Assignment 5 - A history of animation - Part 3

Stop-motion animation is used in many different ways for many different things, like films or TV adverts and so on. These are a few of the examples for some of the things stop-motion animation is used for.

TV Programmes
A stop-motion animation TV programme that was a big success was "Pingu"; a series about a morphing penguin that lives with his family in the artic. Stop-motion was actually used mostly in the fifties through to the nineties to create children's TV programmes but in modern programmes that use stop-motion animation are for a more adult audience, like "Robot Chicken"
















Films
Stop-motion animation films have been going for a very long time but they have usually been made as short films but in the last twenty years or so more feature length films have been made in the tradition of stop-motion animation but early on in films stop-motion animation was used by animators like Ray Harryhausen to make movie monsters in live action films like "Clash of the Titans" (1981) but more recently films that use stop-motion animation use entirely stop-motion animation like "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" (2013) or "Chicken Run" (2000).





Advertisements
Stop-motion animation has also been used occasionally in television adverts; this is usually because it isn't usually seen in this area and can be seen to be more attractive. It has been famously used in an LCD television advert which actually won a best advert award which was a massive scale showing hundreds of different coloured rabbits run down a street. It has also been used in more simple senses like the ipad advert.  





Music videos
Music videos have always been used to give a sense of an artistic style to them but in more modern videos stop-motion animation in lyric videos, like the music video in "Eyes open" by Taylor Swift, but they are also used in proper music videos as well like We Have Band – “You Came Out” (2009).



Channel idents
Channel idents are used to tell what channel you are watching but something called eastings are a newish thing which was actually first used and created by the E4 television channel and basically uses stop-motion sequences before each show and to inform you what channel you are watching. These idents are often weird and wonderful going from small thing to giant strange set ups.



Who is stop-motion animation made for?
For most of the early years of stop-motion animation, television programmes had been used mostly to entertain children's shows while a lot of the films were shorts and made not necessarily but mostly for an adult audience trying to create a serial kind of environment and meaning that a lot of younger people wouldn't understand. In recent years this has swapped around and it is films that are mostly made for children and television that is made for adults.

What does the future hold for stop-motion animation?
I believe that stop-motion animation will be used less and less in the coming years but it wont disappear completely; it will most likely be featured in a films every few years to be used in a fashion to create a sort of vintage or old styled film or environment but I think it will probably stay used in mature programs like "robot chicken".