Jan Švankmajer and his work...

Jan Švankmajer created a music video for Hugh Cornwell, who is an English musician and a songwriter. It is an interesting video called ‘Another Kind of Love’ where the audience is able to see Švankmajer’s style. It was created in 1988, so the quality of it isn’t so great, but because Švankmajer used his unique style, the clip is more interesting.

In most of his works, he uses clay, and also in this music video, he decided to use the same technique. This piece of work isn’t as controversial as his other videos; however it is still a little bit disturbing.

Jan Švankmajer

He is well known for his stop motion films, which he often created very surreal, controversial and sometimes quite scary. Jan Švankmajer is a Czech animator, who gained international renown in 1983. He still continues to make films in Prague. In his films he uses different objects, but mainly clay. However food is his favorite subject and medium. To make the video more effective, scary, he exaggerates the sound. Stop-motion features in most of his work, though recently his feature films have included much more live action sequences than animation.

Many of his movies, like the short film ‘Down to the Cellar’ are made from a child's perspective, while at the same time often having a truly disturbing and even aggressive nature.

Today Švankmajer is one of the most celebrated animators in the world. Among his best known works are the feature films ‘Alice’ (1988), ‘Faust’ (1994), Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), ‘Little Otik’ (2000) and ‘Lunacy’ (2005), a surreal comic horror based on two works of Edgar Allan Poe and the life of Marquis de Sade.

What is Stop Motion Animation?

Stop Motion Animation has been well known and used for a very long time. Originally, it involves animating objects which are ‘3D’ only, such as blocks, Legos, toys, etc. However, the stop frame animation does not include hand drawn animation.

It is an interesting and funny way of creating a video clip; but this experiment takes a big amount of time to produce it. It is a technique where objects are being physically manipulated, step by step to create an illusion of objects changing their position on its own. The figure is moved in a small or being changed slightly, after the photograph is taken. This procedure is repeated many times and then series of frames is played as a continuous sequence.

One of the first stop motion animation examples was ‘The Humpty Dumpty Circus’, which was created by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton. It’s a video where toy circus of acrobats and animals come to life using stop motion animation. The idea might be simple, but the result interesting and realistic. J. Stuart Blackton also created ‘The Haunted Hotel’ in 1907, which in another stop motion film, which was a great success when released.