Stop-Motion Animation
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Stop-motion animation is an animation technique in which physical objects, puppets, or models are photographed one frame at a time, with small adjustments made to their position between exposures, so that when the frames are played back in sequence the subjects appear to move on their own.
Technique
Unlike hand-drawn or computer animation, stop-motion works directly with physical materials: armatured puppets, clay figures, cut paper, or even everyday objects. An animator repositions the subject incrementally—often by fractions of an inch—and captures a still photograph at each stage, typically aiming for a rate of 12 to 24 frames per second of finished footage. Because every frame requires a manual adjustment, stop-motion is notably labor-intensive compared to most other animation methods.
History
Early stop-motion experiments date to the beginning of cinema itself, but the technique became widely recognized through 20th-century special-effects and animation work. Ray Harryhausen popularized a refined form of model animation, known as Dynamation, in films such as Jason and the Argonauts (1963), where stop-motion creatures and skeletons interacted with live-action footage. Clay-based stop-motion, or claymation, gained popularity through figures like Gumby and, later, through the work of studios such as Aardman Animations, creators of Wallace and Gromit.
Stop-motion has remained a durable niche within animation, valued for its tactile, handmade look even as digital tools have come to dominate much of the medium; feature films using the technique continue to be produced by specialist studios decades after the computer-animation era began.