make a claymation film

My husband and I decided to do this one together, as a goal for 2009. We’re making a music video to one of his original songs. We’re just getting started by picking out the song and a concept so that we can get creative with the clay next.
Any helpful hints would be great as we’ve never done this before.

I took an animation class in art school and it was alot of fun. I definitely recommend giving this a try. It is very time consuming but when you have the end product it is great :) I also recommend stop motion it’s also cool. Either one can be done with little more than a digital camera and computer.

In order to get a feel for timing i experimented with a very short (15 seconds) animation using a blue screen background, and one of the models i made for my main project. Filmed at 15 frames a second.
I’m still doing things too fast. Though when i slowed it down using one of my video effects options.. making the film 30 seconds .. it looked better. 7.5 frames a second isnt enough though.
I bought AVS Media video editor .. because it has Chroma Keying, and exprimented with that too. I added a background picture, but because my lighting wasnt good enough, and some white clay on my model had blue reflections on it from the background … in the end you can see through part of the model.
Lots of things to learn … but making progress.

My girlfriends kids and i made a small video using home made model dinosaurs and scenery from one of the kids school projects.
The models are solid and unmoving, made with ‘DAS’, so the animation is just moving them about rather than moving limbs, but even so it came out great, just a bit too fast.

The frame rate was 12 per second, but the kids dont have the patience to take things slowly, and they made the moves too big .. the whole scene with 3 dinosaurs fighting took about 30 seconds and looks like a longer film sped up.

But i added titles and overlaid a soundtrack …. 30 seconds from “Freestyler” ... and its pretty cool.

A good first effort … the next one will be done much more slowly.

Did the research on how, bought the materials, timed the recording, broke it into scenes, made a story board, and designed the models on paper.

Not a bad start!

I’ve tried before and I lost interest half way through, but I think that since I have a week ahead of me, I can make maybe a 2 minute one about animals or something. I love claymation.

I did this at I camp a couple years back. Really fun!

It was a short minute and a half video, but it took enough time and effort. Very satisfying! :)