Claymation: Issues

I haven’t posted anything in a while, because I’ve been too busy working. And I have realized one thing. CLAYMATION IS REALLY DIFFICULT. Of course I knew this going into this project, but for some reason, I decided to give it a go. I have the set up, the characters, some backgrounds, a green screen and a stop-motion program, yet I’m struggling a lot. I think the trick is that I’m doing it alone.

I always thought that time was going to be the issue considering I have seen films and videos of other students in which their claymations have taken them years. I even watched a Tim Burton master class (http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/watch-70-minute-animation-masterclass-with-tim-burton-20130806) hoping that I would learn something. The animations of the students were not the best I’ve ever seen and it had taken them all at least a year. The whole time I watched I couldn’t help but think, hey they aren’t that great… Or so I thought. Until I started doing it. Then I started to believe they were wonderful.

My biggest advice for if you are going to do a claymation is not what you think. It’s not: don’t do it in your apartment. It’s not: don’t do it in a short period of time. It’s if you want to create a claymation recruit another pair of hands. I am having a lot of issues, but the main one is that I don’t have enough hands to move things, hit a button and the 10 other things I need to do at once.

I had a few serious issues while trying to make my figures move. The first was making my character walk. Making a character walk is difficult on its own. I tried my best to follow the model to the right, but it is difficult. One must constantly bend the wires and reform the clay to ensure that the clay covers everything. This was where I ran into trouble. My figures often broke or the clay revealed the wire.  Plus the green screen I purchased had a texture, which wasn’t visible from far away. Yet when I got too close or the figures pressed up against the screen, the texture was easily visible. I was constantly having to fix rips and tears in the figures.

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