Pixilation is a stop motion technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in an animated film, by repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames. The actor becomes a kind of living stop motion puppet. This technique is often used as a way to blend live actors with animated ones in a movie, such as "The Secret Adventures Of Tom Thumb" by the Bolex Brothers, which used the technique to a compelling and eerie effect.
"Neighbours" is an example of Pixilation animation. Neighbours is 1952 anit-war film by Scottish-Canadian film maker Norman McLaren. Produced at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, the film uses the technique known as Pixilation, an animation technique using live actors as stop-motion objects. McLaren created the soundtrack of the film by scratching the edge of the film, creating various blobs, lines, and triangles with the projetor read as sound.
The plot of the film is two men, Jean Paul Ladouceur and Grant Munro, live peacefully in adjacent caredboard houses. When a flower blooms between their houses, they fight eachother to death over the ownership of the single small flower.
The term "Pixilation" was created by Grant Munro, who had worked with McLaren on Two Bagatelles, a pair of short pixilation films made prior to Neighbours. While Neighbours is often credited as an animated film by many film historians although very little of the film is actually animated. The majority of the film is shot with variable-speed photography, usually in fast motion, with some stop-frame techniques. During one brief sequence, the two actors appear to levitate, this effect was achieved in stop-motion, the men repeatedly jumped upward but were photographed only at the top of their trajectories.
Neighbours is the winner of both a Canadian Film Award and an Academy Award, the latter for which it was nominated twice, for Short Subject (One-reel) and for Best Documentary (Short Subject). This film has been designated and preserved as a 'masterwork' by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada. In 2009, the film was added to UNESCO's Memory of The World Programme, listing the most significant documentary heritage collections in the world.
Neighbours - Norman McLaren. (A short clip of the 1952 pixilation film Neighbours.)
Claymation.
Clay Animation also known as Claymation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either a character or a background, is "deformable" - made of malleable substance, usually Plasticene clay.
In Claymation, each object is sculpted in to clay or a similar pliable material such as Plasticene, usually around a wire skeleton called an armature. The object or character is arranged on the set, and then the object or character is moved slightly by hand and then photographed. This cycle is repeated until the animator has achieved the desired amount of film. Clay Animated films were produced in the United States as early as 1908, when Edison Manufacturing released a trick film entitled The Sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Dream. In 1916 Clay Animation became something of a fad, as an East Coast artist named Helena Smith Dayton and West Coast animator named Willie Hopkins produced clay-animated films on a wide range of subjects. Pioneering the clay-painting technique was one-time Vinton animator Joan Gratz, first in her Oscar-nominated film The Creation in 1980 and then in her Oscar-winning Mona Lisa Descending A Staircase, filmed in 1992.
Some of the best known Clay Animated works include the Grumby series of television show segments created by Art Clokey, The California Raisins advertising campaign by Will Vinton Productions studio, The WB'S The PJ's produced by and featuring the voice of Eddy Murphy and of course, Wallace & Gromit created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations.
Wallace & Gromit - Nick Park of Aardman Animations. (An example of Clay Animation at it's best.)
Papermation.
Papermation is a technique for producing animatons using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs. The world's earliest known animated feature films were cut-out animations made in Argentina by Quirino Cristiani as is the world's earliest surviving animated feature.
Today, cut-out style animation is frequently produced using computers, with scanned images or vector graphics taking the place of physically cut out materials. South Park is an example of this transition since it's first episode was made with paper cut-out's before switching to computer animation. Other examples of this include Angela Anaconda, and Charlie & Lola. One of the most famous animators still using traditional cut-out animation today is Yuriy Norshteyn.
South Park - Trey Parker & Matt Stone. (An example of Papermation animation.)
Illustration.
An Illustration is a depiction such as a drawing, painting, a photograph or an other image that is created to dictate information such as a story, poem or newspaper article. The earliest Illustrations were pre-historic cave paintings. Before the invention of the printing press, books, such as Medieval illuminated manuscripts, were hand-illustrated. Various illustration techniques have been available to the artists over the centuries. The invention of paper pushed it's boundaries even further. Traditional illustration focuses on ways of creating illustration and can be classified into different types.
The Simpsons is a good example of Illustration. The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom written and created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a parody of a middle class American lifestyle eptiomized by it's family of the same name, which consists of Marge, Homer, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. The show is set in the fictional town of Springfield.
The Simpsons has won dozens of awards since it debuted as a series, including 27 Primetime Emmy Awards, 30 Annie Awards and a Peabody Award. Time magazine's December 31st, 1999 issue named it the 20th century's best television series and on January 14th, 2000 the Simpson family was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The Simpsons - Matt Groening. (An example of Illustration animation.)
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