Claymation animation

Claymation Animation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each piece in the frame can be deformed which is usually made of Plasticine clay, as the most popular type of material used.  The way the illusion of movement is created is by moving the clay in different positions then photographing each new shape, then when you edit together, adding all the frames then makes clay appear to move. There is not a huge amount of equipment needed to perform this animation platform as you mainly need the clay and camera equipment. The amount of clay can vary depending on the scale of animation you want to perform. The other equipment could be sets, an animation that is considered one of the most popular claymation is Morph. It has been around since 1977 which was created by Peter lord which has a simple but effective use of claymation animation. The character itself can move in any shape and has an extremely basic layout which uses its eyes and mouth to create most of the expression. To create this show they needed many morphs for one character as the clay would wear out after a while. Each episode only lasts a certain amount of time roughly a minute. Another example is Wallace and Gromit which similar to Morph is produced by Aardman, it has been around since 1972 created by Peter Lord and David Sproxton who wanted to realise their dream of producing an animation motion picture. One other which was released in 1986 called Pingu, which is a TV series which ran to 2000. It was created by Omar Gutmann who ha developed the idea to not have dialogue have all the characters squeak and make sounds so we interpret what they are saying through tone of voice and non verbal communication. A negative about this animation is that it has limitations to how much you can create as it has to be able to function with the clay as you have to move it constantly, another limitation is that you have to keep the clay cool otherwise it can start to weaken with the heat and u cannot hold the clay in the position you want and it can hurt the final product. I then created my own claymation which was a fairly long process as you have to prepare for each shot and an abundance of frames have to be taken to finally reach several seconds . It was an interesting process as we could make any story we wanted so we had to have several characters and add them in. My Favourite scene was with the  morph character was climbing up the side of the computer, to improve I would have a more coherent story and more character developing.