Stop motion is an animation technique that allows a person to manipulate an object so that it appears to move on its own. The object would be moved in small parts between individual photographs taken to create the movie. Most stop motion productions use dolls with movable joints as they are easier to manipulate and reposition. The first time stop motion animation was recorded was in 1897 when the short film “The Humpty Dumpty Circus” used the technique to make a group of toy animals and acrobats come to life.As technology evolved, the creation of characters for stop motion animation became easier with 3D printers as animators were then able to print the faces for characters rather than custom make them using modelling clay. The first instance of this being used in stop motion animation was in the 2009 movie Coraline. This movie used armatures underneath the 3D printed bodies. There were more than 28 animators working at the same time on shooting scenes, which produced roughly 90-100 seconds of animation per week. The pre-production of this movie lasted 2 years and the actual shooting of the movie took 18 months to fully complete. There were 28 different sized puppets made for Coraline alone. This included having one crew member making tiny sweaters for each individual puppet. Stop motion films can be made from different types of material; you can use different types of clay as well as 3D printing. The process of stop motion revolves around the use of the camera by making the entire movie from single photographs of each scene usually using 12 or 24 frames per second.Another example of stop motion would be the Postman Pat cartoon. The entire village of Greendale was built up inside a studio in separate parts. The production stage of Postman Pat included crew members knitting small jumpers for each character so that they could move with the animation. The characters were made using armatures underneath the modelling clay of their bodies. These armatures made it easier for crew members to work on moving the body small amounts to get the most effective and realistic look on the characters.ClaymationClaymation is one form of stop animation. Each piece of animation either character or a background is made up of plasticine. This means that each part of the character is completely deformable. Meaning it can be taken apart and altered to coincide with the movement that is required. An example of the Claymation technique is the movie Nightmare before Christmas. The characters in this movie were partially made out of foam latex so that their faces could be changed when they needed a character to express a certain emotion. One of the more popular cases of stop motion animation being used is in Tim Burtons, The Nightmare before Christmas. This movie used dolls for the characters and used 24 different images for a single second of filming, meaning that the amount of shots used to create this feature length movie was at least 110,000. This meant the movie took over three years to create. The main character, Jack Skellington, had different heads for his body for each facial expression that was used during the movie, this consisted of over 400 heads made for one single character. Sally on the other hand, had different masks to change her face as it would have taken far too much time to sculpt her hair over and over again on different heads. Using this technique it took one week to record one minute of the film.