Video: Human Flip Book

Here's a neat stop motion animation done with shirts. In each frame, the shirt gets changed and a little story gets played out. See it for yourself below.

A Couple of Time Lapses

I was away for a few days and while I was gone, I did a couple of time lapse videos that I thought I'd share. I guess they could be considered a type of stop motion animation, but maybe not quite. Here they are anyways. They're pretty much my first two time lapse videos.


Sun Set Time Lapse from kramerklaymation on Vimeo.


Beach Time Lapse from kramerklaymation on Vimeo.

I used Blender to put the images together and Virtualdub to edit and compress them. The top one was over a period of about an hour while the bottom one was a little shorter. Hope you enjoyed. I also have a new project I'm working on that I'll probably announce sometime soon. Right now it's in the planning stage.

Video: Become

Here's a cool animation done by Dan Mackenzie from Mack Productions. It shows the creation of a clay stop motion animate puppet.

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.

I Broke My Bone Today

No, not a real bone, but a fake one. Today I tried out making a chicken leg out of Premo for 'The Hole', but it didn't work out too good. I was really testing out a new way of baking clay things so that they wouldn't get scorched like they had in the past. I did this by placing the item in a pile of cornstarch in a foil box which then went into my toaster oven. After I baked the perfect bone, however(I baked the bone then applied the meat), I accidentally cracked it while trying to clean it off and give it a little sheen by rubbing it. I applied the meat to the bone afterwords and then baked that. When I took that out I found that the meat had cracked and the bone broke completely. It would probably be salvageable, at least the bone part, but the meat isn't looking quite as I would like it to and I may give it another go later on. At least I know that baking it cornstarch works pretty well. I'll still need to test the original Sculpey in it though because that's the clay that burnt or turned purple all the time for me.

Video: Tips from Javan Ivey

Here's a video done by Indy Mogul where they interviewed Javan Ivey (I've posted about him before) and asked him some easy tips for clay animation and stop motion animation. They're basic tips, but good ones nonetheless. Enjoy.

Animation Ramblings

Here's a blog that I like to keep up with called Animation Ramblings. It's not updated as often as I would like it to be, but it does have good information on it about various animation topics. In the heading of the blog it says, "The latest animation news from London and progress reports on the production of the flea circus film." I guess that pretty much sums it up. It's just another good blog to add to your reader if you have one.

Animation Ramblings Blog