Clay animation

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. In clay animation, each object is sculpted in clay or a similarly pliable material such as Plasticine. Using Plactercine is a very flexible method of animation because it is very easy to create characters exactly how you want it and to move objects such as arms and legs correctly to look life like. Clay animation is 3D animation so you are able to move the objects freely in most dimensions, able to lift & also turn over objects which you can't do in cut out animation because it is 2 dimension.  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. To achieve the best results, a consistent shooting environment is needed to maintain the illusion ofcontinuity. This means paying special attention to maintaining consistent lighting and object placement and working in a calm environment.
Great care must be taken to ensure that the object is not altered by accident


Clay animation has been around for decades and has been popular particularly for children’s television programs and movie-length features
One of the most famous practitioners of the clay animation style was Will Vinton, who began experimenting with the style in the late 1960s and onwards. Some of his most famous productions include ‘Will Vinton’s A Claymation Christmas Celebration’ (1987), ‘Return to Oz’, and the television series ‘The PJs’. Will Vinton has trade-marked the term ‘claymation’ as applying specifically to his work and style of clay animation, however the popularity of the technique in recent years has lead to it becoming a generally accepted descriptive term. 


Other examples of other films/tv shows with clay animation is , 'Pingu' , 'Wallace & Gromit' & 'Chicken Run'.


The disadvantages of clay animation is that it is very time consuming , it takes a long process because each frame is created individually. Each second usually varies from 20-24 frames per second.

Clay Animation

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A Zoetrope is a device for giving an illusion of motion, consisting of a slitteddrum that, when whirled, shows a succession of images placed opposite the slits within the drum as one moving image.  The Zoetrope is based on the same principle as the phenakistiscope, but is cylindrical in shape. This enabled several people at the same time to view the moving pictures - an advance over the single spectator of the earlier toy. The English mathematicianW.G. Horner was the first to describe the zoetrope, calling it the 'daedaleum'.


The zoetrope, or Wheel of Life, was another early optical toy. The cycles have to be very simple, and are made of only 12-14 images.

Eadward Muybridge

Eadward Muybridge was a British photographer who is well know for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography. Eadweard developed a fast camera shutter and used other state of the art techniques of his day to make the first photographs that show sequences of movement. In 1879 the Zoopraxiscope was developed, which projected a series of images in successive phases of movement obtained through the use of multiple cameras. Eadweard Muybridge's most famous motion studies, a row of cameras snapped a dozen or more photographs of a passing horse; the public was astonished to see proof that a trotting horse can simultaneously have all four hooves off the ground. For this experiment Muybridge devised a fast camera shutter and used a new, more sensitive photographic process, both of which dramatically reduced exposure time and produced crisp images of moving objects.

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