Present Animators

Stop motion is a slow process, it's created by taking a still picture of an object or character, then moving it ever so slightly and taking another picture. This is repeated over and over again to create a moving object or for example clay character by the string of still photos being put together and then sped up.

Aardrdman Animations 

Aardman Animations were founded in 1972 as a low budget project by David Sproxton and Peter Lord. Its based in Bristol, UK and is well known for its use of stop-motion clay animation. Most famously in Wallace&Grommit and Chicken Run the movie. However in 2006 it successfully entered the computer  animation market with Flushed Away. Dreamworks and Aardman had a connection for a period. This is when they together made the first full length Stop Motion feature film. Due to the success Dreamworks gave Aarman $250 million to make 4 new films. From this they made: Curse of the Warerabbit, Flushed Away, Crooked Awakening. Aardman and Dreamworks have now gone split and Aardman have joined Sony Pictures Entertainment. Producing the award winning film ' Arthur Christmas '. They have won many awards over the years including The Academy Awards. They are the most renowned British animators.

The skill of them making these films is that they take a huge amount of time to produce one film. Chicken run took around 3 years to make. Due to the fact each one second you see involves 24 frames(pictures) and making several clay characters for each emotion and situation. With the rise of  technology, some of these tasks have been made easier. But its still a huge task to produce.
Aardman are very different to Burton and the Brothers Quay who are more dark and surrealist. As you can see from this famous clip, this is not the case with Aardman

Brothers Quay

The Brothers Quay are identical twins who , live in England having attended school here ,  have been creating unique animation films since the early  1970's. They are extremely influential to fellow film makers because of their unusual but creative work. One of their main influences was Jan Svankmajor and they actually created a film about him called 'The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajor.' . They use an extremely unique way of making their films by using completely original story lines and ways of creating characters. Most of their animation features dolls and other materials to create the dark mood that they aim to achieve. Most of their films contain no spoken dialogue.This is because they use sound and special effect,  effectively to set the mood of mystery and darkness . Before becoming animators the brothers took an interest to illustration and worked as professionals in this area. Producing some art work of books such as ' The Clockwork Testament'. They have also created TV idents for MTV and BBC however BBC never broadcast The Brothers Quay work. The brothers are a good example that stop motion is not just for feature films it can be used in many genres such as TV and music videos.


The Brothers Quay are identical twins who are American animators. They both live in England, studied here and went to the same schools. Most of their animations include puppets and dolls that are slightly disassembled to create a sinister, surreal mood - most notably in 'Street of Crocodiles'. They rarely have any dialogue, and the films that do have characters speaking speak nonsense. The Brothers Quay have developed animation to something even further - taking inspiration from David Lynch and Jan Svankmajer, their animation is now revolved around fantasy surrealism, a genre never seen before. The film 'Street of Crocodiles' is an example of this. Terry Gilliam declared Street of Crocodiles to be in the top 10 list of best animated films ever, and in 1998 received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play 'The Chairs'.

Tim Burton

Tim Burton is American film director, animator and artist, who deals especially in surrealism and horror. He famously produced A Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride within years of each other. 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' was believed to have a budget close to $18,000,000 and it made over $74.7 million in the box office. Compared to Nick Park the chief of Aardman they have a very different style. Nick Park tends to use very lifelike colours to represent normality. Burton is very well known for using dark 'scary' colours. Making his films somewhat surreal. His target audience was be mainly children with the likes of Frankenweenie, which was actually made by Burton many years ago , but was thought to be to scary. Since the rise of technology the film has now been re-made with the inclusion of 3D.

Burton has a similar style to the Quay brothers- who also use dark and sinister colours. Burton is known to be a kneen admirer of Jan Svankmajer. Burton has many awards to his name- including a Golden Globe, an Emmy and a BAFTA.