Stop motion vs CG

nyarlothothep

Which do you prefer? I think stop motion has a number of advantages in that it's not simulating lighting, the lens, texture, colour and shape etc. It's all real. However the animation issue I think is that it always appears slightly jerky which works amazingly well in one sense. Ray Harryhausen irc said that special effects should have the appearance of a dream rather than being completely lifelike, so the jerkiness of motion would have that effect. Certainly it worked unbelievably well for ED209 in Robocop, the slight jerkiness made it more robotic/mechanical. However I think CG has some pros too. The animation is smoother and you're not limited by physical constraints (which is a blessing or a curse, depending on whether you think necessity is the mother of invention), it's faster too in a sense. A thought just occurred to me that it might be possible to use a combination of go-motion, (computer incrementally moved stop motion) with an ultra high speed camera so that interpolation in post production could be used to 'tween' or smooth out the animation, not sure if that's possible though.

Duggy747

Really depends on the type of sequence. I prefer models to CG any day of the week, The Dark Knight tunnel sequence where the batmobile slams head-on into the truck being a great example of a model.

As for stop-motion vs CG, Jurassic Park did a top notch effort and even though the below go-motion video is just a test, I think CG was the better route by far.

Foot animation at 2:03 made me think of ED-209 immediately :pac:

I'll always have a special place for stop motion, spent many years growing up watch Ray Harryhausen's work and made it a point to go see an exhibition of his work when I was on holidays in London. I always found stop-motion to be creepy and perfect when it was used for monsters in those mythological movies.

I keep meaning to watch Clash of The Titans again, might do that tonight :pac:

Plus, there's also this gem which is still impressive considering the sheer amount of work that went into it:

Giruilla

The original King Kong, Jason & the argonauts stop motion still look, feel real-er and create more excitement for me than any cgi done in the past 10 years.. maybe since T2's minimal use of it.

There's some weird anthropomorphic quality about knowing that the models were actually made in the real world, and not solely on a computer screen, that make them scary and vivid.

The prominent power of stop motion over cgi is still the lighting.. its intrinsic to humans believing something is real or not, and light hitting stop motion models - even if in a seprate lighting environment to whats on screen - brings a realistic quality that I've yet to see cgi match. Cgi still looks too silky and smooth for me.

Baked.noodle

Perhaps robotics could be the middle ground. Too expensive for sure, but awesome. It's probably been done to a limited extent, but the potential to go all out would be class. They could be miniature robots to save money, but if life size ones were made they could exhibit them at the theme parks and make more money.

nyarlothothep

I think you're talking about animatronics, Jaws used a robot shark, a lot of 80s films had them. Animatronics were awesome. The go-motion for the imperial walkers in Star Wars was outstanding, I wonder if they used it now with even finer adjustments and motion blur would it look totally smooth?