Time (STOP) for (STOP) another (STOP) film (STOP) festival—oh, this is taking forever! Stop-motion filmmaking and animation can be very labor-intensive. But for these shorts, all available on YouTube and Vimeo, the results were well worth the effort.

We experience video as a flurry of action and movement, but every moment in a film can be isolated as a discrete still image—or frame. When many frames are played one after another at the right speed, the illusion of motion is created. Stop-motion filmmakers patiently labor in quantum spacetime—handcrafting and then capturing each individual frame, to produce the thousands or hundreds of thousands of them necessary to tell their stories.



Stop motion has been around since the dawn of movies (one of the earliest was The Humpty Dumpty Circus, from 1898) and thrives today in all sorts of projects. The filmmakers included here employ an array of techniques and materials to create their movies: found objects, clay, Legos, puppets, paper, and even people. Their work represents a sampling of the styles and techniques used throughout the history of stop-motion filmmaking. So stop, go, and enjoy! (Keep in mind that animation goes way beyond kid stuff. You may want to screen these shorts yourself before sharing them with the little ones.)