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It's Stop Motion March Madness!
This month we’re featuring the ever-mesmerizing first form of animation, Stop Motion. This intriguing technique has brought to life favorites from the early King Kong movies, to Gumby, Wallace & Gromit, and such current Hollywood Box Office hits as Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Producing stop motion animation is an art form akin to ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, with intense attention paid to positioning objects, taking photos, moving the objects slightly and repeating the process in order to create a sense of movement through sequential images.
William O’Brien’s 1933 King Kong left Fay Wray and the rest of us screaming for more stop motion magic. A master of the art form, O’Brien used rubber models and stop motion to create emotion on the gorilla’s face in his early work. O’Brien went on to make Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, winning the Academy Award for special effects in 1949.
The illusion of motion really hits its stride in the art form of claymation™, one of the most common forms of stop motion animation. Claymation™ typically uses plasticine, a camera, a computer, video software and, of course, creative vision. The clay figures come to life through slight position changes captured in multiple frames. One of the most recognizable stop motion favorites, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, the holiday TV special produced in the 1960s, still airs every December to the delight of its many fans.
Clay animation has strutted its stuff in Academy Award winning films including Creature Comforts in 1989 and Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase, which took home the Oscar in 1992. Today we see the popularity of stop motion in computer games,TV commercials and shows like the highly-rated Robot Chicken on Adult Swim.
Riding the stop motion animation wave, meet Jon Kinyon, and the magic he’s created with his own guitar hero. Check out Kinyon’s parody of Jimi Hendrix on MyToons.com with “Jimi Homeless Plays Monterey” featuring Jimi Hendrix’s greatest hits, complete with a full length album and stop motion music video.
