Here's the Animation

Well, it took me a little longer to get the animation up than I expected. I ran into some upload problems and wasn't able to get to reuploading it until now. Here it is though. In the second "scene", the blob is supposed to be sleeping when it bobs its head up and down. It might be hard to tell since there aren't any sound effects.



Also, for the site, I'm still trying to come up with a name. I think I'm probably trying too hard in some ways, but I decided to do some research to try to help come up some ideas. Hopefully I'll find something good sometime so that I can actually start getting some work done.

Random Animation

Here's some of the random animation I did. It's not the best because I did two things that an animator shouldn't do. First of all, I used natural lighting, so the lighting changes because of clouds covering the sun. I also touched the camera to take each picture, so there's a considerable amount of shake. I mainly did it for the animation though, so it doesn't matter too much. Here's the video:



I found that I'm a little bit off with animating at 24 fps, so I set this at 20 fps. That's something I'll have to work on next time.

Here's a random tip that I'll leave you with. If you want to compress something fairly well without much quality loss, use Xvid. I got this video down from around 400mb to 8mb without much change.

Claymation in the Comics

M-Flem-Jr over at Stop Motion Magic posted some of the comics he's found that have been clay animation related. Right now, there's a series of about 12 strips from Heart and the City. I've read a couple of them before and thought about cutting it out but didn't get around to it, good thing Mike did. Here's the link to go see them.

Heart of the City Claymation Comics

Videos: Meet the California Raisins

Here are some videos I watched a long time ago and then rediscovered. All three parts are part of one original production. They were made back in 1988 when the California Raisins were popular. It was done by Will Vinton's studio and runs around 30 minutes in total.

Video: Bored

Here's the short animation/claymation I did not too long ago. It's not the best in the world as it was just something for me to do in a time of boredom. There's also some major flickering in it as well, something that will definitely happen if you stand in between your main light source and what you're animating. I tried out something a little new in this, animating a light.

Best of Aardman

Like the stuff that you've seen from Aardman? Well, I found out that you can see a bunch of their stuff on AtomFilms. There's a collection there called the Best of Aardman and features a lot of the stuff they've made. I think there are around 45 right now (The number may change if more are added or some are taken away from some reason.). Here's the description of it given on the site:

From the Oscar-winning creators of Wallace & Gromit, Creature Comforts and the Angry Kid series, here's a library of top shelf Aardman classics.

So, if you want to sit back and watch some good animation, go check it out.

AtomFilms: The Best of Aardman

Videos: Claymation Documentary

Here's a neat documentary I found while browsing around You Tube one day. I never knew such a thing existed. It was done a while back(1978 to be exact) in the early days of Will Vinton Productions. The whole thing is a little under 20 minutes or so. If you have time, watch it now, if not, come back later.

Camera Mapped Test for The Hole

I don't usually like posting too much in one day, but I'm going to anyways since this is related to the last post. I was actually working on it while writing the last one and had to let it render and upload later. Anyways, this is a test for something that I may try for "The Hole". Basically, it gives me the opportunity to do a more extreme camera move in the world of animation where you would normally have to use a motion control rig. In this test, I used a miniature(didn't have enough clay sitting around to make a large one) version of the character, set it on a table, and took a picture. Then on the computer, I edited the picture so that the background would be flat and so that there would be a hole in the table. After that was done, I went though the process of camera mapping it. Normally I would not try this for an animation, but in this case it is more easily done because of the simple shapes of the set and character(everything has to roughly be modeled in CG, complicated stuff would take forever). After doing it once, I have an idea of how I could probably make it better, but won't share all the details now(those will either come much later on the blog or in a short book on the making of "The Hole"). Here's the video. Keep in mind that it is a test, so it wasn't done to my best ability.

Animator: Andreas Francis

I posted something (the Wallace & Gromit tribute video) of Andreas Francis a while back, and afterwards, I did a little more research and found out more about him and his work. He seems to be a good animator and might even work at Aardman (not sure if it was an internship or work) based on some of the stuff I've read and see. To see some of his animations and still images, which I suggest you do, you can either visit his Deviant Art page or his You Tube page.

Andreas Francis - Deviant Art
Andreas Francis - You Tube

Video: Throwing Ball Claymation

Here's another animation I did today. It's not quite to my satisfaction, but good enough. I may edit the wire out later, if I'm bored sometime, but not now. It's pretty crazy, I've done 7 animations in the past 2 weeks, that's 4 more than I completed in all of last year.

Video: Random Clay Animation

Here's the animation I did. It's pretty random, although you'll probably notice elements from some of the other "blob" animations I've done recently. Since it's just a test, I'm not bothering with editing out the wires.

Video: Water Magic Trick

Here's another animation I did today. I didn't do too good on it however. The arms of the guy kept giving me too much trouble, and I wasn't able to portray it how I imagined. At the start, he's supposed to be rubbing his hands. I guess you do good on some, bad on others, that's what practice is for.



I also went on You Tube today and found a bunch of videos for future blog posts. I'll have to write them up sometime though.

Video: Secondary Colored Worms

Here's another claymation I did today. I did it mainly for fun, no real practicing of timing or anything here. It seemed to have more camera shake in this one, I think the tripod is propped up too high or something. I'd probably be doing another animation tonight if I could, but I don't have any real lighting. I've been using the natural light and it seems to be working pretty good. School starts in about a week, I need to try to get as many done as possible before then, while I'm on a roll. It was inspired partially by this, although his was much more well done.

Nick Park & Aardman Documentary

I found this on Youtube by mistake, and seeing that it was a documentary about Nick Park and Aardman, I had to watch it. It's a pretty interesting documentary, some of the stuff in it was old to me(I've read too many books and articles/watched too many clips I guess), but there still was quite a bit of fresh stuff. It was just a way to learn a little bit more about Nick Park and behind his success and Walace and Gromit. I suggest you watch if if you have the time. It comes in 5 parts, each is about 10 minutes long. I'll embed the first video, but I'll link to the rest. Embedding too many videos on one post makes the page lag a little when loading. Enjoy!



Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Animation Practice: Punching Bag

Did another practice animation, this time of a blue man punching a bag. It was done at 24fps and on the Sony S60 again. I think it turned out pretty good besides a few camera shakes and the bottom of the punching bag wobbling a little. I had to delete a few frames from the punch because I took too many again. I guess I need to learn that you don't need many frames to make something happen fast. I'll probably do another animation sometime soon. Here it is:

Another Animation Test

I was gone for a few days so there wasn't much posting going on, but now that I'm back, here's some more. This morning I did another short animation test. Now, I'm really trying to practice timing and different animation techniques like easing in and out. I think that these things really do help as this looks a lot better than some of the not-so-good stuff I was pulling out a couple years ago. It's still not the best, but it's a start. This time I shot a clip of a blue man clapping, again on the Sony S60, but this time at 24fps. What's nice about not worrying about camera quality and features of the character is that you can really concentrate on animation and timing. I'll have to come up with a few more exercises for myself to really get this stuff down, it'll be good practice for "The Hole" too. Speaking of "The Hole", I bought myself a board to use as the set while I was away. I'm hoping that it won't be too narrow, but if it is, I'll just get another one. Next for that will be to paint it and to build a base for it. Still got to finish that animatic though. Here's the video:



The clap part is a little slow, but I think I realized that I was doing that during the actual animation process. Next time, I'll try to make sure to stay with the number of frames planned.

EDIT:
I edited the video by taking some frames out of the clap section as Ryan suggested and it looks better. Here's the result:

Stop Motion Magic

Stop Motion Magic is a Social Networking site created by Marc Spess (the owner of Animate Clay and creator of Zombie Pirates) and was created to bring different animators together and to just share and help each other learn more about the art. On his About Us page, he says:

Hey, I'm Marc Spess. There's a chance you heard of me - as I also run AnimateClay.com for about eight years now. StopMotionMagic.com is a site I decided to created to be the ultimate place for stop motion animators to network and share their art. So what you see here today is the final site which took months of planning - money and hard work.

If you want to check it out and join, check out the link below. I'm on the site under the user name of kramerklaymation so feel free to add me as a friend if you do join. Have fun!

Stop Motion Magic

Replacement Animation

Yesterday I messed around with the first animation I've done in a long while. It was a simple replacement animation. I had nothing else to do so I gave it a shot, following the template from "Creating 3D Animation". Since I don't have the proper equipment yet(still is being sent over from the US via shipment) I used my old Sony s60. As a result, I could not control the focus nor use a remote so there is some camera shake and flicker due to changes in focus. All in all I think it turned out pretty good. I may do some more practice animation tests if I feel like it and since I can't get the best quality, they truly will be tests. This is 12 fps by the way. If I took doubles, I could've played it back at 24. It took me a while to get it uploaded. Blogger doesn't take over a certain size videos and Youtube was having problems so I ended up using Google Video.

I used 6 different replacement parts in total, as seen above.

Clay Animation Tutorials

Majed Elass over at his site, Clay Animation Tutorials, has some nice video tutorials to learn from. So far he has three done: "How To Make Replacement Mouths", "How To Make A 6 Inch Armature Tutorial", and "How To Keep Your Puppets Standing With Out a Tie down Tutorial!" (These link directly to their video page and not to the site). They're pretty well done and are a good way to learn something new. The site also has a blog, photos, store, and a featured video page. They are updated from time to time, depending on how busy he is. I've linked to both the site and his Stop Motion Magic page below.

Clay Animation Tutorials
Stop Motion Magic Page

Vince Backeberg's FAQ on Claymation

Here's a nice FAQ done by Vince Backeberg about clay animation. It's got some nice information on it. The link is below.

Vince Backeberg Claymation FAQ