New clay animation

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I just finished up a clay animated film. It's reasonably short, only 70 seconds.

(It's in HD so set the image size to 720 for best quality)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7WOXD3hMnc[/youtube]

I've posted these before, but here's a link to the initial animation test where I started to come up with the idea for the above film.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqrt_3M7oTo[/youtube]

Ahaha! I love it... I just started working on my own stop motion animation project. Currently, I'm in the stages of scripting. Your video was nicely done and super unique... I really do like it

Your animation was pretty good. I prefer silicone or latex puppets I use to use wire armatures but they kept snapping. I have been thinking of doing it again especially since I now know how to make ball and socket armatures. Animating with clay always ended up in failure for me. The wire armature seemed to always find its way out becoming exposed. What frame rate did you use? Did you shoot on ones or twos? What camera did you use? I am hoping to get a Panasonic DMC-FZ50 since has no to little flicker between shots. what program did you use to do your animation with?

Thanks for the comments.

The film was shot on a Canon 5D Mk 2 DSLR. With Lightroom 3, you can tether the camera to the computer and fire it directly from the program. This allowed me to capture the frames and toggle back and forth to see how the animation was playing. While I could have shot without tethering the camera, this made it a lot easier to judge how the animation was working as I did it.

The animation was shot at 12 fps, shooting only one frame for each move. I knew in advance that I would put it into After Effects and bring it up to 24 fps.

Other technical notes: The animation was shot against a greenscreen and later keyed in Shake. I had to do some rotoscoping with the pale green tie and the Hand Tooth thing's shoe. The background and the front curtain were drawn in Illustrator and added in After Effects.

I kind of like the rough nature of clay animation. While I've enjoyed seeing some pretty pristine, clean looking animation, my personal preference is for something that looks a bit more hand made and rough. I find the things I shoot in HD video need to go through an image degrading pass before I am happy.

Instead of using wire armatures inside the models, I used twisted aluminum foil. I did have the armatures poking out of the clay a few times, but the animation wasn't so complex that this posed much of a problem.

In regard to flicker, after a few bad time lapse shots, I discovered that DSLRs have too many features that try to "optimize" color balance, exposure and other things. I think there were about 5 default settings on the 5D that I had to shut off to prevent flicker from frame to frame. But once I shut those off, the image is remarkably steady.

Do you have any of your work available for viewing? I know nothing about silicone and latex puppets. It sounds like they could be fun to work with.

Lars

I love the eyeball.

Wow - pretty good!! ! But very freaky.... I felt sorry for that yellow winged creature in the first one, until he got his eye back of course. Good luck with your animation.

I've done quite a bit of clay animation but I can't access it unfortunately, otherwise I'd post mine.

it was all on super-8 film stock and was mostly walk cycles, push-pull exercises, jump with arial rigging, and weight simulation. I sold my projector to a friend and I think he has all my super-8 films. I would of loved to have attempted voice sync with changeable heads or mouths.I think there is a program called mocking bird that makes lip sync easier.

When I was doing it I made 12" figures out of roma plastina then made a ultracast 30 molds. I used foam latex over an aluminum armature. The armature always snapped and the elbow and knee joints always ripped from over use. I fixed the joints with latex and little bits of tissue paper. Today I would use silicone I heard you need really tight ball and socket armatures but silicone takes forever to tear at the joints.

Have you ever seen these web sites?
www.stopmotionanimation.com
www.animateclay.com

Here is some good behind the scene videoes you might find useful

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agJP-P68EsQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGr40LmG ... N8bHn6lqKU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBp85mJZ ... UcPwhg2s0Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1WsgasZ ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1WsgasZ ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqsYyEHJ ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mffFaYpBZ4

Last edited by Todesking on 14 Jun 2010, 1:15 am, edited 2 times in total.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBGGAjMg9vw[/youtube]