Animation is film-making in reverse. "...Slate 1, Take 1, Plasticine 1..."If a movie is action captured at 24 frames a second, then animation is 24 still frames made up to produce a second of action. Due to a phenomenon known as 'persistence of vision' (where our eyes retain images for a tenth of a second) the individual images have the illusion of movement, and animators can bring objects to life.

Animation allows film-makers to tell fantastical stories. Stop motion animation has been in use since the birth of film-making, from special effects pioneer Georges Melies Voyage to the Moon (1902), through Ray Harryhausen's arm of marauding skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) to the colourful clucking characters from Nick Park & Peter Lord's Chicken Run (2000).