Clay Animation 10:49

Clay animation is one of the many forms we see in todays stop motion animation. Clay is a good item to use in the formation of stop motion animation because it is deformable and can easily be changed from its original creation, also clay can be manually moved rather than acting as the actor would have to remember the position that they were in. In our stop motion ident for the childrens TV station "Cbeebies" we will be using plasticine clay in bright colours to attract the childs attention and seem child attention. Primary colours are more widely used in childrens programming rather than dull bland colours such as grey as primary colours are bright and attract the attention of the children.

In clay animation each item is sculpted, usually around a skeleton architecture. In our meeting we had many ideas of what we would be doing, these included the small "blob-like" creatures currently used on the Cbeebies idents or using a morph like creation. We would most likely be creating a centre object and have the action occuring around this centre item. We have not yet decided on what the centre object may be, we will come to this conclusion in a second meeting after each group member has conducted their research. If we were to go with the "blob-like" idea then the clay would take on a freeform motion where as the morph idea would involve using character motion where the character will be recognizable throughout the motion. An idea we looked in to during the meeting involved strata-cut animation which would involve slicing a loaf of clay in to various scenes and then moulding from that but we felt that would limit the amount of creativity we could put in to producing the ident and would not be suitable for the station we have decided to create for; Cbeebies.

The creation process
When creating our stop motion ident we will need plasticine or polymer clay as well as wire to hold the pieces together and give them a spinal structure.

The wire will then be beant in to shape and then we will mould the clay on to this structure.

We will most likely need to use a base clay which we can add clay on to, for this we will use a neutral colour such as grey.

We will then add the following layers of clay on to this.

The clay shall then be animated, for this we shall be using a digital camera, perhaps on a tripod so we can keep a consistant camera shot.

We will use a flat service to base the creations on.

We will then move the figure in to its next position.

We shall then load the images on to a computer and this will then be pieced together to form a motion using software such as Pinnacle or Power Director.

The chosen form of clay the group shall be using is Plasticine clay as this clay does not harden as easy as other forms of clay and we will be producing this motion over the course of a few days.

Clay animation is a great technique to use but the process can get tiring in long productions which involve a lot of frames which is why we don't often see this used in long processes with not many resources. As we are working in a team of four and have a certain amount of plasticine, this technique will be suitable for our ident production.