Go motion

Go motion is a variation of stop motion animation, and was co-developed by Industrial Light & Magic and Phil Tippett for the film Dragonslayer.

Technical Explanation

Stop motion animation can create a disorienting staccato effect; go motion was designed to prevent this by moving the animated model slightly during the exposure of each film frame, producing a realistic motion blur. The main difference is in other words that while the frames in stop motion are made up by images of stills where no actual movements are involved, each image in go motion is made up of shots of the object at the same moment it moves. This frame-by-frame, split second motion is almost always created with the help of a computer, often through rods connected to a puppet or model which the computer manipulates to reproduce movements programmed in by puppeteers.

Usage

Go motion was used in films such as E.T. and was originally planned to be used extensively for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, until Steven Spielberg decided to try out the swiftly developing techniques of computer-generated imagery instead.

Today

Today, go motion is rarely used, if ever, as it is more complicated and expensive than computer generated effects, even for the novice filmmaker. However it was used twice in Wallace and Gromit. The first was during the train chase in The Wrong Trousers and again during the Lorry chase in A Close Shave, in both cases the cameras were moved physically during a 1-2 second exposure.