginary creates the whole stop motion film using computer generated graphics, which is much faster, but can lose the sense created by traditional stop motion if  not used carefully.

Want to see it in practice? Here is a short film using the technique of stop motion, it is “The PEN Story”:

Hope you learned something about stop motion today. If you already know what stop motion is, I hope you really enjoyed the film.

Want to share your favorite stop motion movies with us? Post the link of the movie in the comment section!