- published: 23 Feb 2011
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Stop motion (also known as stop frame) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop motion animation using clay is called clay animation or "clay mation".
The term "stop motion", related to the animation technique, is often spelled with a hyphen, "stop-motion". Both orthographical variants, with and without the hyphen, are correct, but the hyphenated one has, in addition, a second meaning, not related to animation or cinema: "a device for automatically stopping a machine or engine when something has gone wrong" (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993 edition).
Stop motion is often confused with the time lapse technique, where still photographs of a live surrounding are taken at regular intervals and combined into a continuous film.