Claymation Animation Self Evaluation

Claymation – 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.
To create a Claymation animation you will fist need to make the character or “morph”. To do this you must take some Plasticine (preferably all the same colour) and form a ball with it, then roll the ball into a cylinder this will be the torso, this also warms it up so that it becomes easier to mould. Next round off the top thus forming the head, it is important to note here that the entire body has to be made from a single piece as attaching the limbs will make it unsteady and liable to unwanted decapitation. For the arms stretch out the clay about three quarters of the way up on either side, be sure they are of good length but not so thin that they will break, then flatten the ends to make hands and separate a thumb. Finally to make the legs split the bottom of the torso and elongate the two parts and form the feet making sure that the soles are flat and that the morph is balanced. Do this for however may characters you want your animation to have. For the set you will need a flat well lit surface, and feel free to decorate it with real world objects, with which the morphs can interact with.

Three TV shows and movies that use Claymation are:
1) Pengu.
2) Wallace and Gromit.
3) The Nightmare Before Christmas.

The strengths of this technique are that the characters are free to move around in a three dimensional space and can interact with objects. They can also be and shape and size you want and movement can be represented smoothly because the Plasticine is usually stiff enough to stay in place when moved even slightly.

Claymation does have some draw backs to, like Plasticine becoming soft and uncontrollable if it gets too warm because of lighting or being moved too much. Getting your character to be balanced can also be a challenge especially if they are humanoid and/or holding something.

 The Claymation animation I did was about two morphs playing tug of war. The biggest problem in this was the Plasticine rope which kept breaking so a lot of time was wasted fixing it and redoing some shots. Furthermore the lighting wasn’t very good and varied quite a lot, also I often ran out of stage as the workspace was fairly small so the morphs often go off screen. I am quite proud of the sound effects and editing though, if it’s not being a bit over the top but that’s sort of the point. The thing that I would like to change the most is in some of the more complicated shots a hand or two may be partly seen which breaks the immersion, so I would like to go back and re-film those sections.