Stop Motion

For some reason the idea of stop motion kind of intrigues me.  It seems like such a tedious technique and just the thought of having to take 24 frames  before you have a second of footage just blows my mind.  The amount of patience you would need is amazing.  24 frames a second for a feature length film which would be about an hour is around 84,000 pictures and that’s not even counting the ones they didn’t use or just threw away.  Of course, I always used to do stop motion when I was a kid.  I set up Legos and made them do little battles.  But I wasn’t done in 24 frames a second; more like 5. 

The first ever stop motion sequence was made in 1897 by Albert Smith and Stuart Blackton, in the film The Humpty Dumpty Circus.  But, probably the best known stop motion of the early days was The Lost World and King Kong by Willis O’Brien.  Similar to stop motion, something called Go Motion came about around and was used by the early Star Wars movies and others like Robocob.  Go Motion was essentially like stop motion except it was the computer that moved parts of the models on each of the 24 frames to make the model actually look like it was moving.

Even though CGI is becoming more prevalent nowadays, I feel like there will always be a place for stop motion.  Because it feels more authentic and more imaginary like we are going back in time to our older days when we wanted our Legos to come alive and fight with each other.  I feel like there will always be this fascination with the tangible which CGI can’t accomplish