It's All in How You Look at It, Part 2

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Dec 23, 2001

After nearly 80 years, stop-motion photography has become such a common element of our film experience that it's hard to imagine the impact those first animated films must have had on an audience. Even today, with all the miracles of CGI, it's impossible not to watch King Kong battle that Tyrannosaur for Fay Wray without a sense of wonder and awe.

The stop-motion procedure itself is, at base, fairly simple to explain. A model is constructed using a jointed wooden or metal "skeleton" (see example below) and covered with some flexible material--usually rubber or clay. The model is than filmed one frame at a time and moved a millimeter between frames. When the resulting series of photographs is shown as the standard film speed of 24 frames per second, the model comes to life. How fast (and how smooth) the action occurs depends on the number of changes.

Of course, that bare-bones description doesn’t begin to address the hours and hours of work that go into the preparation for and the execution of that “simple process.” First, there is the building of the models, which can take anywhere from hours to weeks. If they are to be filmed in a miniature set, that must be built. Lighting must be designed and set up. Then someone has to make those minute changes in the model--or models--for frame after frame.

“[Twenty-four] single picture frames equals one second of animated action or movement,” explains stop-motion artist Lionel Ivan Orozco, who created a fair share of the background figures in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, (see "winged demon" armature below) “and so, ten seconds of animation would equal 240 individual pictures.”

To understand the full scope of that multiply it by six, for the number of seconds in a minute, and then again by 90, for the number of minutes in the average animated film. The total is 129,600 frames--all set by hand. Keep that in mind the next time you watch Chicken Run And the number can be even greater.

Although Georges Méliès and other early filmmakers used stop-motion occasionally, it wasn’t until the second decade of the 20th Century that the process became anything more than in infrequent novelty. In 1913 a San Francisco newspaper cartoonist by the name of Willis O’Brien became fascinated by the idea and began experimenting in his garage with miniatures of prehistoric animals he made with jointed wooden frames (armatures) covered in a rubber substance. O’Brien photographed his creations in miniature sets, and in the process invented most of the basic procedures of stop-motion that are used to this day.