Clay Animation Evaluation

Clay animation or ‘clay-mation’ is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable" made of a malleable substance, usually Plasticine clay. In clay animation, each object is sculpted in clay or a similarly pliable material such as Plasticine, usually around a wire skeleton called an armature. As in other forms of object animation, the object is arranged on the set (background), a film frame is exposed, and the object or character is then moved slightly by hand. Another frame is taken, and the object is moved slightly again. This cycle was repeated until I had achieved the desired amount of film.

Many TV shows and film productions use this technique such as Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, Morph, Pingu and many others.

The weaknesses of this technique are that sometimes the body proportion of a character are different and therefore make it harder to sculpt and allow the character to stand on it’s own. In addition to this, fine movement is not easy unless the model is made with ball joints. They also take a relatively long time to make and require maintenance as the heat/lighting dries them out.

However there are some strengths to this type of animation such as clay models are relatively easy to make and most importantly easy to move into position. They can also be made to represent any object or person.

In my clay animation I worked with a partner and we were able to combine our ideas and create two clay characters; a female and a male. My animation shows the male figurine playing a game of croquet. We then created a ball that chased the man and planted it’s self as a tree. As the tree grew the female figurine then came along and admired the tree.

The strengths of our production were that we we’re able to agree on an idea and use both figurines in the short film. Also the production was able to run smoothly as we watched previous TV shows and movies that used this technique, so we able to establish how much and how fast/slow we had to move our Claymation in order for it to look flawless. The weaknesses of our production were we found it hard to position our characters and our timing as the film was only a couple seconds long compared to other peoples’ production which were a minutes longer.