A Guide to Claymation

History

Clay animation first began in the late 1800s with the advent of plasticine. However, it wasn't until the mid-1960s that clay animation began to truly take off. This was mainly due to the efforts of Art Clokey and his creation, Gumby. Clay animation experienced a resurgence in the 1980s with the California Raisins commercials and TV specials. Twenty years later, clay animation came back into the forefront with movies such as "Chicken Run" and "Coraline."

One of the most influential clay animation pioneers is Will Vinton, who coined the term "claymation." His studio produced the classic California Raisins commercials and created one of the last pure clay animation movies, "The Adventures of Mark Twain." He has also had a huge impact on popular culture today by animating, albeit with a computer, the talking M&Ms. His company, Will Vinton Studios, later became LAIKA and produced the animated masterpiece, "Coraline."

The process for creating clay animation relies on creating the illusion of movement one frame at a time. This is done by creating characters and sets from clay and moving a character a tiny amount, snapping a picture, then moving a character another small amount and snapping another picture. This process is extremely labor intensive. Every single motion seen on the screen needs to be physically moved by a person, one centimeter at a time for hundreds of pictures.

There are many difficulties associated with creating clay animation. The main difficulty is time, but there are numerous others. Creating clay animation can be physically painful for the artists, as they have to carefully reach around sculpted objects, set pieces and scenery to reach a character that needs to be moved. Lighting is also difficult in clay animation. This is because lights for the sets were created for human actors. When you light a miniature set with clay figures using large human scale lights you can end up casting what look like gigantic shadows. Because of this, animators have to spend time arranging lights to minimize shadows.

The principle behind clay animation is called stop-motion animation. This technique has been used for special effects in hundreds of movies. "King Kong," "Jason and the Argonauts" and even "Star Wars" made use of stop-motion animation. Classic Christmas programming such as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" by Rankin and Bass made use of this technique as well. These movies and television specials have been parodied, copied and used as a source of inspiration for a new generation of special-effects producers.