Both techniques of filmmaking use photography as a medium to obtain the footage. The Stop Motion technique was first used in 1902, but its popularity in the film industry happened in the 1960’s. It’s commonly used in animations and consists in taking photography for each movement of the object or subject. Clay objects animations are famous by using this technique, but Hollywood Classics like The Lost World (1929) and the 1933’s King Kong used adopted it to animate the non-human subjects.
Every photograph becomes a frame of the scene and when they’re put in an order, they give us the illusion of movement, creating a chronological narrative.
The Go Motion is quiet similar, but it differs from the technique mentioned above because it incorporates movements in each photograph, and, consequently, each frame. While in the Stop Motion footage the character has to be standing still, in Go motion the photograph is shooted while it’s moving, creating what filmmakers call motion blur, an effect that emphasizes the moving sensation. The Polish-Russian filmmaker Ladislas Starevich started to experiment with this technique in the 1920s in Paris. But it got notoriety in the 1980s with the blockbuster Star War: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and it was used in minor sequences in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). And it was extensively used to animate the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park’s series.
But differently from both techniques mentioned, the Slow Motion consists of controlling the frame timelapse, making it slower and larger than the original footage. It’s an editing resource and usually applied to emphasize a scene. All details engage the audience, as they get bigger than usual. To increase reality in those scenes, they’re usually shot at a speed higher than usual, so when you slow the timelapse, subjects move even slower and naturally.
