Stop Motion Wednesday: Gumbley's News

When I left school five years ago I was really interested in setting myself up in the film industry, I even went to study the subject (yes I went to film school, can call me stuck up and arrogant) before I realised that if I ever worked in the industry it would squash and destroy my love for the art of film making.

One of the styles of film that I personally have always enjoyed (I am partial to animation to being with) is stop motion or stop frame animation. To me there the art of making a good stop motion film is not only in how technically good you are with the camera, editing software etc but how good you are in conceptualizing from beginning to end what you want the end product to look like.

Stop motion is is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. This obviously takes quite some time and the animator has to have a very clear picture of what he wants before he even starts - it is this concept or beginning idea behind all stop motion that I find fascinating.

If you would like to learn a bit more about stop motion Stop Motion Central is a great resource as is StopMotionAnimation.com. The guys over at The Art Of Stop Motion Animation have also put together a very good how to here. If you are looking to get going with some stop motion of your own check out AnimAide for Mac and Helium Frog for PC. We would love to see some of your work entered into our creative showcase!

The internet has also been instrumental in spreading the popularity of the medium, Coraline was the last big stop motion hit. There are also hundreds of great animations out there done mostly by ammeters. Some of the best are know as Brickfilms films. Which, for the most part, object animation stop motion films featuring Lego minifigures as a vital component.

Gumbley's News

As stop motion is such a creative and ideas driven form of drawing, sculpting, film making and editing (coupled with its current popularity) that we thought it would be very cool to feature a new stop motion animation with you all every Wednesday.

To kick off we have an awesome animation by Louise Lockhart called 'Grumbley's News'. The story is about a lonely newsagent who makes his ideal woman from the produce in his shop. It is very Frankensteinish in its style (by its own admission) but the fact that everything is made entirely out of newspaper (except from Mr Gumbley himself) is really amazing.

Sit back and enjoy!