Case Study: Tim Burton

Tim Burton

Tim Walter Burton (1958) is a film director and producer. His short film "Stalk Of The Celery Monster" shot him to fame, the film attracted attention from Walt Disney Animation Productions. Walt Disney offered him an apprenticeship for three years. While he was working for Walt Disney he worked on films like Tron and The Fox and the Hound. After a while he became bored with Walt Disney and began to work on solo projects because his style clashed with their style of animation. One of early films was a six minute stop motion animation called 'Vincent'. Walt Disney loved this short clip that much they gave him funding to remake this little film. He then had enough money to have his favourite voice actor feature 'Vincent Price' this is why he named the animation Vincent. 

One of his recent animations was inspired by Vincent is a remake of Frankenweenie released in 2012. The first version of Frankenweenie in 1984 was said to be "to quirky and scary for a mainstream appeal", for this reason it wasn't highly successful. However, 28 years later the same film is being re-made and re-released; the second time around the film was very successful and became one of the "best kids films of the twenty first century". This film really shows the development of animation, that in this context, Walt Disney didn't allow scary or quirky because people didn't know about horror or jump scares at the time. His second major film was The Nightmare Before Christmas which Tim Burton write and produced the film. It was said that this film helped generate a new interest in stop motion animation. The film was in production for three years because each character had over 7,000 clay animated faces. I think it was good that the film was in production for so long because it was such and excellent pieces of work and i think it set the bar high for stop motion animation. Referring back to The Nightmare Before Christmas and Vincent his technique he used to create the films was Clay models. Using clay is a very tedious process because it clay back then would melt under certain temps, so this made it harder for Tim because he would have to remodel it and this was very time consuming for him. Using clay you could show a lot of expression because you can manipulate it to hold its shape, the down side to this for every little movement of the face or the body you would have to create a new model for the expression/movement. So you can end up with a lot of clay heads. Tim Burton made all of the figures himself and it taken over 8 months  just to make three main characters: Jack, Sally, Oogie Boogie because they was the most complex. Its a lot easier to create a new head instead of moving the expression on the existing clay model and also you may need to re-film that expression again and it impossible to get the same expression twice, so you see how this leads up to having loads of clay models just for one character. One the other hand, Burton also used puppets in Mars Attacks, he used puppets to make the film look realistic while using real life actors. He made the puppets from a combination of plastic and wood or even what ever he had handy at the time. So it was a lot like The Nightmare Before Christmas he had a series of alien heads in his workshop with different expressions. George Pal had used this technique in his 1940's hit cartoons Puppetoons. This influenced Tim Burton in the making of Mars Attacks because George Pal was  also very interested in dinosaurs, monsters, and aliens, as evidenced by his films The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. This latter film was based around an english man traveling into the future by a time machine. Both of these films was based on novels by H.G Wells. George Pal was heavily influenced by H.G Wells because he Pal went on to create his most famous work. Not only was Tim Burton Inspired by George Pal he was also Influenced by Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen used a lot of dark subjects in his films, they was always monsters and dinosaurs and if you look at Tim Burtons work today they have a similar kind of tone because Burton comes up with these dark almost sinister story lines and characters i.e Corpse Bride. The setting and the mood of the film is dark but Burton does it in such a way that we become to love the characters he creates no matter if they are dead or sown back together. Tim Burton has also be an Inspiration on other Film directors such as Henry Selick. Henry Selick worked with Tim Burton on Nightmare Before Christmas and became aware of the technique that Burton used. Henry Selick went on to direct the film Corline the film was in the style of Tim Burtons it had a dark storyline with the evil mother and the evil father wanting her to stay in this fantasy world and sew buttons to her eyes so she can stay in this creepy odd world. Henry used Animators clay to make his models so again another link in to Tim Burtons work because most of his characters are made from animators clay.

Timeline of stop motion animation

100BC- Ding Han 

1834- Zoetrope- William Horner

1895- Lumiere Bros- Cinematograph

1896- George Meliere- A Trip To The Moon

1902- Thomas Edison sort film Fun In A Bakary Shop.

1911- Miese Kinooperata this film was made by Wladyslaw Starewicz

1917- El Apóstol was a spanish stop motion animation film using cutout animation. Cutout animation is flat characters, props and background cut from things like paper, card and even plastic. It was directed by Quirino cristiani.

1935- "The New Gulliver" was a Russian cartoon. It was the first to make extensive use of puppet animation. The cartoon was directed by Aleksandr Ptushko.

1937- The Tale Of The Fox was a french animation film and it lasted around 65 minutes. The plot was an early snow white but the difference was the film featured a loin and there were no dwarfs again the technique used was puppet animation. Irene Starevich and Ladislas Starevich directed the film together.

1937- The Seven Ravens was a german stop motion animation about an old classical myth in Germany, it was directed by the by the Diehl brothers Ferdinand Diehl and Hermann Diehl. 

1945- Handling Ships was one of the first stop motion pictures ever made by the UK. The film shown people being recruited for the royal navy. This also was one of the first animations to ever win an award at Cannes Film Festival in 1946. The film was directed by Alan Crick, the first film to use technicolour also.

1947- The Crab With The Golden Claws featured a character that we all know and love today he was called TinTin and the film was based around him taking an adventure. This was produced in Belgian by Claude Misonne, his technique was wooden puppets like most early animations.

1947- The Czech Year it was the first feature film ever to be directed by Jifi Trnka and it went on to winning a many awards. This film was one of the first animated films to ever come from Czechoslovakia.

1947- Adventures of Esparadrapo was a sixty minute animated film.

1949- This is when we first seen Alice In Wonderland and it was first shown to audiences in France in 1949. Like most animations of the time it used puppets to tell the story also it was the first film ever to use live actors in certain scenes. The film is directed by Dallas Bower. However, there is another version of Alice In Wonderland it was produced by Disney.

1949- The Emperor's Nightingale was directed by the same person who i directed The Czech Year this was his second animation film he had created and this featured dubbed sound for the film.

1950- Prince Bayaya was the tired animation film from Czechoslovakia it was based around a prince who livid in his castle. There isn't much information on this animation film apart from it was made by using puppets.

1953- The Treasure Of Bird Island again not much i could find on this animation. All i could find out is that it used cutout technique.

1954- Hansel & Gretel: An Opera Fantasy its based around two kids who go wondering in a forest and find a house made of candy but there is a witch who lives there and she tries to kill Handsel and Gretel. This was the first animated film for the US, it was very successful in its time but its a lot like Alice In Wonderland there was two version of the film Michael Myerberg and Tommy Wirkola we are focusing on the Michael Myerberg version. He used puppet animation techniques and it was on of the longest animations of its time coming in at 72 minutes long.

1958- Beloved Beauty was an Russian produced film following the story line of a king and  queen in there castle, the film was created by using puppet figures. The directer of this film is Vladimir Degtyaryov.

Pionners

Pioneers of Stop Motion Animation

Joseph Plateau: was born in 1801, he lived till 1883 which was unusual for someone to live that long back in those days. He was the first person ever to demonstrate the illusion of the moving image, the way he did this was he used round counter disk and a series or repeating images on them. Each drawing to be a little different from the last. He called this device the Phenakistoscope, this device used a thing called Persistance Of Vison. persistance of vision is when the eye and the brain hold onto a series or images to form a single complete picture, in between each image there is 1/20 of a second blank space this is what you miss and it goes to the next image, this makes it look like its moving when in reality it is a still drawing. This device was invented by another two people in the very same year, Simon Von Stampfer who called his stroboscope. The projection of the images created the illusion of movement which it then eventually went into development for cinema. Plateau inspiration came from two people Peter Mark Roget and Michael Faraday, they were the original people to invent the device but Plateau developed it. He thought by moving the images slightly it would create the illusion of motion. The bad thing about this device is only two people could view this at one time, however two years later the Zoetrope was invented. this was an upgraded version of the Phenakistoscope and more then one person could view the moving images at one time. The Zoetrope was actually invented as a toy for children but the people who invented it was more fascinated and they classed the toy as being magical so it actually didn't get produced as a toy. Joseph Plateau was the main reason why we discovered animation and he influence's many animators to this day.

Image found at: commons.wikimedia.org

image found at: en.wikipedia.org

William Hornor: invented the Zoetrope. This device produced the illusion of motion from a fast sequence of static pictures. The device was a round cylinder with slits on the outside and then on the inside was a strip of images from a set of sequenced pictures. The way this device works is you would spin it really fast a lot like the Phenakistoscope and look though the slits at the images and you will see a succession of images, creating the illusion of motion. William invented the device in 1833 and he named the device Daedalum. However, the device failed to become popular until an America developer, William F Lincoln developed it and then it was renamed the Zoetrope. The Zoetrope was engineered to entertain people and it was designed as a toy which this then lead to the Zoetrope to be one of the longest toys using the principle of stop motion animation. The company Hudzo Design (2002) created a large 3D Zoetrope which was human powered, the device was shown in Nevada (Las Vegas) at an art and culture show because so many people attended the show the device got classed as an art form. When the Zoetrope was invented it was aimed at children because of the toy features also because most of the images inside where of animals and this lead to children to believe the device was more magical. As the Zoetrope developed even more it is used in channel idents and art shows, the target audience would be a range of people both who like the art and the creativeness of the device or even if they came across it on television people would watch it because it was a "cool" thing to watch.

Charles-Emile Reynaud: invented the Praxinoscope in 1877, this was a more developed version of the Zoetrope. This device occured by replacing the viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, so that the reflection of the images appeared more or less still in position as the wheel turned. Therefore, unlike the Zoetrope you did not have to wait until the cylinder get fast enough, where as you could just look though it straight away with the Praxinoscope. He had then taken the technique and projected it on to a screen at the theatre obitque, as the first presentation of moving images to an audience. Four years later he projected his first animated film to the public in Paris (France) he named the film Pauvre Pierrot. Because of Charles inventing the Praxinoscope sequences where no longer limited to a short cylinder movements the whole purpose of the Praxinoscope was to improve upon the zoetrope so that the illusion of motion could be viewed by a large audience at one time. The target audience, along with stop motion animation devices, i think became wider due to the fact that it can be viewed on screens, because of this the audience would of grown and the public awareness of the device, also how many people could view it at one time. The impact of this technique on the audience was that they didn't have to watch it though tiny little slits and instead watching animations on screen developing it into Cinematography.

Eadweard Muybridge:  was a photographer in 1830, photography was important to studies in motion and in motion picture projection in the eighteen hundreds he made images of animals and humans in motion, he was capturing what the human eye couldn't see as single movements. He experimented with horses, he placed cameras on to the horses race track and each camera would of been set off with a piece of string and it would capture the horse as it raced pasted. The final result is shown in the image below, whereby the illusion of movement has been created. Then Eadweard coped these images on to a disc to be viewed in a device he created, called the zoopraxiscope. He created this device in 1879, this may class as the very first movie projector. The way this device worked was simple is used disc with photographs on and it would project them on to a screen and because it was spinning fast it gave the impression of movement. The Zoopraxiscope was inspired from the Kinetoscope the first commercial film system.

Kinetoscope was designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time though a viewer window at the top of the device. This device was first seen in 1888 by Thomas Edison. Thomas encounter with Eadweard Muybridge inspired him to produce and develop the motion picture system. They both became to work together to try to figure out how they could put sound in the device so when people watched the film that was being shown they could also have sound to go with it.








The Lumiere Brothers : These two were the very first filmmakers in history, they began work on the moving image in 1892. However they didn't want anyone to copy there idea and got everything legally protected and they legally protected a number of processes leading up to their film camera. The bothers worked together to over come the limitations they saw in Edison's Kinetoscope. They came up with a plan to make their device much smaller and much more lightweight these are the problems that faced the two brothers. After the brothers created their film camera in 1895 it was classed as a improvement because the device had a printer, projector and also could shoot film and the brothers called the device Cinematographe. The brothers wanted to keep there invention private so no one could see it yet until they know it was going to work so it actually wasnt shown until three mouths later on march the 19th 1895. This would be the very first audience to view the brothers device, this was a big deal to the brothers because they didn't know if people would could and view there films but because the bothers continuous private screenings word was traveling fast and they went on to opening theatres or as we know them cinemas.

George Pal: he was animator who studied in the genre of science fiction. He went on to creating the puppetoons series in the 1940s which were animated puppet films using wooden puppets in a stop motion technique. Every wooden puppet that was shown in the series had 9,000 individually carved and machine wooden puppets. The technique was invented by George Pal, He is famous for several science fiction films in the 1950s/1960s. Also he was one of the references to the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show. He then signed to paramount pictures in holland where many other famous animators worked such as Ray Harryhausen. Because the genre of stop motion animation was science fiction. This shows how stop motion has changed over the years as nothing like this was ever seen before. He was famous for his puppets whereby some had lots of heads and bodies, this may have been the inspirations for the modern film Nightmare Before Christmas, because the character Jack Skellington  has around four hundred heads allowing jack to have lots of expressions and emotion.