Present Stop Motion Animations

Current Stop Motion Animation

Stop motion is still used in many different media's. It is still used in modern television, channel idents, computer games, music videos, Cinema, websites, advertisements and on mobile phones.

TV Stop Motion - 
Stop motion has had a fairly big influence on television, there are numerous successful programmes that are on TV. The most frequent style of stop-motion shown on tv is claymation. A very popular claymation series is 'Gumby', this is an american series which was created in 1955 by Art Clokey and has 233 episodes spanning 34 years (1955 - 1989).
Some good examples of stop motion animation on current TV are Pingu, Creature Comforts and A Town Called Panic. 

'A Town Called Panic' is a puppetoon series distributed by Aardman Animations and produced in Belgium by Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier for La Parti & Pic Pic André. It follows the everyday events of Cowboy, Indian and Horse in a small rural town as they go about their lives. Each episode is roughly 5 minutes long and is crudely animated: the characters are meant to resemble cheap toy figurines.

'Creature comforts' is a television series released in 2003. It was originally a 1989 British humorous animated short film about how animals feel about living in a zoo, featuring the voices of the British public "spoken" by the animals. It was created by Nick Park and Aardman Animations.

Pingu is another great example of modern day stop motion-animation, which is a series that started in 1986 and is still running today. This award-winning stop motion clay mated series was created by swiss animator Otmar Gutmann.

Channel Idents - 

Almost Every channel has an ident. A channel idents can vary between the channel, some even have more than one channel and some of these idents use stop motion animation. Some of the best channel idents that I have seen are from the channel E4.

E4's idents are unique as they are very surreal and they are very suited to their target audience. Another reason they are so good is that they have a competition for viewers to send in their own idents so a lot of the idents shown on the channel are viewer made.

Computer Games - 

Many different techniques are used to create computer games, these can include stop motion animation, using motion capture suits and cel (Standard) animation. Not many big, well know companies use stop motion in video games, they use cel animation and now lots of companies use motion capture suit for realistic movement. Some indie games use different techniques of animation, here are two I have found that use stop motion.

Voyager is an indie game created using stop motion of small wool figures. This is a small game for the iPad.

Cletus Clay is a game made entirely using claymation, this is a ver unique game as claymation is not often used to create video games.

Music Videos - 

Music videos can be of anything the artist wants the video to be, this means there are an extremely large variety of music videos out there and because of this, there are lots of different styles of video including a lot of stop motion videos. A very good video that utilises stop motion is the video for Delta Heavy's song 'Get By'.

Another very good stop motion video is by Benga with his video fr his song 'I Will Never Change'.

Peter Gabriel's video for his song 'Sledgehammer' is one of the first stop motion animation music videos. In this, he uses many different style of stop-motion animation which makes it very iconic.

Advertisements - 

There are lots of different adverts on modern TV and they are very varied. a very good example of this is Sony's advert for their Xperia phone.

Another good example is the Volkswagen "Think Blue. Symphony" advert, which uses some aspects of stop motion.

Stop motion animation all around us in the modern world of media, it is a popular method to give a unique effect to videos and create a certain style. It is a very good technique and will still be used for a long time.