Claymation
Sculpting Tools
Tools are the single most important part for sculpting your oil based clay characters. And guess what the magical, most widely used, best tool there is for sculpting? Your fingers, of course.
Your fingers can squish, smooth, pinch, flatten, and poke clay better then any tool. Good metal, plastic, and wooden tools are important as well. These kinds of tools are used in places where detail is too small for fingers to get into or for sharp clean edges.
Sculpting tools also scoop out holes for eye sockets, and ears, and mouths.
One tool that you wouldn't think of for sculpting oil based clay is the paintbrush, in combination with a 35mm film can. John Ashlee taught me one day when I went to visit his studio, how you take a film can, stuff a wadded up paper towel inside of it, and pour mineral oil inside of it until it is absorbed by the paper towel.
You keep pouring, until the paper is saturated enough to where you can take your finger and rub the paper towel with your finger tip, and get a nice thin coating of oil on it. Then in the future you can just dip your finger in it, and use your oily finger to smooth out your sculptures. You also use the soft but firm bristled paint brush to get onto fine detailed areas using the same process.
Animation Clays
Oil based clay is the best clay for animation. The best brand is called Van Aken. Van Aken clays come in many colors, is very inexpensive, is animation proven and non toxic. Making new colors out of existing colors from this brand is extremely simple to do. All you will need is a double boiler, a large piece of plastic wrap, and a spatula.
First, boil some water in the double boiler, and place the base color clay you want to change the color of, in the top pot. Once it is fully melted, place different colors of small pieces of clay into the pot to modify the base color. Keep mixing until the clay is completely fluid, and adjust the colors accordingly. Next, place a long piece of plastic wrap on a level table top.
When you have the color clay you want, pour the still melted clay on the plastic wrap slowly, until it is all out of the pot. Any clay left in the pot should be quickly rubbed out with a paper towel so the next time you mix clay in your pot, the new colors wont mix with the old colors. One word of advice when doing this, is to make sure you have plenty of fresh air in your house because the oil can evaporate into the air and make you sick. Also, melted clay can stick to you if it is spilled onto you, and will burn. Trust me, I have done it a few times and it hurts quite nicely. So use common sense, or ask an adult for help.
Character Accessories
Accessories are things on clay characters that are made out of different materials other then the oil based clay. They include making parts out of hardening clay, plastic, metal, or any other material that is hard. As you can see in the picture, some of the most useful things are plastic beads for eyes, teeth sculpted from hardening clay, which has been painted, and there are many more.
In the short film by Nick Park, he sculpted the entire upper body of Wallace from hardening clay, and then painted it to look like clay. The arms, head and legs were to be animated, so they were made from oil based clay. It is a very smart idea for a character because you can't accidentally squish the clay or ding it with tools when you animate it. Fake ties, pens, pencils, calculators, swords, guns, bowling balls, baseball bats, or any external things you are not going to animate on a character can be made from hardening clay. Things such as eyeglasses can be made from ordinary craft wire, and so can funny antenna on an alien. As you can see, there are no rules to clay character construction!
*Note-Will Vinton Productions buys untapped plastic Delrin balls from a company called Small Parts. (PUT LINK HERE TO www.smallparts.com) Delrin balls are what they use for eyes. A hole is drilled in the center, and counter sunk. A scribed line is scribed around this hole, and it is painted to look like an eye using enamel paints. You can see one of these plastic balls unpainted in the middle of the picture above.
Armature Construction
Armatures are the support for your new creation.
Basically it is the skeleton underneath the clay which will allow you to move your character in small increments for animation.
The items you will need are, 1/16th inch aluminum armature wire, 1/8 inch wooden dowel rods, steel craft wire, a scrap piece of wood, two small wood screws and a hot glue gun if you can get one.
The tools you will need are a power drill, a screwdriver, and a pair of wire cutters.
The first step in creating your armature is to take your spool of aluminum armature wire, and stretch a four foot piece out, and fold it in half so you have two straight parallel pieces of wire. Place the two ends of wire into the chuck of your drill bit, while you hold the other end of the wire under a chair leg.
Then start the drill and twist the wire until it looks like the wire in the picture. The reason for this is because it makes the wire twice as strong, and also less likely to cause problems if one half the wire breaks during animation.
The next step is to draw out your armature on paper, in the size of the character you would like to animate. Take the wire and bend it to the shapes you would like for arms and legs. Usually it is made of two large "U" shaped pieces.
One long piece which acts as the two legs, and hip section, and one which runs from one hand, through the shoulders, to the other hand, and is joined together by a mid section. After you have your armature laid out, you need to make sections that do not bend. If you do not add these sections, your character will look like his arms and legs are made from spaghetti.
The way to add hard sections is to think about where you would like specific body parts to have joints. Your wrists, elbows, knees, and waist are all flexible areas, and they would be likewise on your character. So as an example, on an armature I am creating, I take a section of dowel rod, and place it next to my characters arm. I figure that I need two hard sections, the upper and lower arm. I take a pen and mark the length of dowel rod I need for each section, and cut the pieces with my wire cutters.
To attach these two dowels, I cut two small pieces of steel craft wire, and tie the dowels onto the aluminum wire, near both tips of the dowel rod. If you can, hot glue over these as well to give it more strength. Feet on an armature are the hardest part to create.
You can either make two loops for feet, and screw the armature to a block of wood, or you can make feet using thin aluminum blocks with holes which have been drilled, tapped, and can allow the aluminum armature wire ankles to be attached through a separate hole. Then use what is called tie downs.
The tie down consists of a rod which can screw into the tapped hole in the foot block, and a thumb screw. You drill a hole in the floor of your set, place the foot over the hole, then from under the set you push the threaded rod through the hole, screw it into the threaded hole in the foot, and use the thumb screw which is on the threaded rod to tighten the foot down to the set floor. It sounds complex, but with a little craftsmanship, can be done with a few hand tools.
The last step is applying clay to your armature. It is important to melt the clay to armature so it will stick to it, and not fall off during animation. I do this using a torch, but can be done using the double boiler to melt the clay. You melt your clay, and drip it onto the armature until you have a thin coating of clay over every part of the armature. You then wait for the clay to cool completely, and then apply your unmelted clay on top of it.
You can also sculpt the inner parts of your character using scrap clay, and then coat the outside of it with nice clean new clay. That is a method Will Vinton had done to save on custom colors they mixed for characters clothes, and is good for recycling clay that will not be used.
Clay Animation
Now you are ready for animating, but don't know where to start. This is an area I won't talk much about because there are many books on animation out there that are very good, and the rules of animation are the same for every media. Some basics include timing, acting, lip sync, and gags. One thing not taught in any animation book I know of is how to animate mouths in clay, so I will try to explain basic mouth construction for animation. You start by roughing in the features of your characters head.
The next step is to hollow out a deep hole where the mouth will be. Also, if you have white teeth on a green character, it will look funny as the white clay slowly turns green from the lips around it. So make the upper teeth from painted hardening clay. One trick is to take the color clay that your characters face is made of, and mix a piece of it with a darker color and place it in the back of the mouth before adding lips to your hollowed out face. It looks more natural, and causes the lips to stand out a little better. Lastly, add lips over the teeth.
When you animate the lips, a common practice is to cut a wedge shaped piece of clay out of the upper lip, and close the gap by moving the lip edge up to close the gap. This keeps the lip from getting a strobe effect because you don't have to re-sculpt the lip edge for every movement. And when you sculpt the mouth in the shape of an "O", you add clay to edge of the lips outward. When you change shape back to a normal mouth position, you cut off the outstretched lips carefully, so you can reuse them for the next "O" shaped lips in your animation sequence.
One last trick to animate the lower jaw moving downward, just like when real people talk. To do this, cut a line straight back from the center area of the lips, straight back to under the ears, and pull the jaw down. Then cover over the slits on both sides of the cheeks with a thin blanket of clay that you have smoothed out, right up to the lip area. It works quite nicely, and gives a more loose effect to animate the jaw of your character.
Set Building
Set building is just as basic as building a good wire armature. Tools used to make sets are basic. Most tools used to make sets consist of saws, hammers, hot glue guns, paint brushes, and drills. If you already have some basic tools you may already have all you need to make a set like the professional set makers.
Designing sets are simple as well. Sets are basically tables with a minimum of three legs. The table top part is where you place your puppets, set walls, mini props, and everything else in your created environment. There are important things that an animator needs when he or she is going to animate on a set. One of these needs is the height of the set. The set must be built at a height that is comfortable for the animator to animate puppets on. A bad design would have the top of the set too low for an animator causing the animator to hunch over for many hours on end.
Other considerations that a set designer must keep in mind is getting the camera to capture certain angles within the set. So if you were to build a kitchen set, you would need to create walls that are removable in order for the director to place the camera at either side of the room for separate shots. I like to use C-Clamps to attach walls to the frame of my sets, but you can also screw the set walls down to the set base that you built, and unscrew them when necessary.
Common materials used to create walls are wood, foam board, styrofoam basement insulation, and blue foam insulation. All of which can be found in home improvement centers and office supply stores. Each of these materials is easily painted and textured using Plaster of Paris, and wall joint compounds.
Animation Equipment
Basic equipment is crucial in animation. You will need these things minimum for your project. A few lights, and a super 8mm camera, or 16mm camera to capture all the animation, along with film. Its important to have a good tripod that goes along with the camera. A projector is handy as well if you can get one. Otherwise you will need to have it transferred to VHS so that you can view all your hard work.
The costs can add up fast. So its a good idea to do some research on these things before jumping in. Your local library is a good starting point, and the yellow pages are good as well. Sometimes people sell these cameras very cheap. Super 8 is very affordable, and it is a good idea to start out with a super 8 camera.
Some notes on purchasing a film camera is to look for one with a zoom lens, and a reflex viewfinder. That means that you can see through the lens on the camera to line up your animation. The non reflex types are bad because you can not accurately do this, and can have the camera pointed on something other then your animation, and waste a lot of time. Also you want one that has an auto exposure meter built in to save you some money. If you don't get one with this option, you will have to buy a light meter to set the exposure on the camera manually. Lastly, and most importantly, it has to have single frame capabilities.
Digital cameras are also starting to rise in popularity. If you would like to start animating NOW then you might already have everything you need. If you have a digital camera and a PC that runs Windows, then download the free software available on The Clay Animation How To Page by going to the LINKS page.
Tutorial by Marc Spess from www.animateclay.com"
