The history of stop-motion animation goes down a deep, deep rabbit hole of filmmaking and photographic history. And if you’re a film geek, then you have to appreciate stop-motion animation on some level. Images from The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933) are iconic, decades before Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) gave us the most famous (and coolest) version of the Abominable Snowman ever — all given to us through stop-motion techniques and a bit of creativity.
The art itself dates back to the 1800s with a guy named Eadweard Muybridge, who realized he could use multiple still cameras in sequence to capture images of objects in motion. He was enamored with it and produced more than 100,000 images of animals and people walking or running between 1883 and 1886. The tools and the technology for capturing images evolved over the next decades, but the basics for stop-motion animation were more or less the same by the time films like The Lost World were becoming popular. Even now, in the 21st century, professional studios can take a week and a half to produce a 30-second commercial using traditional stop-motion animation and The Nightmare Before Christmas took three years to make a few decades ago. All this is to say it’s a time-consuming art form that requires a lot of creativity and a lot of patience.
Doing all this with puppets and clay is one thing. But what about a stop-motion ski edit? Filmmaker and skier Sämi Ortlieb spent months shoveling snow with friends, stacking logs and then taking them down, and filling up who knows how many hard drives with clips to “experiment” with a skiing-stop-motion crossover concept. The end result was “Maneuvers (Manöver)”, an actual one-of-a-kind ski film. Snow melts. Kickers appear out of nowhere and then vanish again. Trees lose entire branches. All in four minutes and 26 seconds that took some incredible commitment.
