Claymation Evalutation

Clay animation or claymation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background is usually made of Plasticine clay.
For our animation we used Morph as inspiration and created our own unique characters and used 'iStopMotion' to take single frames of the clay figures.


We started off by getting a pice of plasticine and rolling it into a ball and then stretched it out to form a character then kept playing around with it till we were happy with it then added details to the figure then after we had made our story and created a story board we began to film using the stop motion program on the Mac to film the story frame by frame to form the final out come.


I was happy with the final out come but feel that it could have been better if we had spent more time on it and had made it a bit longer time but overall it came out good and got the story across and showed that we have learnt the basic skills for claymation and stop motion animation. 


Morph is a animated plasticine stop-motion character who appeared with Tony Hart in 1977 on several of his UK TV programmes:Take Hart and Hartbeat. Morph was made for the BBC by Aardman Animations who later became famous for Wallace and Gromit. I think what makes Morph so significant to the success of Aardman is the fact that he's is simple but very cleverly created and made to fit into the storys which show the potential of claymation which opened more doors for them to go on and do bigger things like 'Chicken Run' and other successful Clay animated movies.


One of the strengths of claymation is that anyone can do it and theres no right way of making a character so its simple and can be done with just clay and a camera so not much equipment is needed, Another strength is that you can create almost anything basically your imagination is what limits you, Its a very simple proses so it can be done anywhere and unlike cut-out animation it doesn't have lots of bits of paper because its just clay you don't really have to worry about losing a pice or two.


The limitations of claymation are that it can be very time consuming to craft a very detailed character and keep him the same in each frame and you also might need to create clothes for it and other stuff, Another limitation is that it can get frustrating and fiddle at times which can be off putting for most also getting it into the position that you want can result in bits falling off or simply not staying where you want it to stay. 


Claymation in comparison to other forms of animation I think is much better because you can do a lot more and even use real life objects in your work and it had very small limiting factors and it doesn't need many things to start so it can be done anywhere by anyone unlike cutout which needs lots of bits and bobs and hours of cutting magazines,sticking them into place,keeping all the bits together so they don't get lost and still it provides a very wide range of things that can be done which cant be done with a Zeetorpe. Although its hard to master and can be frustrating at times but I think its the best form of animation because its simple and easy and you can get much better results once you mastered it.