3 Ways with...Stop-Motion Animation

Stop-motion animation feels like the sort of thing that should be dead as an art. With computers we can hold in our hands able to create infinite words, who wants to spend months creating animation by moving clay figures by incremental amounts? Luckily of fans of awesome animation, however, the answer to that question is ‘lots of people’.

For the first of our 3 Ways with… features, then, we look at great recent examples of the form from modern stop-motion masters including PES and Wes Anderson. With much great work to choose from, we have grouped together three very different things can be done with frame-by-frame animation.

1. Turn Branded Objects into Characters

A mascot can be a great thing for a brand, giving it a fun family-friendly face or creating a totem that can literally bring the brand’s identity to life. But why waste money and man-hours trying to choose whether your brand is more of a penguin or a goat when you can let the branded item act for itself?

The best recent example of this comes from a series of ads made by VML for Gatorade. Released to launch their Gatorade Recover series of whey protein-based bars and drinks, they saw these products transform into miniature sportsmen, driven by their inner Gatorade-osity to score goals, dunk hoops, or hit home runs.

Twinings, meanwhile, took a different approach for Drink in the Day. Using their distinctive tea tags, they created a Twinings-themed world which they described in an interview with us as ‘David Hockney with a dash of pointillism’. They then combined this with live-action filmmaking to create one of our favourite ads of 2015.

2. Making Abstract Patterns

In its purest form, the beauty of stop-motion is the ability to make inanimate objects move and dance across the screen. In the best ads that take this approach, animators put a single object central to the ad – in the below examples, a pixel and a book – and build the ad around it.

For example, in D&AD’s recent ad for their upcoming awards, F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi took the title, Every Pixel Counts, and brought it to life by creating 500 acrylic pieces, moving them by hand to replicate the movement of pixels within digital video    

In a stunning spot for Type Books, Lowe Roche used the movement of books in a bookshop to create a fantasy world of dancing books and cascades of colour. The film was clearly a labour of love for the agency’s ACD and his wife, who spent much after-hours time creating it in their local independent book shop.

3. Bringing reality to animation

Against the cold slickness of much computer animation, stop-motion has a unique warmth to it that comes from the knowledge that real human hands shaped every movement, with signs of those human hands sometimes making the screen in fingerprints or the ruffling hair of a certain 1930s giant gorilla.    

As well as this, it offers budding animators unfamiliar with, or without access to computer animation software the chance to make their own animations. As Aardman founder Nick Park once said in an interview, ‘here I was, aged 13, in our loft making animated films just like my heroes’.    

This sense of stop-motion being associated with youthful experimentation is clear in ads helmed by Wes Anderson for Sony Experia. For these, Sony asked kids how they thought smartphones worked, then asked Anderson, who had just finished his stop-motion film Fantastic Mr Fox, to animate the results.

The best stop-motion ads make the most of their handmade aesthetic. This was most clear in the Emmy-nominee Paper, made for Honda by stop-motion supremo PES. Featuring thousands of drawings manipulated by on-screen hands to tell a history of Honda, it is a beautiful testament to the sense of reality that cannot be achieved by even the most high tech CGI.

NEXT WEEK ON '3 WAYS WITH...': We look at 3 ways ads have shown Dubai, in tribute to the city's Dubai Lynx festival.