What Are the Possibilities? - Frame-by-Frame Stop Motion: The Guide to Non-Traditional Animation Techniques - page 5

Similar to the Lumiere Brothers, Edison's first films reflected everyday life and
activities. Edison also attracted audiences and talent, like the first established
American stop-motion animators, James Blackton and Willis O'Brien. Both
artists favored model or puppet animation. O'Brien produced special effects
films like the 1915 The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy
and eventually the 1933 King Kong . Artists were moving away from the
obvious tricks of dissolves, position replacements, and editing techniques to
techniques that were the beginnings of special effects and model animation.
Pixilation took a back seat. Even artists like Charley Bower favored models, as is
illustrated in his 1930 It's a Bird , where Bowers has a bird eating metal materials
and a car appears to be destroyed frame by frame as the film is run in reverse.
This gives the appearance of the car assembling itself totally unassisted.
It is worth noting the Russian-born Polish animator, Ladislas Starevich, in 1910, was
creating documentary films for the Museum of Natural History in Kovno, Lithuania.
The final film in a series focused on the fighting of two stag beetles. Since these
beetles would become dormant when the movie lights were on, Starevich decided
to use dead beetles and attach wire with sealing wax to their thorax in place of
their legs. This innovative thinking started a whole new approach to stop motion,
which ultimately led to much more developed model animation.
In 1929, Russian director Dziga Vertov created a silent documentary film called
Man with a Movie Camera . In this film, Vertov documents the lives of urban citizens
in Odessa. The film, which was edited by his wife and partner, Elizaveta Svilova,
features many of the techniques that we will discover in the following chapters.
Not only does Vertov use freeze frames, double exposures, reverse playback, fast
and slow motion, dynamic camera angles, and editing techniques but also stop-
motion approaches to reveal a rather frenetic and modern existence. It is worth
viewing this wonderful documentary film for its historical and aesthetic approach.
Stop Motion and Its Various Faces
Not until 1952 did the technique of pixilation become utilized in a film
that struck an international chord. Norman McLaren's Neighbours , which
featured Grant Monroe, mentioned earlier as the person who coined the term
pixilation , put this technique back in the public eye.
Fig 1.5 Neighbours, directed
by Norman McLaren. © 1952
National Film Board of Canada.
all rights reserved. photo credit:
evelyn Lambert.