Calling for Help

I was thinking today that maybe some of you guys that read this blog could help me out on the new site a little. Basically I need help collecting some resources. It's something that's not normally the easiest for me to do because of my internet situation, but with a little help, it will make it less painful for me as well as speed things up with the process of getting this new site done.

Basically, I need any links or You Tube videos that you have saved or know of that you think would be worth sharing. These links don't necessarily have to do specifically about clay animation. Here's a list of a few things that I'm looking for, but this list doesn't cover everything. The only requirement is that they are quality. I don't want to have to sort through a bunch of stuff that I wont share. If you think they're good, chances are they will be.

Learning and Informational Videos and Sites
These can be about anything related to stop motion. Whether it's about mold making, film making, armature making, photography, brickfilms, or anything else related, I want it.

Entertainment Videos
I want to create a collection of good stop motion videos that are entertaining. These can range from clips, to episodes, to advertisements. They can be general stop motion, claymation, brickfilms, and whatever other forms of stop motion there are out there. No beginner animations that you just want to show off please. I want these to be relaxing and interesting to watch. They should be good examples of film or animation.


I guess that actually pretty much sums it up. If you would like to submit the links, just post them in a comment, or email them to me at kramer.klaymation(at)gmail.com. Replace the (at) with a @. Thanks bunches and I appreciate your help. By helping me, you'll be helping others.

Light Painting

Light painting is something that I've experimented somewhat with still images, but I'd like to try putting more of them together to form an animation. Light painting is pretty much what it sounds like; you take a light and draw a picture in mid air in from of a camera. Since the camera has a long exposure time, the path of the flash light or what ever you're holding gets recorded onto the final image(cameras take in light to make the image). If you change the path you draw a little each time and do a bunch of them and put them together, you'll have a light painting animation. The final output looks really neat and is probably really fun to make. Below I've included a few videos from You Tube. Some are tutorial videos while others are just cool examples. If you're into animation and you have a camera that you can control shutter speed with, I encourage you to take a friend out and try this sometime. I know I will when I have the chance.

Awesome Tutorial Video


Example Video 1


Actual Sprint Commercial


Have fun and go make some awesome stuff. Remember pre-planning might help you make sometime more story oriented or thoughtful than sometime random. Something thought provoking will get more response than something random.

Stanley and the Dinosaurs

Here's another one of the shows I watched when I was little. It's not claymation, but still stop motion nonetheless. I remembered it a while ago and realized that it probably was, then not too long ago I found it on You Tube. I think the puppets are probably some kind of latex or something. Anyways, here are the videos.

More Video Work

Today I did a lot of work with the videos; I edited some and redid others. I also converted them to a .flv format in preparation for the site. The sizes of them will be slightly(you can hardly tell) larger than they are now, but hopefully the quality will be a little better. Click on the image above to view them larger. I still have to do a few more, but I have to find the images somewhere in my masses of files if they still exist. If they no longer exist on the computer, I probably have a burned copy of them somewhere.

As for the animatic, I hope to do some kind of animating marathon or something so that I can get it finished up during summer break. I doubt that I'll have tons of time once school starts. I may try to animate maybe 1-2 hours a day if I can get myself to. If you want to see a little of how it looks, I've included a short test clip that I did below. Sorry for the quality, I compressed it a little too much. Depending on the render times, I may cut down on a few amenities(reflections, motion blur, ect.) to speed up progress.

LSW: The mad project

Here's a link to a site I think you should check out about a guy with a goal to remake StarWars Episode 4 using Lego animation. I first saw it quite a while ago, I don't remember when, but I thought it was neat back then and still do. Sadly, it seems that this site has been dead for quite a while now though, but it still has some cools stuff in it about how he did some of the effects that he did. Even though this is not claymation, it is still stop motion and I found it interesting seeing some of the techniques he used to complete part of his goal. He uses blue screen to do some of his space scenes, tracks, and other neat tricks to make things look like they're flying and stuff. So check it out, even if you don't watch the videos, take a look at the "making of" page.

http://www.lswproject.com/