another interesting clay motion

a clay motion ipad.

Clay Animation VS Stop Motion !!!!

When I doing research on clay animation, i found out some commentaries said that all stop motion are same as clay motion. This is entirely wrong. Clay motion is actually a term by Will Vinton to describe the process of using modeling clay, plasticine for stop motion, allowing animator to have freedom in squash and stretch technique and changing facial expressions. It is often used for simple children type show.

Even clay motion usually isn't done entirely in clay. There's usually at the very least a wire armature inside the puppets, unless they're extremely suimple and squat, with no arms or very short thick ones. The other 2 common ways to make puppets is foam latex and cushion foam. The foam latex method is very involved and takes a good deal of skill and practice to master, as well as some pretty expensive equipment. You need a good scale, a mixer and an oven, plus the multi-component foam itself is fairly expensive. And ofcourse these methods can be mixed up in various ways, and you can make heads from a hard material like Sculpey or wood and hands can be wire dipped in regular latex.

Example:

• Nightmare Before Christmas - NOT clay
• KingKong by Ray Harryhausen and Jim Danforth - NOT clay
• Chicken Run - hybrid puppet with a clay head and arms while body made by silicone

Stop Motion technique - Clay Motion

Clay animation is one of the stop motion. His technique is quite simple. The object or character sculpted in clay or other material, plasticine. When the object or character are in place, frame taken, then the object or character move slightly by hand, another frame taken. This cycle will keep repeating until process is done. When we rapidly playing image as motion, hence making it appear that the object is moving itself, and of course hand must not the seen in picture, this can be avoid when we taking picture. To achieve the best result, a consistent shooting environment is needed. For example the lightning of the scene, object placement, even single dirt, hair, dust can disturb the process. Extra caution must be taken.

Normal film runs 24 fps(frame per second). For 30minutes long film, there would be 21,600 frames, that means we need to stop 21,600 to change the object or character for the frame. Great care must be taken in this process, the lightning & environment position and the object position. Some frame may able to overlap but it is not advisable.

List of the films featuring Clay Motion:

• "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" 2010
• "Mary and Max" 2009
• "Weasel Stomping Day" 2006
• "Moral Orel"
• "Taiko no Tatsujin" 2005
• "Gary and Mike" 2001
• "Chicken Run" 2000

Small research on Time-Lapse

Time lapse photography is a cinematography technique whereby frames are captured is much more slower than actual film. When played at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and lapsing. Timelapse photography include cloudscape, plant growing and flower opening, fruit rotting, construction building project, people in the city. The first use time lapse photography is in a feature film by Georges Melies' motion picture Carrefour De L'Opera (1897).

Time lapse construction building.

Time lapse sunset

Time lapse flower opening

Time lapse plant growing

Top 20 stop motion videos

Roof sex by PES

Western Spaghetti by PES

Drum and Piano stop motion

Human Skateboard

Human Tetris Performance by Guillaume Reymond - great job on sound fx

Top 20 stop motion videos

I found a website that show top 20 coolest stop motion. All the artist are amazing, especially this one. Basically it's a stop motion video of one man getting tattoo done. Yes, getting the tattoo DONE! Not any old tattoo, mind but a tattoo of a whole bunch of cameras, all the way up his forearm.

Here all the link:

Tattoo camera part 1 , part 2, part 3

Flip book-style stop motion - interesting yet time consuming

Deadline - very creative piece of work.

Ten Thousand Pictures of You - stopmotion drama

Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie - music video

Mytery Guitar Man plays the Flight of The Bumblebee

Transformers' Bumblebee beats Optimus Prime

Iron Man vs Bruce Lee - Genius

Youtube Street Fighter - youtube stopmotion game.

Bboy Joker - another youtube stopmotion game.

To be continue...

Continue the research...

The Automatic Moving Company in 1912 that i mention in earlier post. A film by Romeo Bossetti. This film was in fact produced by Bossetti for Pathe Company. This is a short movie yet charming film depicting actual furniture uloading from a truck and arranging itself in a second-floor apartment without the aid of human.

The Dinosaur and The Missing Link in 1917, a Conquest Pictures production distributed by Thomas Edison.

Work of Willis O'Brien as promised. O'Brien designed sets and dinosaur figures which were built by Marcel Delgado for a shot-lived project Creation in 1931. The plot was to have featured a submarine discovering a lost island where dinosaurs still roam.

This is not clay, it is wooden man. Kinex Studio created Chip In The Land Of Whiz in 1929 is a toyland adventure. Gingerbread man and Doodlebugville all feature character crafted out of wood and other materials in a much more "cartoon" like style, where as realistic bugs and human dolls were predominant characters in earlier stop-motion film.

An animator named Ladislaw Starewicz produced second film, The Revenged of the Kinema ToGraph Cameraman in 1912. This film showed a lecherous couple, the Beetles has a humorous edge in that a grasshopper cameraman provides the climax by showing his secretly-captured film at a cinema where the Beetles are in attendance. Husband and wife betray each other and yet they remain together in the end of the story with a bottle of wine. Starewicz used actual preserved insects as subject in this film.