Story by Shawn Cook
Photos by Blake Hamilton
Remember The California Raisins? They danced around singing Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” sporting black sunglasses, or blasting on a saxophone. They were the coolest, most soulful dried grapes of all time. Those colorful, wrinkled characters, created as part of an ad campaign for the California Raisin Advisory Board, exploded onto the TV screen in the mid 1980s. Everybody sang along. Three-dimensional plasticine rock stars, the “raisin sensations” spawned merchandise from video games to figurines, and achieved extraordinary market success for over a decade.
The Raisins were brought to life by an animator and filmmaker named Will Vinton. In the late 1960s, while a junior architecture student at the University of California, Berkeley, Vinton began experimenting with a filming technique that Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton invented almost a century before: stop motion.
Equipped with a 16mm camera that “shot stop motion pretty well,” Vinton began blending the filming technique with a model building made of plasticine clay as a 3-D presentation tool for architectural design. “You bring some element of a building, a model, to life using stop motion,” he says.
From there, Vinton began focusing on organic structures. Utilizing the superior malleability and toughness of modeling clay to create organic shapes—“Crude things, initially”—Vinton realized he could do something new.
“This had never been done,” Vinton says. “Sculpting in clay, crossing paths with experimental stop motion filmmaking.” He unknowingly made one of the initial pushes that brought on a groundbreaking tidal wave of animation.
Stop motion, sometimes called “stop action,” is a technique filmmakers and animators use to create a sense of movement with inanimate objects. By taking multiple still images of an object on motion picture film—say, a clay model of a raisin—then moving it, meticulously and ever-so-slightly, then taking another shot, then repeating those steps over and over thousands of times, filmmakers eventually come up with a series that, played in sequence, brings life to patient visions. A tedious method, one short scene could take months to finish. “One thirty second commercial spot took about nine weeks,” Vinton says. This new style revolutionized the creative process of animation by introducing a new form Vinton patented in 1976 as “claymation.”
“It was sort of my epiphany,” he says, “to realize how much life could be breathed into a lump of clay sitting on a table.” Vinton continued to apply a growing knowledge of stop motion videography to increasingly more intricate, handmade clay figures in complex, 3-D scenes. In 1975, Vinton launched what would become an extensive, successful career by winning the Oscar for Best Animated Short for Closed Mondays, the story of a drunk man who wanders into a closed art gallery where the paintings on the walls come to life.
Vinton created animated dimension in space with elaborate scenes and meticulously molded characters, but in order to complete the illusion of depth of field, he also utilized stereoscopy. 3-D images are produced with stereoscopic cameras, which animators use to produce exact duplicates of every image. Exhibiting a flowing series of these identical images, stereoscopic films trick the human brain into combining them, which gives the distinct, but false, impression of a third dimension. Polaroid glasses with differentiated red-and-blue lenses allow only one eye to see each image, the left, or the right, producing stereoscopic vision and finalizing the illusion. An antiquated technology, invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838, stereoscopy has undergone vast improvements and technique variances.
Stereoscopy and stop motion are still used widely today, but Vinton says, “it was cumbersome in those days. There wasn’t really a good system in the theaters for creating 3-D. There were a lot of problems with it.”
Then, in a mad rush during the 1990s, computer technology exploded, providing animators with swiftly evolving technologies that produced three-dimensional animation with high definition resolution in a fraction of the time. In the 1990s, CGI, or computer-generated imagery, became the most popular medium for animation. Today, it dominates the industry.
Animators however, are loyal to stop motion, and they’ve figured out how to use computers to aid in the creative process of this time-honored technique. Undoubtedly, a vastly greater number of still film images can be stored, manipulated, projected, and/or replicated using software than by hand. According to Dr. Sanjeev J. Koppal, a Harvard University research associate, in a technical presentation written for IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, “a digital editing tool provides the timeline control necessary to tell a story through film. But current technology, although sophisticated, doesn’t easily extend to 3-D movies because stereoscopy is a fundamentally different medium for expression and requires new tools.”
Many animators and stereoscopic 3-D filmmakers “totally believe in stop motion,” Vinton says. “It gets under their skin. They like the handmade feel of it,” asserting that the clarity, texture, and effect are unique and impossible, as of yet, to recreate with software. “But definitely,” Vinton adds, “most animators use computers today.”
Ray Di Carlo, co-owner of Bent Image Lab in Portland, Oregon, along with Vinton, of the now huge animation scene, agrees. “But they each carry their own weight,” he says.
“When I started in this business, there was no CGI,” Di Carlo explains. “I remember when we started using computer-controlled camera rigs. We were excited, but that was it.” Then he took some time to work on a low-budget feature film. “It had ten minutes of CGI in it. And that’s where my background started . . . from the ground up. Computers controlling all the camera moves was a huge improvement,” Di Carlo says. With time, computers and software became so advanced and sophisticated that the necessity of producing animated films in the old tradition became obsolete.
“We rarely shoot film now, if ever,” Di Carlo says, “and then only for specialty purposes. You can do things now that you couldn’t possibly do before. You can sit at a desktop and produce a visual effect by yourself, with software that’s available off the shelf. Before, you couldn’t do complicated effects. Try to do a Benjamin Button without a computer, you know?” According to Di Carlo, computers are now close to actually producing realism. “This was impossible before,” he says. “Now you can do it. Stop motion is just its own thing.”
Some computer animators claim old techniques are inefficient as they take too much time to produce even a few minutes of footage. Then, some hands-on animators think that computers take the fun out of animating and channeling creativity into actual substance. But each technique seems to play a vital role, and has a distinct, individually evolved purpose. Combined, they continue to propel the animation world into new territory.
Twenty-first century animators, filmmakers, and computer graphics specialists have not merely discarded the technologies of the past. More so, they have welded them, continuously producing ingenious ways for moviegoers to enjoy the full potential of the imagination through animation.
