Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Stop Motion

Who was the guy holding the medusa?
That guy is Ray Harryhausen.
He was most known for his animation in filims like King Kong and Jason and the Argonauts. The style of animation that he used was called either Stop Motion or Special Effects animation.
I find the skeleton scene in Jason and the Argonauts especially interesting because of the way that the actors interact with the stop motion skeletons. As it is an old film I expected it to be a little dodgy, but this was due to the actors not the stop motion. The skeletons for the most part are very well done, they move smoothly and fight as you'd expect them to. Harryhausen was a master

Another topic of today was monsters and one of the big questions for an animator is why people choose to use them. For starters monsters are maleable, they an interesting larger than life creature which really doesn't have to be limited by the imagination. Despite their appearance they can be used to portray human emotions and therefore can tell human stories (Monsters Inc). They can also evoke the opposite emotion and can be seen as violent, hideous creatures or destroyers with which the veiwer has no problem watching them die (godzilla).
We did a stop motion on monkey jam today. Its about a monster and a jellyfish.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgJTlv3z6B4

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