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98-500: Clangers (usually referred to as The Clangers ) is a British stop-motion animated children's television series , consisting of short films about a family of mouse-like creatures who live on, and inside, a small moon-like planet. They speak only in a whistled language , and eat green soup (supplied by the Soup Dragon) and blue string pudding. The programmes were originally broadcast on BBC1 between 1969 and 1972, followed by

196-480: A Guinea for which Bryant & May would supply soldiers with sufficient matches. No archival records are known that could proof that the film was indeed created in 1899 during the beginning of the Second Boer War . Others place it at 1914, during the beginning of World War I . Cooper created more Animated Matches scenes in the same setting. These are believed to also have been produced in 1899, while

294-477: A big impression in Paris, where it was released as L'hôtel hanté: fantasmagorie épouvantable . When Gaumont bought a copy to further distribute the film, it was carefully studied by some of their filmmakers to find out how it was made. Reportedly it was newcomer Émile Cohl who unraveled the mystery. Not long after, Cohl released his first film, Japon de fantaisie (June 1907), featuring his own imaginative use of

392-406: A brace is used for this purpose. When more than one system appears on a page, often two parallel diagonal strokes are placed on the left side of the score to separate them. Four-part SATB vocal settings, especially in hymnals , use a divisi notation on a two-staff system with soprano and alto voices sharing the upper staff and tenor and bass voices on the lower staff. Confusingly,

490-445: A center alto as this creates confusion). When playing the piano or harp, the upper staff is normally played with the right hand and the lower staff with the left hand. In music intended for organ with pedalboard , a grand staff normally comprises three staves, one for each hand on the manuals and one for the feet on the pedalboard. Early Western medieval notation was written with neumes , which did not specify exact pitches but only

588-444: A clef, the notes represented by the positions on the staff can be modified by the key signature or accidentals on individual notes. A clefless staff may be used to represent a set of percussion sounds; each line typically represents a different instrument. A vertical line drawn to the left of multiple staves creates a system , indicating that the music on all the staves is to be played simultaneously. A brace (curly bracket)

686-604: A feature animated film with a technique other than cel animation was produced in the US. The first was the stop motion adaptation of 19th century composer Engelbert Humperdinck 's opera Hänsel und Gretel as Hansel and Gretel: An Opera Fantasy . In 1955, Karel Zeman made his first feature film Journey to the Beginning of Time inspired by Jules Verne , featuring stop motion animation of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Art Clokey started his adventures in clay with

784-561: A freeform clay short film called Gumbasia (1955), which shortly thereafter propelled him into the production of his more structured TV series Gumby (1955–1989), with the iconic titular character. In partnership with the United Lutheran Church in America , he also produced Davey and Goliath (1960–2004). The theatrical feature Gumby: The Movie (1992, released in 1995) was a box-office bomb . On 22 November 1959,

882-573: A large close-up view of a table being set by itself baffled viewers; there were no visible wires or other noticeable well-known tricks. This inspired other filmmakers, including French animator Émile Cohl and Segundo de Chomón. De Chomón would release the similar The House of Ghosts ( La maison ensorcelée ) and Hôtel électrique in 1908, with the latter also containing some very early pixelation. The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1908, considered lost) by Blackton and his British-American Vitagraph partner Albert E. Smith showed an animated performance of

980-399: A method of sticking needles in a stroboscopic disc so that it looked like one needle was being pushed in and out of the cardboard when animated. He realized that this method provided basically endless possibilities to make different 3D animations. He then introduced two methods to animate stereoscopic pairs of images, one was basically a stereo viewer using two stroboscopic discs and the other

1078-426: A non-percussive staff is indicated by the placement of a clef symbol at the appropriate vertical position on the left-hand side of the staff (possibly modified by conventions for specific instruments ). For example, the treble clef , also known as the G clef, is placed on the second line (counting upward), fixing that line as the pitch first G above " middle C ". The lines and spaces are numbered from bottom to top;

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1176-402: A note about improvements for his Fantascope (a.k.a. phénakisticope ). A new translucent variation had improved picture quality and could be viewed with both eyes, by several people at the same time. Plateau stated that the illusion could be advanced even further with an idea communicated to him by Charles Wheatstone : a combination of the fantascope and Wheatstone's stereoscope . Plateau thought

1274-778: A presentation of the complete dance with a home cinema projector. Later on, he bought a movie camera and between 1906 and 1909 he made many short films, including puppet animations. As a dancer and choreographer, Shiryaev had a special talent to create motion in his animated films. According to animator Peter Lord his work was decades ahead of its time. Part of Shiryaev's animation work is featured in Viktor Bocharov's documentary Alexander Shiryaev: A Belated Premiere (2003). Polish-Russian Ladislas Starevich (1882–1965), started his film career around 1909 in Kaunas filming live insects. He wanted to document rutting stag beetles , but

1372-439: A project would take much time and careful effort, but would be well worth it because of the expected marvelous results. The plan was never executed, possibly because Plateau was almost completely blind by this time. In 1852, Jules Duboscq patented a "Stéréoscope-fantascope ou Bïoscope" (or abbreviated as stéréofantascope) stroboscopic disc . The only known extant disc contains stereoscopic photograph pairs of different phases of

1470-452: A release date of 1908 has also been given. The 1908 Animated Matches film by Émile Cohl may have caused more confusion about the release dates of Cooper's matchstick animations. It also raises the question whether Cohl may have been inspired by Melbourne-Cooper or vice versa. Melbourne-Cooper's lost films Dolly’s Toys (1901) and The Enchanted Toymaker (1904) may have included stop-motion animation. Dreams of Toyland (1908) features

1568-603: A rendition of the legend of the German scholar . Švankmajer's work has been highly influential on other artists, such as Terry Gilliam and the Quay brothers (although the latter claim to have only discovered Švankmajer's films after having developed their own similar style). French animator Serge Danot created The Magic Roundabout (1965) which played for many years on the BBC . Staff (music) In Western musical notation ,

1666-415: A scene with many animated toys that lasts approximately three and a half minutes. As a means to plan his performances, ballet dancer and choreographer Alexander Shiryaev started making approximately 20- to 25-centimeter-tall puppets out of papier-mâché on poseable wire frames. He then sketched all the sequential movements on paper. When he arranged these vertically on a long strip, it was possible to give

1764-532: A sitting old lady. American film pioneer Edwin S. Porter filmed a single-shot "lightning sculpting" film with a baker molding faces from a patch of dough in Fun in a Bakery Shop (1902), considered as foreshadowing of clay animation. In 1905, Porter showed animated letters and very simple cutout animation of two hands in the intertitles in How Jones Lost His Roll . Porter experimented with

1862-476: A small bit of crude stop-motion animation in his trick film Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). The "Teddy" Bears (2 March 1907), made in collaboration with Wallace McCutcheon Sr. , mainly shows people in bear costumes, but the short film also features a short stop-motion segment with small teddy bears. On 15 February 1908, Porter released the trick film A Sculptor's Welsh Rabbit Dream that featured clay molding itself into three complete busts. No copy of

1960-406: A small number of picture sequences were photographed with subjects in separate poses. These can now be regarded as a form of stop motion or pixilation, but very few results were meant to be animated. Until celluloid film base was established in 1888 and set the standard for the moving image, animation could only be presented via mechanisms such as the zoetrope . In 1849, Joseph Plateau published

2058-462: A special episode which was broadcast in 1974. The series was made by Smallfilms , the company set up by Oliver Postgate (who was the show's writer, animator and narrator) and Peter Firmin (who was its modelmaker and illustrator). Firmin designed the characters, and Joan Firmin, his wife, knitted and "dressed" them. The music, often part of the story, was provided by Vernon Elliott . A third series, narrated by Monty Python actor Michael Palin ,

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2156-691: A string of Academy Award for Best Animated Short Films , including Rhythm in the Ranks (1941), Tulips Shall Grow (1942), Jasper and the Haunted House (1942), the Dr. Seuss penned The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1943) and And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1944), Jasper and the Beanstalk (1945), John Henry and the Inky-Poo (1946), Jasper in a Jam (1946), and Tubby

2254-460: A wide variety of differing timeslots. Episodes 1 and 2 were seen at 4:50   pm; episodes 3, 5 and 6 at 5:05   pm; episodes 4 and 8 at 5:00   pm; episode 7 at 4:40   pm; episode 9 at 5:30   pm; and episodes 10, 11, 12 and 13 (which followed episode 9 after a gap of more than a year) at 4:00   pm. The first of these was an election special, produced in 1974, entitled "Vote for Froglet". Inspired by what Postgate referred to as

2352-637: A year later. Although the films and her technique received much attention of the press, it seems she did not continue making films after she returned to New York from managing a YMCA in Paris around 1918. None of her films have yet surfaced, but the extant magazine articles have provided several stills and approximately 20 poorly printed frames from two film strips. By 1920 Starewicz had settled in Paris, and started making new stop motion films. Dans les Griffes de L'araignée (finished 1920, released 1924) featured detailed hand-made insect puppets that could convey facial expressions with moving lips and eyelids. One of

2450-548: Is Snip and Snap (1960-1961) by John Halas in collaboration with Danish paper sculptor Thok Søndergaard (Thoki Yenn), featuring dog Snap, cut from a sheet of paper by pair of scissors Snip. Apart from their cutout animation series, British studio Smallfilms ( Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate ) produced several stop motion series with puppets, beginning with Pingwings (1961-1965) featuring penguin-like birds knitted by Peter's wife Joan and filmed on their farm (where most of their productions were filmed in an unused barn). It

2548-418: Is also incomplete and often insufficient to properly date all extant films or even identify them if original titles are missing. Possible stop motion in lost films is even harder to trace. The principles of animation and other special effects were mostly kept a secret, not only to prevent use of such techniques by competitors, but also to keep audiences interested in the mystery of the magic tricks. Stop motion

2646-425: Is closely related to the stop trick , in which the camera is temporarily stopped during the recording of a scene to create a change before filming is continued (or for which the cause of the change is edited out of the film). In the resulting film, the change will be sudden and a logical cause of the change will be mysteriously absent or replaced with a fake cause that is suggested in the scene. The oldest known example

2744-464: Is created. Typically, the upper staff uses a treble clef and the lower staff has a bass clef . In this instance, middle C is centered between the two staffs, and it can be written on the first ledger line below the upper staff or the first ledger line above the lower staff. Very rarely, a centered line with a small C clef is written, and usually used to indicate that B, C, or D on the line can be played with either hand (ledger lines are not used from

2842-523: Is more common than stave in both American English and British English , with the latter being, in fact, a back-formation from the plural staves . The plural staffs also exists for staff in both American and British English, alongside the traditional plural staves . In addition to the pronunciations expected from the spellings, both plural forms are also pronounced / s t æ v z / in American English. The vertical position of

2940-573: Is told that they are just television characters. The Master rolls his eyes; he was obviously joking and knows full well they are puppets. A Clanger (as a glove-puppet rather than a stop-motion puppet) appears as a member of the "Puppet Government" in The Goodies TV episode " The Goodies Rule – O.K.? ". From the block's start until its discontinuation, the UK's Nick Jr. Classics block aired Clangers episodes specifically for parents who remembered

3038-489: Is used for the beheading in Edison Manufacturing Company 's 1895 film The Execution of Mary Stuart . The technique of stop motion can be interpreted as repeatedly applying the stop trick. In 1917, clay animation pioneer Helena Smith-Dayton referred to the principle behind her work as "stop action", a synonym of "stop motion". French trick film pioneer Georges Méliès claimed to have invented

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3136-434: Is used to join multiple staves that represent an instrument, such as a piano, organ, harp, or marimba. A bracket is an additional vertical line joining staves to show groupings of instruments that function as a unit, such as the string section of an orchestra. Sometimes a second bracket is used to show instruments grouped in pairs, such as the first and second oboes or first and second violins in an orchestra. In some cases,

3234-470: The 1862 International Exhibition in London. Desvignes "employed models, insects and other objects, instead of pictures, with perfect success". In 1874, Jules Janssen made several practice discs for the recording of the passage of Venus with his series Passage de Vénus with his photographic revolver . He used a model of the planet and a light source standing in for the sun. While actual recordings of

3332-627: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation . The American transmissions are narrated by William Shatner. As from 2018, it is also broadcast on the Belgian channel Ketnet . As of 2023 the 2015 UK version is on the American video on demand site Bentkey . In 2001, a selection of the music and sound effects was compiled by Jonny Trunk from 128 musical cues held by Postgate, who contributed act one, "The Iron Chicken and

3430-687: The British Academy Children's Award for Pre-School Animation in 2015. The Clangers originated in a series of children's books developed from another Smallfilms production, Noggin the Nog . Publishers Kay and Ward created a series of books based on the Noggin the Nog television episodes, which was subsequently expanded into a series called Noggin First Reader , aimed at teaching children to read. In one of these, called Noggin and

3528-595: The staff ( UK also stave ; plural : staffs or staves ), also occasionally referred to as a pentagram , is a set of five horizontal lines and four spaces that each represent a different musical pitch or in the case of a percussion staff , different percussion instruments. Appropriate music symbols, depending on the intended effect, are placed on the staff according to their corresponding pitch or function. Musical notes are placed by pitch, percussion notes are placed by instrument, and rests and other symbols are placed by convention. The absolute pitch of each line of

3626-466: The "Winter of Discontent" (a phrase from Shakespeare's play Richard III , usually employed to refer to the winter of 1978–79 , but Postgate was referring to the miners' strike in the winter of 1973-74), and inspired partly by his recollections of post-war Germany, it was broadcast on the night of the October 1974 General Election. The narrator explains the democratic process, and demonstrates it by asking

3724-606: The 10-minute The Beautiful Leukanida (Прекрасная Люканида, или Война усачей с рогачами) (March 1912), the two-minute Happy Scenes from Animal Life (Веселые сценки из жизни животных), the 12-minute The Cameraman's Revenge (Прекрасная Люканида, или Война усачей с рогачами, October 1912) and the 5-minute The Grasshopper and the Ant (Стрекоза и муравей, 1913). Reportedly many viewers were impressed with how much could be achieved with trained insects, or at least wondered what tricks could have been used, since few people were familiar with

3822-570: The 1974 special still existed, and it has been referred to as a "missing episode". In fact the whole episode is available from the British Film Institute. The original Mother Clanger puppet was stolen in 1972. Today, Major Clanger and the second Mother Clanger are on display at the Rupert Bear Museum . The Clangers grew in size between the first and last episodes, to allow Firmin to use an Action Man model figure in

3920-491: The 26 episodes (aired as two series of 13 programmes each) was broadcast on BBC1 from 16 November 1969. The last edition of the second series was transmitted on 10 November 1972. However, there was also one final programme, a seven-minute election special entitled Vote for Froglet , broadcast on 10 October 1974 (the day of the General Election). Oliver Postgate said in a 2005 interview that he wasn't sure whether

4018-561: The Action for Children's Arts J. M. Barrie Award "for a lifetime's achievement in delighting children". The Soup Dragons , a Scottish alternative rock band of the late 1980s and early 1990s, took their name from the Clangers character. In the 1972 Doctor Who serial " The Sea Devils ", The Master is seen to be watching the episode "The Rock Collector". He states that they are fascinating creatures and even mimics their language. He

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4116-682: The Baby Soup Dragon were by Dan Postgate. The first episode of the new series aired on 15 June 2015. It turned out to be a massive hit for CBeebies. The BBC News Entertainment and Arts magazine revealed that 65% of the episode's viewing audience of 484,000 were adults, and that it was CBeebies' most watched programme of 2015 up to that date. The rating was more than double the previous record, set by an episode of Alphablocks , Numberjacks , Waybuloo , Fimbles , Charlie and Lola , Teletubbies , The Lingo Show and The Octonauts that year, as well as other CBeebies favourites since

4214-541: The Best Pre-school Animation award at the BAFTAs. The principal characters are the Clangers themselves, the females wearing tabards and the males brass armour: Other characters appeared in only one or two episodes each: One of the most noted aspects was the use of sound effects , with a score composed by Vernon Elliott under instructions from Postgate. Although the episodes were scripted, most of

4312-606: The Cheese Trees provided a cylindrical five-line staff for notes taken from the Music Trees. Postgate provided the narration, for the most part in a soft, melodic voice, describing and accounting for the curious antics of the little blue planet's knitted pink inhabitants, and providing a "translation", as it were, for much of their whistled dialogue. Postgate claimed that in reality when the Clangers' were whistling, they were "swearing their little heads off". The first of

4410-547: The Clangers to vote between the Soup Dragon and a Froglet. The Soup Dragon wins the election on a policy of "No Soup for Froglets", but the Clangers are dissatisfied with the result. This special was believed to be a lost episode for many years, but it was released in full for free by the British Film Institute to coincide with the 2017 UK General Election . Episodes 1–26 were first broadcast at 5:30   pm, while episodes 27–52 were at 6:00   pm on CBeebies. Following

4508-734: The German System (often in the combined forms Liniensystem or Notensystem ) may refer to a single staff as well as to the Akkolade (from the French) or system in the English sense; the Italian term is accollatura . When music on two staves is joined by a brace , or is intended to be played at once by a single performer (usually a keyboard instrument or harp ), a grand staff ( American English ) or great stave ( British English )

4606-526: The March 2015 special, a full series was commissioned for the summer of that year. The series was narrated by Michael Palin, and co-produced by Smallfilms with the involvement of Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate's son, Dan. The series was directed by Chris Tichborne and Mole Hill, with music composed by John Du Prez. 52 11-minute episodes were commissioned. The voices of the Iron Chicken, the Soup Dragon, and

4704-526: The Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1915). Apart from the titular dinosaur and " missing link " ape, it featured several cavemen and an ostrich-like "desert quail", all relatively lifelike models made with clay. This led to a series of short animated comedies with a prehistoric theme for Edison Company, including Prehistoric Poultry (1916), R.F.D. 10,000 B.C. (1917), The Birth of a Flivver (1917) and Curious Pets of Our Ancestors (1917). O'Brien

4802-518: The Moonmouse , published in 1967, a new horse - trough was put up in the middle of the town in the North-Lands. A spacecraft hurtled down and splash-landed in it: the top unscrewed, and out came a largish, mouse-like creature in a duffel coat , who wanted fuel for his spaceship. He showed Nooka and the children that what he needed was vinegar and soap-flakes, so they filled up the fueltank of

4900-494: The Music Trees", of A Clangers Opera , with libretto that he had compiled. In the early 1990s, three VHS cassettes of the Clangers were released by BBC Enterprises Ltd. Later, another six cassettes were released by Universal Pictures. A number of DVDs have also been released by Universal Pictures (original series) and Signature Entertainment (revived series). Stop motion The term "stop motion", relating to

4998-692: The Tuba (1947). Many of his puppetoon films were selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry . Willis O' Brien's expressive and emotionally convincing animation of the big ape in King Kong (1933) is widely regarded as a milestone in stop-motion animation and a highlight of Hollywood cinema in general. A 1940 promotional film for Autolite , an automotive parts supplier, featured stop-motion animation of its products marching past Autolite factories to

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5096-421: The animation technique, is often spelled with a hyphen as "stop-motion"—either standalone or as a compound modifier . Both orthographical variants, with and without the hyphen, are correct, but the hyphenated one has a second meaning that is unrelated to animation or cinema: "a device for automatically stopping a machine or engine when something has gone wrong". Before the advent of chronophotography in 1878,

5194-438: The beginning of episode three, where the doors get stuck, Major Clanger says 'sod it, the bloody thing’s stuck again'. Well, darling, you can't say that on children's television, you know, I mean you just can't". I said "It's not going to be said, it's going to be whistled", but [they] just said "But people will know!" I said no, that if they had nice minds, they'd think "Oh dear, the silly thing's not working properly". If you watch

5292-401: The bottom line is the first line and the top line is the fifth line . The musical staff is analogous to a mathematical graph of pitch with respect to time . Pitches of notes are given by their vertical position on the staff and notes are played from left to right. Unlike a graph, however, the number of semitones represented by a vertical step from a line to an adjacent space depends on

5390-411: The construction of a sequential set of stereoscopic image pairs would be the more difficult part of the plan than adapting two copies of his improved fantascope to be fitted with a stereoscope. Wheatstone had suggested using photographs on paper of a solid object, for instance a statuette. Plateau concluded that for this purpose 16 plaster models could be made with 16 regular modifications. He believed such

5488-649: The creatures wouldn't cooperate or would even die under the bright lamps needed for filming. He solved the problem by using wire for the limbs of dried beetles and then animating them in stop motion. The resulting short film, presumably 1 minute long, was probably titled by the Latin name for the species: Lucanus Cervus (Жук-олень, 1910, considered lost). After moving to Moscow, Starevich continued animating dead insects, but now as characters in imaginative stories with much dramatic complexity. He garnered much attention and international acclaim with these short films, including

5586-1039: The earliest clay animation films was Modelling Extraordinary , which impressed audiences in 1912. The early Italian feature film Cabiria (1914) featured some stop motion techniques. Starewicz finished the first feature stop motion film Le Roman de Renard (The Tale of the Fox) in 1930, but problems with its soundtrack delayed its release. In 1937 it was released with a German soundtrack and in 1941 with its French soundtrack. Hungarian-American filmmaker George Pal developed his own stop motion technique of replacing wooden dolls (or parts of them) with similar figures displaying changed poses and/or expressions. He called it Pal-Doll and used it for his Puppetoons films since 1932. The particular replacement animation method itself also became better known as puppetoon . In Europe he mainly worked on promotional films for companies such as Philips . Later Pal gained much success in Hollywood with

5684-449: The episode "The Rock Collector". BBC 's CBeebies channel and the American pre-school channel, Sprout, produced a new series for broadcasting in their 2015 schedules, with Michael Palin narrating in place of the late Oliver Postgate . The American pre-school channel Sprout were major funders and co-producers having commissioned the series in tandem with the BBC , with William Shatner narrating. In November 2015, The Clangers won

5782-514: The episode, the one where the rocket goes up and shoots down the Iron Chicken, Major Clanger kicks the door to make it work and his first words are "Sod it, the bloody thing's stuck again". Years later, when the merchandising took off, the Golden Bear company wanted a Clanger and a Clanger phrase for it to make when you squeezed it, they got "Sod it, the bloody thing’s stuck again"!" Series 1 episode, "The Visitor" features two brief extracts from

5880-480: The figures from a popular wooden toy set. Smith would later claim that this was "the first stop-motion picture in America". The inspiration would have come from seeing how puffs of smoke behaved in the interrupted recordings for a stop trick film they were making. Smith would have suggested to get a patent for the technique, but Blackton thought it wasn't that important. Smith's recollections are not considered to be very reliable. Blackton's The Haunted Hotel made

5978-575: The film Mighty Joe Young (1949). Harryhausen would go on to create many memorable stop motion effects for a string of successful fantasy films over the next three decades. These included The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Clash of the Titans (1981). It wasn't until 1954 before

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6076-453: The film has yet been located. It was soon followed by the similar extant film The Sculptor's Nightmare (6 May 1908) by Wallace McCutcheon Sr. J. Stuart Blackton 's The Haunted Hotel (23 February 1907) featured a combination of live-action with practical special effects and stop motion animation of several objects, a puppet and a model of the haunted hotel. It was the first stop motion film to receive wide scale appreciation. Especially

6174-488: The first episode of Unser Sandmänchen (Our Little Sandman) was broadcast on DFF (East German television) . The 10-minute daily bedtime show for young children features the title character as an animated puppet, and other puppets in different segments. A very similar Sandmänchen series, possibly conceived earlier, ran on West German television from 1 December 1959 until the German reunification in 1989. The East German show

6272-403: The key, and the exact timing of the beginning of each note is not directly proportional to its horizontal position; rather, exact timing is encoded by the musical symbol chosen for each note in addition to the tempo . A time signature to the right of the clef indicates the relationship between timing counts and note symbols, while bar lines group notes on the staff into measures . Staff

6370-479: The little spherical ship, which then "took off in a dreadful cloud smelling of vinegar and soap-flakes, covering the town with bubbles". In 1969 (the year of NASA's first landing on the Moon), the BBC asked Smallfilms to produce a new series for colour television , but without specifying a storyline. Postgate concluded that as space exploration was topical the new series should take place in space (and, inspired by

6468-441: The more than 300 short films produced between 1896 and 1915 by British film pioneer Arthur Melbourne-Cooper , an estimated 36 contained forms of animation. Based on later reports by Melbourne-Cooper and by his daughter Audrey Wadowska, some believe that Cooper's Matches: an Appeal was produced in 1899 and therefore the first stop-motion animation. The extant black-and-white film shows a matchstick figure writing an appeal to donate

6566-425: The motion of a machine. Due to the long exposure times necessary to capture an image with the photographic emulsions of the period, the sequence could not be recorded live and must have been assembled from separate photographs of the various positions of the machinery. In 1855, Johann Nepomuk Czermak published an article about his Stereophoroskop and other experiments aimed at stereoscopic moving images. He mentioned

6664-504: The music used in the two series was written in translation by Postgate in the form of "musical sketches" or graphs that he drew for Elliott, who converted the drawings into a musical score. The music was then recorded by the two, along with other musicians – dubbed the Clangers Ensemble – in a village hall, where they would often leave the windows open, leading to the sounds of birds outside being heard on some recordings. Much of

6762-404: The notehead on the staff indicates which note to play: higher-pitched notes are marked higher on the staff. The notehead can be placed with its center intersecting a line ( on a line ) or in between the lines touching the lines above and below ( in a space ). Notes outside the range of the staff are placed on or between ledger lines —lines the width of the note they need to hold—added above or below

6860-933: The official selection of the 1946 Cannes Film Festival . The first Belgian animated feature was an adaptation of the Tintin comic The Crab with the Golden Claws (1947) with animated puppets. The first Czech animated feature was the package film The Czech Year (1947) with animated puppets by Jiří Trnka . The film won several awards at the Venice Film Festival and other international festivals. Trnka would make several more award-winning stop motion features including The Emperor's Nightingale (1949), Prince Bayaya (1950), Old Czech Legends (1953) or A Midsummer Night's Dream (1959). He also directed many short films and experimented with other forms of animation. Ray Harryhausen learned under O'Brien on

6958-548: The passage of Venus have not been located, some practice discs survived and the images of one were turned into a short animated film decades after the development of cinematography . In 1887, Étienne-Jules Marey created a large zoetrope with a series of plaster models based on his chronophotographs of birds in flight. It is estimated that 80 to 90 percent of all silent films are lost. Extant contemporary movie catalogs, reviews and other documentation can provide some details on lost films, but this kind of written documentation

7056-531: The real Moon Landing, Peter Firmin designed a set which strongly resembled the Moon). Postgate adapted the Moonmouse from the 1967 story, by simply removing its tail ("because it kept getting into the soup "). Hence the Clangers looked similar to mice (and, from their pink colour, pigs). They wore clothes reminiscent of Roman armour, "against the space debris that kept falling onto the planet, lost from other places, such as television sets and bits of an Iron Chicken", and they spoke in whistled language . The Clangers

7154-427: The score was performed on Elliott's bassoon, and also included harp, clarinet, glockenspiel and bells. The distinctive whistles made by the Clangers, performed on swanee whistles , have become as identifiable as the characters themselves, much imitated by viewers. The series creators have said that the Clangers, living in vacuum , did not communicate by sound, but rather by a type of nuclear magnetic resonance , which

7252-407: The secrets of stop motion animation. The Insects' Christmas (Рождество обитателей леса, 1913) featured other animated puppets, including Father Christmas and a frog. Starevich made several other stop motion films in the next two years, but mainly went on to direct live-action short and feature films before he fled from Russia in 1918. Willis O' Brien 's first stop motion film was The Dinosaur and

7350-457: The shape of the melodies, i.e. indicating when the musical line went up or down; presumably these were intended as mnemonics for melodies which had been taught by rote. During the 9th through 11th centuries a number of systems were developed to specify pitch more precisely, including diastematic neumes whose height on the page corresponded with their absolute pitch level (Longobardian and Beneventan manuscripts from Italy show this technique around

7448-503: The show. Tiny Clanger (also as a glove-puppet) appeared on Sprout's Sunny Side Up Show in honour of the U.S. premiere of Clangers . The series was not widely broadcast outside the UK in the 1970s, mainly because it did not require additional money from sales abroad to finance its production. However the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation showed the series in 1970 and 1982, entitled Romlingane . It

7546-572: The song, "No Smokes" (1967) by the Glasgow psychedelic band One in a Million . John Du Prez , who wrote some of the music for Monty Python (another show Michael Palin was in) composed the score for the 2015 series. The first series was transmitted on BBC1 at 5:55pm, except for the episode "Chicken" which went out at 5:50pm because there was a Children in Need appeal at 6:00pm. The second series episodes were also transmitted weekly on BBC1, but in

7644-418: The staff. Which staff positions represent which notes is determined by a clef placed at the beginning of the staff. The clef identifies a particular line as a specific note, and all other notes are determined relative to that line. For example, the treble clef puts the G above middle C on the second line. The interval between adjacent staff positions is one step in the diatonic scale . Once fixed by

7742-418: The station's launch in 2002, although an episode of Numberjacks peaked at over 1 million back in 2009. The same year, William Shatner was chosen to be the American narrator for the series airing on the cable network Sprout . A second series of the revival, and the fourth series overall, was released on 11 September 2017 with 26 more episodes. A third series of the revival, and the fifth series overall

7840-526: The stop-motion technique. It was followed by the revolutionary hand-drawn Fantasmagorie (17 August 1908) and many more animated films by Cohl. Other notable stop-motion films by Cohl include Les allumettes animées (Animated Matches) (1908), and Mobilier fidèle (1910, in collaboration with Romeo Bosetti ). Mobilier fidèle is often confused with Bosetti's object animation tour de force Le garde-meubles automatique (The Automatic Moving Company) (1912). Both films feature furniture moving by itself. Of

7938-478: The stop-trick and popularized it by using it in many of his short films. He reportedly used stop-motion animation in 1899 to produce moving letterforms. Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón (1871–1929) made many trick films in France for Pathé . He has often been compared to Georges Méliès as he also made many fantasy films with stop tricks and other illusions (helped by his wife, Julienne Mathieu ). By 1906 Chomón

8036-589: The syndicated television series The New Adventures of Pinocchio (1960-1961). The Christmas TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has been telecasted annually since 1964 and has become one of the most beloved holiday specials in the United States. They made three theatrical feature films Willy McBean and His Magic Machine (1965), The Daydreamer (1966, stop motion / live-action) and Mad Monster Party? (1966, released in 1967), and

8134-450: The television special Ballad of Smokey the Bear (1966) before the collaboration ended. Rankin/Bass worked with other animators for more TV specials, with titles such as The Little Drummer Boy (1968), Santa Claus is Comin' to Town (1970) and Here Comes Peter Cottontail (1971). British television has shown many stop motion series for young children since the 1960s. An early example

8232-501: The tune of Franz Schubert 's Military March . An abbreviated version of this sequence was later used in television ads for Autolite, especially those on the 1950s CBS program Suspense , which Autolite sponsored. The first British animated feature was the stop motion instruction film Handling Ships (1945) by Halas and Batchelor for the British Admiralty . It was not meant for general cinemas, but did become part of

8330-636: The war and stayed in China afterwards. Due to the scarcity of paint and film stock shortly after the war, Mochinaga decided to work with puppets and stop motion. His work helped popularize puppet animation in China, before he returned to Japan around 1953 where he continued working as animation director. In the 1960s, Mochinaga supervised the "Animagic" puppet animation for productions by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass ' Videocraft International, Ltd. (later called Rankin/Bass Productions , Inc.) and Dentsu , starting with

8428-409: The year 1000). Digraphic notation, using letter names similar to modern note names in conjunction with the neumes, made a brief appearance in a few manuscripts, but a number of manuscripts used one or more horizontal lines to indicate particular pitches. The treatise Musica enchiriadis ( c.  900 ) uses Daseian notation for indicating specific pitches, but the modern use of staff lines

8526-626: Was broadcast in the UK in June 2015 on the BBC 's CBeebies TV channel, gaining hugely successful viewing figures, following on from a short special broadcast by the BBC earlier that year. The new programmes are still made using stop-motion animation (instead of the computer-generated imagery which had replaced the original stop-motion animation in revivals of other children's shows such as Fireman Sam , Thomas & Friends and The Wombles ). Further new series were made in 2017 and 2019. Clangers won

8624-533: Was broadcast on CBeebies on 17 July 2019 with another 26 more episodes. Although not quite as popular as Bagpuss (which in 1999 was voted in a British television poll the best children's television programme ever made), since the death of Postgate in December 2008 interest has been revived in his work, which is considered to have had a notable influence on British culture throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In 2007, Postgate and Firmin were jointly presented with

8722-446: Was continued on other German networks when DFF ended in 1991, and is one of the longest running animated series in the world. The theatrical feature Das Sandmännchen – Abenteuer im Traumland (2010) was fully animated with stop motion puppets. Japanese puppet animator Tadahito Mochinaga started out as assistant animator in short anime (propaganda) films Arichan (1941) and Momotarō no Umiwashi (1943). He fled to Manchukuo during

8820-471: Was covered with an old metal dustbin lid, to protect against meteorite impacts (and space debris). In each episode there would be some problem to solve, typically concerning something invented or discovered, or some new visitor to meet. Music Trees, with note-shaped fruit, grew on the planet's surface, and music would often be an integral feature in the simple but amusing plots. In the Fishing episode, one of

8918-424: Was described by Postgate as a family in space. They were small creatures living in peace and harmony on – and inside – a small, hollow planet, far, far away: nourished by Blue String Pudding, and by Green Soup harvested from the planet's volcanic soup wells by the Soup Dragon. The word "Clanger" is said to derive from the sound made by opening the metal cover of one of the creatures' crater-like burrows, each of which

9016-656: Was followed by Pogles' Wood (1965-1967), Clangers (1969-1972, 1974, revived in 2015), Bagpuss (1974) and Tottie: The Story of a Doll's House (1984). Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer 's released his short artistic films since 1964, which usually contain much experimental stop motion. He started to gain much international recognition in the 1980s. Since 1988 he has mostly been directing feature films which feature much more live action than stop motion. These include Alice , an adaptation of Lewis Carroll 's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , and Faust ,

9114-480: Was more or less similar to the later zoetrope . Czermak explained how suitable stereoscopic photographs could be made by recording a series of models, for instance to animate a growing pyramid. On 27 February 1860, Peter Hubert Desvignes received British patent no. 537 for 28 monocular and stereoscopic variations of cylindrical stroboscopic devices (much like the later zoetrope). Desvignes' Mimoscope , received an Honourable Mention "for ingenuity of construction" at

9212-539: Was narrated by Ingebrigt Davik , a popular author of children's books. It was shown on Swedish television in the late 1960s and 1970s, entitled Rymdlarna . The first 13 episodes were also shown on Czechoslovak Television in August 1972, entitled Rámusíci as a part of the children's evening program slot Večerníček . The revived version in 2015 has received funding from Sprout , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal , and has been pre-sold to other foreign broadcasters including

9310-559: Was recognized as a technique to create lifelike creatures for adventure films. O' Brien further pioneered the technique with animated dinosaur sequences for the live-action feature The Lost World (1925). New York artist Helena Smith Dayton , possibly the first female animator, had much success with her "Caricatypes" clay statuettes before she began experimenting with clay animation. Some of her first resulting short films were screened on 25 March 1917. She released an adaptation of William Shakespeare 's Romeo and Juliet approximately half

9408-491: Was then hired by producer Herbert M. Dawley to direct, create effects, co-write and co-star with him for The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918). The collaborative film combined live-action with animated dinosaur models in a 45-minute film, but after the premiere it was cut down to approximately 12 minutes. Dawley did not give O'Brien credits for the visual effects, and instead claimed the animation process as his own invention and even applied for patents. O'Brien's stop motion work

9506-438: Was translated to audible whistles for the human audience. These whistles followed the rhythm and intonation of a script in English. The action was also narrated by a voice-over from Postgate. However, when the series was shown without narration to a group of overseas students, many of them felt that the Clangers were speaking their particular language. Postgate recounted: "When the BBC got the script, [they] rang me up and said "At

9604-609: Was using stop motion animation. Le théâtre de Bob (April 1906) features over three minutes of stop motion animation with dolls and objects to represent a fictional automated theatre owned by Bob, played by a live-action child actor. It is the oldest extant film with proper stop motion and a definite release date. Segundo de Chomón 's Sculpteur moderne was released on 31 January 1908 and features heaps of clay molding itself into detailed sculptures that are capable of minor movements. The final sculpture depicts an old woman and walks around before it's picked up, squashed and molded back into

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