Minor Reasearch: The math of stopmotion animation
One main issue i have when it comes to this project is the actual length of the animated sections in the final scene, what would be a good amount of screen time to also balance out the animation with live action footage, so i decided to look into the matter with the film i had based on my project, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953).
Above is a small piece of the scene i analyzed. for a breif expliantion of the scene, the creature (named the rhedosaurus) has made its way to the harbour of new york and begins its rampage downtown. The entire scene lasts 5 minutes in total. My reason for chosing this scene of the film is because it features the monster the most prominetly. i first had to find out the framerate that the creature was animated through, so by going through each frame in one main chunk of its screen time i had found out that the stop motion was animated in 25 fps (frames per second).
From what i had found out in the scene it turns out that the live action actually outweights the animation sections of the scene. The live action section last the majority of the scene weighing in at 3 minutes: 18 seconds while the animated sections of this scenes only last for 1 minute and 42 seconds which is just under 2 minutes. This is not only what i found out about the amimation screen time but how long the actual creature is on screen per cut, which i found out that the actual average screen time that the creature actually appears per each cut is around three seconds long.
However i do have a theory onto why this could possibly be the case. The film is actually one of ray harryhausens first films he had worked on so his various techniques and possibly his animation experience was not 100%, however from each of his films you can see his animation gets better and better from each of his films. Take this scene above for example from The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad (1973) which was made near the end of his career, in which the magician koura makes a statue of the god khali dance to scare a tribe away. from this scene you can tell that the main centre of this scene is the animation with the majority of the scene taken up by the great khali.
Overall i had learned something very important about the merger of the two mediums, mainly that the live action sections of the films are there mearly to help connect the live action footage together as the animation does not take up enough time to complete its run time for a feature length film