Claymation, or Clay animation is a film made by all pictures - they create an object out of playdoh or anything breakable, and they put it onto the camera scence, where the director of the film would take a picture, move the object one little space, take another picture, move the object on more little space etc etc; and soon you'll get the idea of 100+ pictures made together to create one animation.
Claymation is takes a long time to make. Have you ever known famous claymationers? Most of them make movies out of claymation, and the movies are 2 hours long! Imagine how many pictures they had to take, how many models they had to build, and how much time it took to upload it onto the computer - or what happened when the camera ran out of space? That is sure a long time.
Producing a stop motion animation using clay is extremely laborious. Normal film runs at 24 frames per second (FPS). With the standard practice of "doubles" or "twos" (double-framing - exposing 2 frames for each shot), 12 changes are usually made for one second of film movement. For a 30-minute movie, there would be approximately 21,600 stops to change the figures for the frames. For a full length (90 min) movie, there would be approximately 64,800 stops and possibly far more if parts were shot with "singles" or "ones" (one frame exposed for each shot).
Great care must be taken to ensure the object is not altered by accident, by even slight smudges, dirt, hair, or even dust. For feature-length productions, the use of clay has generally been supplanted by rubber silicone and resin-cast components. One foam-rubber process has been coined as Foamation by Will Vinton. However, clay remains a viable animation material where a particular aesthetic is desired.
Clay animation can take several forms:
"Freeform" clay animation is an informal term where the shape of the clay changes radically as the animation progresses, such as in the work of Eliot Noyes Jr and Church of the Sub-Genius co-founder Ivan Stang's animated films. Or clay can take the form of "character" clay animation where the clay maintains a recognizable character throughout a shot, as in Art Clokey's and Will Vinton's films.
One variation of clay animation is strata-cut animation in which a long bread-like loaf of clay, internally packed tight and loaded with varying imagery, is sliced into thin sheets, with the camera taking a frame of the end of the loaf for each cut, eventually revealing the movement of the internal images within. Pioneered in both clay and blocks of wax by German animator Oskar Fischinger during the 1920s and 30s, the technique was revived and highly refined in the mid-90s by David Daniels, an associate of Will Vinton, in his 16-minute short film Buzz Box.
Another clay animation technique, and blurring the distinction between stop motion and traditional flat animation, is called clay painting (which is also a variation of the direct manipulation animation process) where clay is placed on a flat surface and moved like wet oil paints as on a traditional artistic canvas to produce any style of images, but with a clay "look" to them.
Pioneering this technique was one-time Vinton animator Joan Gratz, first in her Oscar-nominated film The Creation (1980) and then in her Oscar-winning Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase filmed in 1992.
A variation of this technique was developed by another Vinton animator, Craig Bartlett, for his series of "Arnold" short films, also made during the 90s, in which he not only used clay painting, but sometimes built up clay images that rose off the plane of the flat support platform, toward the camera lens, to give a more 3-D stop-motion look to his films.
A sub-variation of clay animation can be informally called "clay melting". Any kind of heat source can be applied on or near (or below) clay to cause it to melt while an animation camera on a time-lapse setting slowly films the process. An example of this can be seen in Vinton's early short clay-animated film, Closed Mondays, (co-produced by animator Bob Gardiner) at the end of the computer sequence.
Some of the best known clay animated works include the Gumby series of television shows created by Art Clokey and the advertisements made for the California Raisin Advisory Board by the Will Vinton studio. Clay animation has also been used in Academy-Award-winning short films such as Closed Mondays (Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner, 1974), Creature Comforts (Aardman, 1989), all three Wallace & Gromit short films, created by Nick Park of Aardman Animation. Aardman also created The Presentators (a series of one-minute clay animation short films aired on Nicktoons). Some clay animations have been popular online, on such sites as Newgrounds.
Claymation is definitely one of the most-major filmed historys, and is a major change to the stop animation and the clay animation.
