Clay animation or claymation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually Plasticine clay.

Characters in the animated series From Il'ich to Kuzmich

A clay animation scene from a Finnish TV commercial^[1]

All traditional animation is produced in a similar fashion, whether done through cel animation or stop motion. Each frame, or still picture, is recorded on film or digital media and then played back in rapid succession. When played back at a frame rate greater than 10–12 frames per second, a fairly convincing illusion of continuous motion is achieved. While the playback feature creating an illusion is true of all moving images (from zoetrope to films to videogames), the techniques involved in creating CGI are generally removed from a frame-by-frame process.

Technique[link]

In clay animation, each object is sculpted in clay or a similarly pliable material such as Plasticine, usually around a wire skeleton called an armature. As in other forms of object animation, the object is arranged on the set (background), a film frame is exposed, and the object or character is then moved slightly by hand. Another frame is taken, and the object is moved slightly again. This cycle is repeated until the animator has achieved the desired amount of film. The human mind processes the series of slightly changing, rapidly playing images as motion, hence making it appear that the object is moving by itself. To achieve the best results, a consistent shooting environment is needed to maintain the illusion of continuity. This means paying special attention to maintaining consistent lighting and object placement and working in a calm environment.

Production[link]

Producing a stop-motion animation using clay is extremely laborious. Normal film runs at 24 frames per second (frame/s). With the standard practice of "doubles" or "twos" (double-framing, exposing two frames for each shot), 12 changes are usually made for one second of film movement. For a 30-minute movie, there would be approximately 21,600 stops to change the figures for the frames. For a full-length (90-minute) movie, there would be approximately 64,800 stops, and possibly far more if parts were shot with "singles" or "ones" (one frame exposed for each shot). Great care must be taken to ensure that the object is not altered by accident, by even slight smudges, dirt, hair, or even dust. For feature-length productions, the use of clay has generally been supplanted by rubber silicone and resin-cast components. One foam-rubber process has been coined as "Foamation" by Will Vinton. However, clay remains a viable animation material where a particular aesthetic is desired.

A subvariation of clay animation can be informally called "clay melting".^{[citation needed]} Any kind of heat source can be applied on or near (or below) clay to cause it to melt while an animation camera on a time-lapse setting slowly films the process. An example of this can be seen in Vinton's early short clay-animated film "Closed Mondays" (coproduced by animator Bob Gardiner) at the end of the computer sequence. A similar technique was used in the climax scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark to "melt" the faces of the antagonists.

Types[link]

Clay animation can take several forms:

"Freeform" clay animation is an informal term referring to the process in which the shape of the clay changes radically as the animation progresses, such as in the work of Eliot Noyes, Jr. and Ivan Stang's animated films. Clay can also take the form of "character" clay animation, where the clay maintains a recognizable character throughout a shot,^[2] as in Art Clokey's and Will Vinton's films.

One variation of clay animation is strata-cut animation, in which a long bread-like loaf of clay, internally packed tight and loaded with varying imagery, is sliced into thin sheets, with the camera taking a frame of the end of the loaf for each cut, eventually revealing the movement of the internal images within. Pioneered in both clay and blocks of wax by German animator Oskar Fischinger during the 1920s and 1930s, the technique was revived and highly refined in the mid-1990s by David Daniels, an associate of Will Vinton, in his 16-minute short film "Buzz Box".

Another clay-animation technique, one that blurs the distinction between stop motion and traditional flat animation, is called clay painting (also a variation of the direct manipulation animation process), wherein clay is placed on a flat surface and moved like wet oil paints (as on a traditional artist's canvas) to produce any style of images, but with a clay look to them.

History[link]

This section requires expansion.

Clay-animated films were produced in the United States as early as 1908, when Edison Manufacturing released a trick film entitled The Sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Dream. In 1916, clay animation became something of a fad, as an East Coast artist named Helena Smith Dayton and a West Coast animator named Willie Hopkins produced clay-animated films on a wide range of subjects. Hopkins in particular was quite prolific, producing over fifty clay-animated segments for the weekly Universal Screen Magazine. By the 1920s, cartoon animation using either cels or the slash system was firmly established as the dominant mode of animation production. Increasingly, three-dimensional forms such as clay were driven into relative obscurity as the cel method became the preferred method for the studio cartoon.

Nevertheless, in 1921, clay animation appeared in a film called "Modeling", an Out of the Inkwell film from the newly formed Fleischer Brothers studio. "Modeling" is one of the few known shorts using clay that was released during the 1920s. "Modeling" included animated clay in eight shots, a novel integration of the technique into an existing cartoon series and one of the rare uses of clay animation in a theatrical short from the 1920s.

Pioneering the clay-painting technique was one-time Vinton animator Joan Gratz, first in her Oscar-nominated film The Creation (1980), and then in her Oscar-winning Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase, filmed in 1992.

In 1972, at Marc Chinoy's Cineplast Films Studio in Munich, Germany, André Roche created a set of clay-animated German-language-instruction films (for non-German-speaking children) called Kli-Kla-Klawitter for the Second German TV-Channel; and another one for a traffic education series, Herr Daniel paßt auf ("Mr. Daniel Pays Attention").

A variation of clay animation was developed by another Vinton animator, Craig Bartlett, for his series of Arnold short films (also made in the '90s), in which he not only used clay painting but sometimes built up clay images that rose off the plane of the flat support platform toward the camera lens to give a more 3-D stop-motion look to his films.

Gumbasia, First stop motion clay animation movie by Art Clokey

Some of the best-known clay-animated works include the Gumby series of television show segments (created by Art Clokey), the TV commercial made for the California Raisin Advisory Board by Vinton's studio and The WB's The PJs, produced by and featuring the voice of Eddie Murphy. Clay animation has also been used in Academy Award-winning short films such as "Closed Mondays" (Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner, 1974), "The Sand Castle" (1977), "Creature Comforts" (Aardman, 1989), and all four Wallace & Gromit short films, created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. Aardman also created The Presentators, a series of one-minute clay-animation/CGI short films aired on Nickelodeon UK. Some clay animations appear online, on such sites as Newgrounds.

Several computer games have also been produced using clay animation, including The Neverhood, Clay Fighter, Platypus, Clay Moon (iPhone app), and Primal Rage. Television commercials have also utilized the clay animation, such as the Chevron Cars ads, produced by Aardman Studios. Besides commercials, clay animation has also been popularized in recent years by children's shows such as Bob the Builder and The Koala Brothers, as well as adult-oriented shows on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup, including Robot Chicken (which uses clay animation and action figures as stop-motion puppets in conjunction) and Moral Orel. Many independent young filmmakers have used clay animation features for internet viewing.

Flushed Away is a CGI replication of clay animation.

Probably the most spectacular use of model animation for a computer game was for the Virgin Interactive Entertainment Mythos game Magic and Mayhem (1998), for which stop-motion animator and special-effects expert Alan Friswell constructed over 25 monsters and mythological characters utilising both modelling clay and latex rubber, over wire and ball-and-socket skeletons. Rather than building the models in the cartoon-like style of Wallace and Gromit, Friswell constructed the figures after the designs of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen to make them more compatible with the game's often violent playing tactics.

Claymation[link]

The term Claymation is a registered trademark in the United States, registered by Will Vinton in 1978 to describe his clay-animated films. While the word is not considered a genericized trademark, it has become a trademark that is often used generically in the U.S. and is also a term used in the UK to refer to any animation using Plasticine or similar substance.

See also[link]

• List of films featuring clay animation

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

• Taylor, Richard. The Encyclopedia of Animation Techniques. Running Press, Philadelphia, 1996. ISBN 1-56138-531-X
• Lord, Peter and Brian Sibley. Creating 3-D Animation. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1998. ISBN 0-8109-1996-6

Will Vinton (born November 17, 1947) is an American director and producer of animated films. He was born in McMinnville, Oregon, near Portland. He has won an Oscar for his work, and several Emmy Awards and Clio Awards for the work of his studio.

Education[link]

During the 1960s, Vinton studied physics, architecture and filmmaking at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was influenced by the work of Antoni Gaudi.^{[citation needed]} During this time, Vinton made a black-and-white feature-length documentary film about the California counter-culture movement titled Gone For a Better Deal, which toured college campuses in various film festivals of the time. Two more films about student protest followed, Berkeley Games and First Ten Days, as well a narrative short Reply, and his first animation, Culture Shock.^[1]

Career[link]

Collaboration with Bob Gardiner[link]

Meeting clay animator Bob Gardiner in the Berkeley, California area in the early 1970s, Vinton brought him to Portland and the two commandeered Vinton's home basement to make a quick 1½-minute test film of clay animation (and the supporting armatures) called Wobbly Wino, completed in early 1973. Gardiner refined his sculpting and animation skills while Vinton built a system for animating his Bolex Rex-5 16mm camera and the two began work in mid-1973 on an 8-minute 16mm short film about a drunk wino who stumbles into a closed art museum and interacts with the paintings and sculptures. Completed in late 1974 after 14 months of production, the innovative film combined Gardiner's amazing sculpting skills with Vinton's considerable camera skills and Closed Mondays stunned film festival judges around the world. Closed Mondays then won an Oscar for best animated short film in the spring of 1975, the first film produced in Portland to do so.

Vinton and Gardiner parted ways during the production of their second short film, Mountain Music completed by Vinton in 1976. Gardiner focused on producing PSA spots for local political issues (eventually evolving into other artistic media such as music and holograms) while Vinton established Will Vinton Productions (later Will Vinton Studios) in Portland to capitalize on his constantly-improving animation technology. Quickly expanding his studio by hiring new animators, Vinton produced dozens of commercials for regional and then national companies.

Going solo[link]

Still with only a handful of animators, he produced a highly-polished trilogy of acclaimed 27-minute fairy tales in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Martin the Cobbler (1977), Rip Van Winkle (1978, nominated for an Academy Award), and The Little Prince (1979). The trio of films later were collectively theatrically released under the title Trilogy, then to video as The Little Prince and Friends. 1978 also saw the production of a 17-minute documentary featuring the behind-the-scenes technical processes used by Vinton and his animators. Titled Claymation, the term caught on with viewers, and was soon trademarked by Vinton, later to become synonymous with clay animation in general.

The 35mm years[link]

Graduating to 35mm film, other short films were produced during this time: Legacy (1979), Dinosaur (1980), The Creation (directed by Joan Gratz, 1981, Oscar nominated), The Great Cognito (directed by Barry Bruce, 1982, Oscar nominated), and early music videos: a longform "video" called A Christmas Gift for Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary, and Vanz Kant Danz (1987) for Creedence Clearwater Revival's John Fogerty. VHS Video compilations of these films were released in the 1980s as Festival of Claymation and Son of Combo II.

Vinton, himself no longer actively animating by now, also produced special effects scenes for TV shows and movies, including a sequence for Bette Midler's Divine Madness! movie (1980), an Emmy-winning sequence for the Moonlighting TV series (1987), the opening and closing title sequences for the feature comedy film Brain Donors (1992), and his own feature-length movie, The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985). His studio's animation effects for Disney's Return to Oz (1985) were also nominated for a special effects Oscar.

Springing from his work on Return to Oz, Vinton was hired by the Disney studio to produce animation effects for their Michael Jackson multi-media Disneyland-Disney World extravaganza, Captain EO in 1986 (September 12, 1986) and the Speed Demon sequence for Michael Jackson musical anthology feature-length film, Moonwalker (1988).

Prominent among his hundreds of now international commercial creations were the California Raisins, the Domino's Pizza Noid, and the M&M's Red, Yellow, and Green characters.^{[citation needed]}

The California Raisins' first big hit was the song I Heard It Through the Grapevine in the first of their series of TV spots for the California Raisin Advisory Board. They became such a media phenomenon that they went on to star in their own pair of primetime specials for CBS television, Meet the Raisins (1988) and The Raisins Sold Out (1990). A couple music albums of songs from the specials, produced by Nu Shooz pop-rock band leader John Smith were released also.

CBS also commissioned three more prime-time specials, A Claymation Christmas Celebration (1988, an Emmy winner), The Claymation Comedy of Horrors a 1991 Halloween special, and A Claymation Easter (1992) All were later released to video and DVD.

During the 1990s, the Vinton Studios produced the animated series The PJs for the FOX TV network. The series was conceived and executive-produced by Eddie Murphy. Another animated series was produced for the UPN TV network by the Vinton studio, Gary and Mike, now a cult favorite. Both series used a refinement in Vinton's style of dimensional animation. Most of the clay figures were replaced by models of moulded foam rubber, eliminating many of the limitations, and maintenance issues, that are inherent with clay, which had been developed by Vinton and his technical teams as far as it could go. Vinton soon coined a new term for this process, Foamation.

The 1990s also flourished as a variety of Vinton's 400 + animators and technicians flowered with new creations and films of their own using the Vinton facilities called the Walkabout Program. Craig Bartlett created his Arnold Escapes From Church short film (1988) which later spawned Hey Arnold!, a cel-animated series for Nickelodeon and generated two more clay-animated short films, The Arnold Waltz (1990) and Arnold Rides a Chair (1991).

Early digital image capture[link]

The animated series produced for the UPN TV network by the Vinton studio, Gary and Mike was shot using digital video capture system developed for the production by two Vinton engineers Miegel Ginsberg and Gary McRobert.

Computer animation[link]

The late 1990s also saw Vinton adding computer animation to his output, used most visibly for his many M&M's character commercials. A short CGI film, Fluffy, directed by Doug Aberle, was created during this time. Other CGI films — some combined with clay and stop-motion animation — soon followed. Vinton also briefly dabbled in a consumer user form of computer animation software called Playmation, co-developed by animation software writers based at a computer animation company, Hash, Inc., located across the Columbia River in Portland's sister city, Vancouver, Washington. Vinton and associates also dabbled in animation for the internet with a series called Ozzie the Elf.

Will Vinton Studios[link]

By the end of the 1990s, the Vinton studio, seeking funds for more feature-length films, had become big enough to bring in outside investors, which included shoe company Nike, Inc. owner Phil Knight and his son, Travis, who had worked at the studio as an animator.

In 2002, Vinton lost control of the studio he founded after Knight became the majority shareholder and Vinton failed to garner funds for further feature production in Los Angeles, eventually being dismissed from the studio. Vinton later sought damages for this and sued for ownership of his name. In 2005, the successor to Will Vinton Studios, Laika, was founded. Premiere stop-motion animator/director Henry Selick joined the studio as supervising director.

Vinton has since founded a new production facility (with a website), Will Vinton's Freewill Entertainment, also based in Portland. Vinton is also associated with the Portland branch of The Art Institutes in northwest Portland and maintains an office there as an artist in residence. The Creative Artist Agency in Beverly Hills, California represents Vinton for production projects (CAA). Projects include a graphic novel called Jack Hightower produced in tandem with Dark Horse comics located in Milwaukie, Oregon a suburb of Portland. Plans exist for a variety of film, TV, and multi-media projects and one short film, The Morning After, the first produced under Vinton's new banner, which combines CGI and live action, was completed in 2005.

Body of work[link]

Feature films[link]

• The Wild (2006) – executive producer
• Moonwalker (1988) – segment director, producer: Speed Demon
• Festival of Claymation (1987) – director, producer (compilation of short films)
• The Adventures of Mark Twain (1986) – director, producer (Comet Quest: UK: video title)
• Shadow Play (1986) – producer (live-action thriller)
• Return to Oz (1985) – claymation director, producer (Academy Award Nominee)
• Gone for a Better Deal (????) – director, producer (live-action documentary)

TV series[link]

• Gary and Mike, TV Series 23:00 × 13 (executive producer) Prime-time Emmy Award Nominee
• The PJs, TV Series 23:00 × 52 (executive producer) Prime-time Emmy Award Winner
• The California Raisin Show, TV Series 23:00 × 13 (creative director, executive producer)
• Klay's TV, TV Series Pilot (director, executive producer)
• Slacker Cats, TV Series Pilot (executive producer)
• Boyer Brother, TV Series Pilot (executive producer)
• 5 Cecille shorts for Sesame Street, 1:30 min. (producer)
• Hammer Time short for Sesame Street
• Adventures in Wonderland, (animated segments), 4 min. × 30 (executive producer)

TV specials[link]

• Will Vinton's A Claymation Christmas Celebration, 24 min. (director, producer) Prime-time Emmy Winner
• Claymation Easter Special, 24:00 (director) (executive producer, producer) Prime-time Emmy Winner
• Claymation Comedy of Horrors, 24:00 (executive producer, producer) Prime-time Emmy Winner
• Raisins Sold Out: California Raisins II, 24:00 (director, producer) Prime-time Emmy Nominee
• Meet the Raisins!, 24:00 (director, producer, executive producer) Prime-time Emmy Winner

Short films[link]

• The Little Prince, 25 min. (director, producer)
• Martin the Cobbler, 26 min. (director, producer)
• Rip Van Winkle, 26 min. (director, producer) Academy Award Nominee
• The Diary of Adam and Eve, 24 min. (director, producer)
• Closed Mondays, 9 min. (co-creator) Academy Award Winner
• Mr. Resistor, 8 min. (executive producer)
• Bride of Resistor, 6 min. (executive producer)
• Dinosaurs! - A Fun-Filled Trip Back in Time!, 17 min. (director, producer)
• Legacy: A Very Short History of Natural Resources, 7 min. (director, producer)
• A Christmas Gift, 7 min. (director, producer)
• The Great Cognito, 5 min. (director, producer) Academy Award Nominee
• The Creation, 9 min. (director, producer)
• The Morning After^{[disambiguation needed ]}, 7:30 (director, producer)
• Mountain Music, 9 min. (director, producer)
• Wobbly Wino, 2 min. (director, producer)
• Culture Shock^{[disambiguation needed ]}, 17 min. (director, producer)
• Go Down Death, 10 min. (director, producer)
• Claymation, documentary, 18 min. (director, producer)
• Vanz Kant Danz (John Fogerty music video), 6 min. (director, producer)
• The Lost ‘M’ Adventure (3-D short film featuring the M&M's characters), 12 min. (executive producer)
• Xerox and Mylar, 5 min. (executive producer)
• The Stars Came Dreaming, 12 min. (executive producer)
• Day of the Dead, 8 min. (executive producer)

References[link]

Gallivan, Joseph (February 1, 2005). "As animated as it gets". Portland Tribune. http://www.portlandtribune.com/features/story.php?story_id=28137. 

External links[link]

• LAIKA previously Vinton Studios
• Willvinton.net, Vinton's personal history website
• Freewill Entertainment
• Will Vinton at the Internet Movie Database
• Will Vinton Associates at the Big Cartoon DataBase