Stop motion Animation Essay – First draft There are a number of reasons why there is a big difference between stop motions animations made in the 21st century and stop motion animations made in the 70’s. There are four main factors to take into consideration when comparing the animations budget, technology, place of exhibition and audience. I have looked at Wollace and Gromit and Bagpuss to show these differences. -‐ Budget is a big factor in the quality of animation e.g. because Wollace and Gromit is shown at the cinema, more people will watch it so it is given a much larger budget, as a result of a much bigger budget the people making it can buy the best equipment to make it look more professional and to make it flow more then Bagpuss does. The budget also helps make the Wollace and Gromit animation better because they can hire more people to work on each individual part of the movie e.g. a team for each character so by doing this the characters can be made really detailed and they can take their time to work on every little detail like lip syncing and character movement which helps improve the quality. The reason why Bagpuss has such a low budget is because it is only made for the BBC and the BBC doesn’t have a lot of money to waste on a programme not many people will watch. Technology is another important factor in the quality of animation. Because Bagpuss was made in 1972 and Wollace and Gromit was made in 2006 when the technology was better so they can make the animation look more life like by using technology like lip syncing which wasn’t around in the 1970’s. In Bagpuss the mice make squeaking noises but their facial expression doesn’t change because the technology wasn’t around to make their facial expression constantly change. The fps in Bagpuss is low because the technology at an affordable price to make the fps high, which would of, made it look better (of a higher quality). Because of the lack of technology when Bagpuss was made it would have been really expensive to make improvements that are considered basic and cheap now a days e.g. it is cheap to take a lot of photos to make up the frames but 30 odd years ago the technology wasn’t there so it was much harder thus much expensive. So if you made Bagpuss today on the same budget it could of looked a lot more effective. Where when Wollace and Gromit was made the technology was available to make it look really effective so the quality was a lot better then Bagpuss also Wollace and Gromit had the money to by the best technology to make it. The place of exhibition is a significant factor in the quality of the animation because if Bagpuss was exhibited at the cinema a lot more people would of seen it so they would of given it a bigger budget so it would make it look more professional but because it was only on the TV less people saw it so the budget was less and in turn it didn’t look as good. Where with Wollace and Gromit it was exhibited in the cinema and millions of people watched it so it was given a bigger budget so it looked much more effective. The audience is an important factor in how good the quality of an animation is. For Example In Bagpuss the audience is only young children so it doesn’t have to
look really good because they won’t really notice if the characters jump around a bit they would just probably think it is part of the show and that’s how they really move. Where as with Wollace and Gromit there audience is slightly older and it is aimed at people who go to the cinema and if your paying like £10 a ticket to go to the cinema you would expect the film to look good (be of high) quality instead of jumping all other the place and the characters talking but no mouths moving or facial expressions changing.