#Foreword by Alice Elliot

[outside-the-mailstrom]

Amazing

I remember seeing a different post pointing out that Native Americans are basically already living a post-apocalyptic world.

[coreyba2breport]

Notes taken from “The Advanced Art of Stop-Motion Animation” written by Ken A. Priebe (Foreword by Henry Selick): 

Foreword and introduction: 

Look up “Lisa Jane Grey” (Stop-Motion Animator). 

“Stop-Motion gives proof of the artist’s hand through the inescapable mistakes made and communicate to the audiences that what they are watching really, truly exists”. 

“Stop-Motion connects us to the time when our toys came to life through the power of our imaginations”. 

Look into “Jabberwocky” by Jan Svankmajer, inspired by Lewis Carrol. 

Look up “Seepage” by Henry Selick at Disney. 

Look up “Pete Kozachik” (worked on “Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions”).

Look up “Anthony Scott” (Animation Supervisor for Corpse Bride). 

Look up “Larry Bafia” (Animator from Will Vinton Studios and PDI). 

Chapter 1: History of Stop-Motion Animation: 

“The earliest Stop-Motion films were merely experiments in moving objects before the camera, like Bewitched Matches (1913) and The Automatic Moving Company (1912)”.  

Look up “Closed Monday’s” by Will Vinton and “Sandcastle” by Co Hilman. 

Look up Stop-Motion TV series such as “Gumby, Morph, Colargol, California Raisins, and anymore (Bagpus, Claykids). 

“These Stop-Motion efforts were designed to hold the audiences attention only for a brief moment, a mere bridge getting them from one feature of entertainment to another. For the most well executed Stop-Motion sequences, such as Harryhausen’s 5 minute skeleton fight in 1963′s Jason and the Argonauts, the shorter the format provided a solid frame to place as much quality as possible into them. Often there was not enough time or budget to create the same amount of animation for more than what any feature film required, so all the available resources were applied to creating these short moments of beautiful entertainment”. 

“If the technique distracted the audience from the story or character development, Stop-Motion could not be utilized as much more than a novelty”. 

“In 1937, Walt Disney took the world by storm with the phenomenal success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was not the first ever animated feature ever made (chronologically), but it was the first to set the standard for what the animation medium could achieve in a feature length format”. 

“It would be company branches owned by Disney that would help bring the animated feature back into vogue, through landmarks like Who framed Rodger Rabbit (1988), Pixar’s Toy Story (1995) and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare before Christmas (1993). Nightmare, of course, was a major turning point for Stop-Motion as the medium’s first feature length project to receive worldwide distribution and a huge following after its release”. 

“In the years following CG features by Disney/Pixar (Finding Nemo, Wall-E), Dreamworks SKG (Shrek, Madagascar), Blue Sky (Ice Age, Horton Hears a Who!) and others grew to dominate and saturate the feature market. The CG boom of the past decade expanded to the point of prompting rumors of the extinction of more traditional techniques of hand drawn and Stop-Motion, partly fueled by Disney’s misguided decision to abandon the hand drawn medium for feature films”. (Mention films that still use 2D in them today like Moana, Princess and The Frog and The Secret of Kells). 

Look into “The Camera’s Revenge” 1912 by Ladislas Starewitch as well as “Le Roman de Renard” 1930 (not released until 1937).  

Look up “King Kong” 1933. 

Look into “The New Gulliver” 1935 and “The Golden Key” 1939 both made by Alexsandr Ptushko. 

Look into “Die Sieben Raben” 1937 by Ferdinand and Hermann Diehl. 

“1940′s brought very little to the screen in the format of full-length puppet features, possibly because of WW2 dominating at least half the decade in many countries”. “Ironically the war did play a part in the first technicolour feature to be made in Britain, which was a training film for the Admiralty called Handling ships 1945.” 

Look up “Halas and Bachelor studio”.

Look into “Alice in Wonderland” 1949 by Lou Bunin

Look into “Hansel and Gretel: An Opera Fantasy” 1954 (released false information on how stop motion was done)(First stop motion feature film in America). 

“Up to this point, (1980) the original full length puppet features were a mixed bag of limited commercial success, failures, and experiments that did not make much impact outside of a few enthusiasts and were otherwise virtually unknown or unreleased outside their country of origin. But the 1980′s to early 90′s was an interesting time for Stop-Motion, where many elements were coming together to set the stage for a major breakthrough in the puppet world”. (The Empire Strikes Back-1980)(Dragonslayer-1981)(Vincent-1982)(The Nightmare before Christmas-1993)(Gumby: The Movie-1995 set up by the release of Pee-Wee’s play house by Will Vinton).

Nightmare combined nearly every puppet and film making technique that had ever been used for Stop-Motion, including front/rear projection, double exposure effects, casting in foam latex, ball and socket armatures, replacement animation and strong character performance”. “Another unique feature was the extensive use of modern motion control to make the camera a moving part of the story”. 

“Disney had installed confidence in Henry Selick to direct a follow-up feature in Stop-Motion, James and the Giant Peach 1996″. 

Look into “The Miracle Maker” 1999. 

“Clay animation in a feature length film would finally have its shot at world wide commercial success by 2000. The 1990′s had seen the rise of another Stop-Motion superstar with genius of animator/director Nick Park”. 

Look into “Wallace and Grommet: Curse of the Were-Rabbit” 2005. 

Look into “Corpse Bride” 2005.

“The Corpse Bride Puppet faces were manipulated by complex mechanisms of paddles and gears underneath a silicone skin”. “Corpse Bride was the first use of digital still cameras for shooting all the animation”. 

Look into “Max and Co” by Frederic and Samuel Guillaume. 

Look up “Marjolaine Parot” and “Brian Demoskoff” (Animators on Max and co). 

Look into “Edison and Leo” 2008 (Canada’s first Stop-Motion feature) Directed by Neil Burns.

Look into “$9.99″ 2008 by Talia Rosenthal. 

Look into “Mary and Max” 2009 by Adam Elliot. (Main character has Asperger Syndrome)

Look into “A Town called Panic” 2009 by Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar.

Look into “Coraline” 2009 by Laika (First film to shoot in 3D). 

Chapter 2: An Interview with Screen Novelties 

Chris Finnegan: It’s important to stress that there is CG animation out there that deliberately tries to look like Stop-Motion and is very convincing in the way that it’s rendered out to look that way” (Consider looking into “The Lego Movie” 2014 for this point). 

Chapter 8: An interview with Bronwen Kyffin 

(Response to the question: “What are your thoughts on the current Stop-Motion scene and its potential?”) “What’s really fantastic right now is that through platforms like YouTube, etc. film makers are able to connect to audiences and each other so much quicker and easier than before. You don’t have to enter or attend film festivals and fly all over the country to be able to share your work with people. Now we can share work with each other from the comforts of home, just e-mailing each other the inspiring films that we find. Hopefully that kind of accessibility will result in more independent work being done. For TV series, I think the interest in it will always ebb and flow, depending on the appeal of the Stop-Motion look and how in fashion it is at the time. I think it will perhaps be more interesting to see how this new online community spreads interest in the Stop-Motion medium, and how that, in turn, affects the number of Stop-Motion shows that we see on TV”. 

Chapter 10: An interview with Larry Bafia and Webster Colcord

Larry: “Sometimes simplifying and going back to roots can really feel much more personal. Sometimes when you get more sophisticated, things can get really antiseptic. Even in CG for example, the film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs went for that Muppet-Type character design, and that helped push the animation, to make it feel unique”. 

Webster: “Audiences are more sophisticated now. They used to complain about Stop-Motion looking jerky, but now they’ve seen the flawless, smooth CG alternative, so they want that handmade quality more. Their eyes have accepted it”.