Stop-motion animation can contain different types of things to be animated. Some creators use people as their models, others use clay or even household objects to tell their stories.
The four main methods used in stop-motion animation are:
Object Animation:-
Object animation is simply what the title implies. The animator will take everyday household objects and move them frame-by-frame, taking a photo of the scene to act as the individual frames. Objects can be creatively moved around, made to look as if they have a life of their own, and can freely move by themselves. It is the earliest form of stop-motion animation, with the very first dating back to 1898, "The Humpty Dumpty Circus", made by Albert E Smith and J Stuart Blackton.
A very well-known object animation is "The Automatic Moving Company", created by Émile Cohl in 1910. The creator moved objects from the house frame-by-frame, creating the illusion that the objects are moving by themself, hence 'automatic' moving company. It was a pioneering animation that inspired several object animations made today, especially amateur animators doing animations for fun (for example the "Pancake Man" video, animating creation of pancakes without any human interaction shown), and become famous through viral websites such as YouTube and Facebook.
A still from "The Automatic Moving Company".
Claymation:-
Claymation is another form of stop-motion that dates back to 1908, when Edison Manufacturing released an animation entitled "A Sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Dream". This film also introduced the 'stop trick' special effect, where an object would be in the scene in one frame, and then removed between that and the next frame, creating the effect of the object disappearing.
One of the most well-known uses of claymation has to be Morph, the character created for many different programs along with the late Tony Hart. Originally created in 1977 for the BBC by Aardman Animations, Morph has continued to grow as a character and even still appears in more modern programs associated with arts and crafts, usually directed at children.
The original Morph character model.
Pixilation:-
Pixilation is the stop-motion technique that uses people or animals as their models instead of objects. A person or animal would move between frames, doing things that could only usually be done in a short space of time (e.g. jumping in the air) for each frame, then giving the illusion of a person flying when the frames are put together for the final animation. Humans and animals are therefore given the ability to do things not physically possible just by creating a quick movement over and over again in different locations.
The earliest example of pixilation animation is in 1908, when a silent Spanish comedy film named "The Electric Hotel" was created by film pioneer Segundo de Chomón, making actors move while sitting down, and having their hair brush itself, as if my magic.
A popular example of Pixilation is "The Wizard of Speed and Time", where a character dressed as a Wizard is shown to be able to run extremely fast throughout America, picking up other characters and carrying them from location to location as if saving them a lot of time with his superhuman speed.
A scene from "The Wizard of Speed and Time".
Puppet Animation:-
Puppet animation is the use of characters made with a skeletal form known as an armature, with some sort of material wrapped around the armature to create the character shapes and features. This makes the characters easy to position in different ways to keep them flexible in movement for each frame, but at the same time there is a strong base beneath it to ensure parts won't tear off or get squashed, which could happen in claymation (when used as clay only). A highly popular example of this style is the Wallace and Gromit series, with the film "Curse of the Were Rabbit" using very advanced armatures in order to create smooth, fluid movement in the animations.
Another example of this would be Ray Harryhausen's "Jason and the Argonauts" as well as his "Sinbad" film series, the first of which being "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad", made in 1958. It used puppet animation to create monsters that the main characters would interact with, usually fighting them dramatically in order to promote the main character as the hero. A particularly memorable scene is the fight between Sinbad and an animated skeleton with a scimitar. Harryhausen created the puppet and made its movements against the main character frame by frame using its armature to move it carefully and precisely without any risk of it falling apart. Harryhausen has had a huge influence on animators of today, as a lot of the modern masters were inspired by such films of his as the Sinbad series, "Jason and the Argonauts" as well as the popular "King Kong" movie.
A scene from "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad".
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