Stop motion involves physically manipulating objects, making them appear to move on their own. The objects are moved in tediously small increments, and each tiny change in their position is photographed. When the series of pictures is played in a continuous sequence, the objects appear to move of their own free will. Because clay is a material that is particularly malleable, it is often used in films that utilize stop motion photography. 

The stop motion technique was first put to use in a film called The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1898. Filmmakers used acrobat and animal toys to become pioneers in this new branch of the movie industry. In the 20th century, animators brought stop motion to the masses when the original King Kong film hit theaters in 1933. Decades later, Disney experimented with stop motion techniques character, Mickey Mouse, in 1978. Then, in 1993, The Nightmare Before Christmas, produced by the delightfully dark Tim Burton, became the first widely released stop motion feature film. 

Today, thanks to the Internet, entertaining stop motion films are always just a click away. One of the best the Web has to offer is T-Shirt War, which was made by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal. In the film, the two men use alternating images on their T-Shirts to push each other’s buttons. In all, it took 222 shirts to make the short video.

 Stop motion techniques have also infiltrated music videos, and one of the most impressive is Oren Lavie’s “Her Morning Elegance.” It consists of 3,225 still photographs of actors on a bed, which were shot by a single overhead camera. It took four weeks of meticulous planning to map out the computer animated storyboard for the video before a single frame was shot.

 In Taiwan, a stop motion animation video caused an online sensation. “Deadline”, a class project by Bang-yao Liu, a student at Savannah College of Art and Design, innovatively used Post-it notes. Bang-yao planned out the changing positions of over 6,000 Post-it notes for three months before beginning his four-day shoot. The moving notes tell the story of a young man dealing with a deadline as monsters, thunderstorms, and a submarine move across the wall in front of his desk. The works of Bang-yao and many other creative filmmakers show that there are no limits to this amazing method of movie making.

   In the United States, there are about twenty-two million hearing-impaired people; of these, two million are profoundly deaf (unable to hear any thing) or severely deaf (unable to hear much). Hearing impairment results from three major factors that are not necessarily exclusive: environmental, hereditary and old age.

   Environmental causes include noise-induced, accidental, toxic, and viral. Noise-induced deafness is primarily a phenomenon of the modern industrial world, though stonemasons, may have been subject to hearing-loss in the ancient world. Permanent deafness resulting from toxicity is also a phenomenon of the modern world. Deafness from accident, such as a blow to the ear, must have resulted from time to time. Viruses, too, were very much part of the ancient world. Of the six main viruses that can cause deafness today—chickenpox, common cold viruses, influenza, measles, mumps, and poliomyelitis—there is evidence for five in ancient Greece. There is also evidence for the presence of bacterial meningitis, whose classic complication is hearing loss. In modern, developed countries, preventative medicine reduces the incidence and severity of these viruses, but in the ancient world, as in third-world countries today, these viruses must have taken their toll.

   There is no reason to rule out hereditary deafness in the ancient world, and there is some conjectural evidence for the results of in-breeding, although not specifically for deafness. In addition to inbreeding, other hereditary factors would have produced deafness. Some families simply have a genetic background that favors deafness.