Can't stop Stop-motion

After seeing such a wondrous stop-motion film like Anomalisa a few weeks ago it got me thinking about some of the other stop-motion and claymation films I know and love.  I grew up with Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, all of which are definitely geared towards kids, and even as a young adult I still find so much charm in the style of animation (even though I would never have the patience for it). Some of the stuff I've seen in recent years is absolutely wonderful.  My favorites include Wallace and Gromit's the Wrong Trousers, Community's Christmas special called Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas, and Coraline, Corpse Bride, and Nightmare Before Christmas.  (Why is that creepy directors decide to do stop-motion animated pieces?) That thought right there made me want to venture onto the other side (for some unknown reason) and see just how creepy stop-motion can be. One of the films that Mike suggested I see was called The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, something that I can't entirely process even after seeing it.  I'm not sure what to think of it...  But I'll let you form an opinion on it by posting it here, the video upload option wasn't working.


What was intriguing about this film was that it was made by using a combination of model stop motion, and a technique called pixilation, which is essentially animating the human actors frame by frame.  At first when I saw that option I wondered why they didn't just shoot the humans in full video and just drop every x number of frames, but after thinking about it the pixilation technique would allow the humans to appear consistent with the animation style of the models.

Neighbours

Alright this is a real throwback but don't a good one worth checking out. Norman McLaren was a Canadian filmmaker who was really revolutionary in the field of Animation. He did a lot of hand drawn work were he would animate directly on celluloid film. McLaren also worked a lot with sound, actually creating soundtracks by marking up film as well.

His 1952 film, Neighbours, actually won him an Oscar for Best Documentary. Neighbours is a lot like a pixelated film using stop motion techniques to animate the characters. Like I said before, McLaren worked a lot with sound, and I love the way the soundtrack of this film interacts with the action. The message of the film is great too. It gets at this idea of the competing neighbors and how sharing is often lost in lieu of possession. McLaren was way ahead of his time, definitely worth checking out his works.

Pixilation

    I just saw a few videos using this technique of animation and I thought I would look into how its done.  It seems that there are two main ways of creating a pixilation.  The first way is to arrange your subjects and photograph them, them move them and photograph them, sort of like stop-motion with real people.  The other way is to take a video and then in post remove individual frames to achieve the same look.  It is cool because you can manipulate the shots to make it seem like people are flying above the ground by filming them jumping at the camera and then take out all the shots of them except the ones when they are in the air.  This is one example of many effects you can achieve by using pixilation.  Below are a few examples that I found of this technique.





Luminaris from Juan Pablo Zaramella on Vimeo.