Claymation

What is Claymation?:

Claymation is a form of stop animation using clay. Claymation involves using objects or characters sculpted from clay or other mouldable material and then taking sequence of still pictures that are replayed rapidly to create illusion of movement.  

The advantages and disadvantages of Claymation: 

The advantages of clay animation that clay is a very adaptable that can be moulded and shaped in to anything beyond imagination the creators can come up with. Disadvantages of Claymation that the production time and cost to create feature-length Claymation films is too much compared to other forms of animation because the same characters may need to be sculpted hundreds of times to develop what they will do or say depending on the length of production and varieties of materials are required to produce them.

Claymation used in media:

In Tim Burton’s movie, “Nightmare before Christmas”, the filmmakers constructed 227 clay puppets to represent the characters in the movie with Jack Skellington having around four hundred heads, allowing the expression of every possible emotion during the motion in each frame.

Claymation can also be used in the music media, for example the Music Video of Love Automatic's "Nightmare" was produced in Claymation by Lee Hard Castle who is Writer, director, and animator that aims to make the world’s first claysploitation a genre that mixes horror and gore with clay animation.




Experiment:

In this experiment I've produced an animation based in clay by using the iMotion app for filming and editing the frames in stop motion. Characters are designed out of clay which is a and the story is about a zombie playing fetch with his dog with a ball.