Animations, historical and modern

The historical animation I decided to research is The Adventures of Mark Twain, which was released in 1985 and directed by Will Vinton. Its a stop motion animation, more specifically Claymation. The term Claymation was actually registered as a trademark by Vinton in 1978 to describe his animated clay films. The principle is the same as with any stop motion animation, a single still shot is taken, then the positions of elements within the scene are manipulated slightly, and another shot is taken. This process is then repeated over and over, with large numbers of still frames being required for even a few seconds of finished footage. This sort of animation works around the flicker threshold of the human eye/brain, though was previously thought to work on the theory of persistence of vision, which was debunked in 1912 by Wertheimer. When run together at a certain frame rate these still images appear to move fluidly from one to the next, without any gaps in the movement.

The film is a very enjoyable tale of Mark Twain, and characters from his novels such as Tom Sawyer, traveling aboard an airship on their way to rendevous with Halley's Comet. The film is an absolute masterpiece of claymation, aside from the tale being interesting, you can simply sit back and marvel at the ammount of detail present in all of the scenes. The ammount of work and time that must've gone into its creation is staggering. At first glance the film could be judged to simply be a colourful kids film, but a lot of the content is actually quite dark. This is my favourite scene from the film. The visuals are creative, and moreover its pretty disturbing, I wouldn't want to be left hanging out with 'satan' for too long, he's a right tweaker.



The modern animation I have researched is a music video for the song Young Folks by Peter, Bjorn and John, released in 2006. I couldn't find any sources concretely stating it, but im pretty certain this video was created in flash. The thing that really strikes me about this video is the simplicity of it. The video works beautifully with the music (pretty key concept for music vids, I know), its a simple and mellow song and the visuals complement this perfectly. Coming back to the simplicity again, this video shows me that above all else if you've got a good idea and some basic skills you can create something amazing. When I watch this video I think to myself 'hey, i could create graphics that look as good as those', and even with my rudimentary knowledge of flash I could animate them to the same standard of this video, which to date has over 8 1/2 million views on youtube, so it's really inspiring. Naturally the fact that its a great song that was very popular at the time of its release contributes to the video being so heavily played, so I guess its a good idea to make friends with people who might make some good music.



The comparisson of the two is quite surprising, in that you would probably expect an animation that's 23 years old to be a lot less complex than a modern one, but in this case the greater visual complexity lies with Mark Twain. There is actually very little animation in the Young Folks video in comparisson to Mark Twain, in which there is always some extra nice touch of animation in the backgrounds or outside the main action. The fact that this comparisson is between a 3 minute music video and a full length feature film has to be taken into account, but again this is kind of surprising as music videos, due to their short length, tend to be an area where people go to town, making it as much of a high-tech effects extravaganza as possible. Nevertheless, both animations styles work very well for the respective purposes, their visual aesthetics suiting their contents nicely