Willis O’Brien
Willis Harold O'Brien (March 2, 1886 – November 8, 1962) was an Irish American pioneering motion picture special effects artist who perfected and specialized in stop-motion animation. He was affectionately known to his family and close friends as "Obie".
O'Brien was hired by the Edison Company to produce several short films with a prehistoric theme, this is his first of many animated movies he has done, most notably The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1915)
Ray Harryhausen
Ray Harryhausen was born Raymond Frederick Harryhausen on June 29, 1920 in Los Angeles, California, he is an American film producer and a special effects creator and created a brand of stop-motion model animation sometimes called Dynamiting.
Before the advent of computers for camera motion control and CGI, movies used a variety of approaches to achieve animated special effects. One approach was stop-motion animation which used realistic miniature models (more accurately called model animation), used for the first time in a feature film in The Lost World (1925), and most famously in King Kong (1933).
Jan Švankmajer
Jan Švankmajer is a Czech surrealist artist and filmmaker. His work spans over several forms of media. He is known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, Shane Acker, and many others.
Švankmajer was born in Prague. An early influence on his later artistic development was a puppet theatre that was given to Švankmajer for Christmas as a child. He studied at the College of Applied Arts in Prague and later in the Department of Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts.
Stephen and Timothy Quay
Stephen and Timothy Quay are American identical twin brothers or better known as the Brothers Quay or Quay Brothers. They are influential stop-motion animators. They were also the recipients of the 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play The Chairs.
The Quay Brothers reside and work in England, having moved there in 1969 to study at the Royal College of Art, London after studying illustration at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. In England they made their first short films, which no longer exist after the only print was irreparably damaged. They spent some time in the Netherlands in the 1970s and then returned to England where they teamed up with another Royal College student, Keith Griffiths, who produced all of their films. The trio formed Koninck Studios in 1980, which is currently based in Southwark, south London.
Timothy W. Burton
Timothy W. Burton is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Beetle juice, Edward Scissor hands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and for blockbusters such as Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Batman, Batman Returns, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland, his most recent film, that ended up being the second highest-grossing film of 2010 as well as the sixth highest-grossing film of all time. The trailer for Alice in Wonderland is in the link below.
After graduating from Cal Arts in 1979, Burton was hired at Walt Disney Productions' animation studio, where he worked as a concept artist on The Fox and the Hound (1981) and The Black Cauldron (1985). Burton's personal artistic tastes clashed with the Disney house style, and he longed to work on his own projects.
Aardman Animations
Aardman Animations, Ltd, also known as Aardman Studios, or simply as Aardman, is an Academy Award-winning British animation studio based in Bristol, United Kingdom. The studio is known for films made using stop-motion clay animation techniques, particularly those featuring Plasticine characters Wallace and Gromit. However, it successfully entered the computer animation market with Flushed Away (2006).
