Stop-Motion Character Animation

My short claymation. For better quality video you can watch this on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRYLbxe2_a4&feature=youtu.be

This is the story of a young witch learning how to cast magic spells.

For this project, once I had finished with story, storyboards and character design, I began by sculpting my character  First I created a wire armature based on some designs that I had seen, and then I went about adding the clay to it. I used an oil based plastalina type clay and beads for the eyes so that they would be easily posable.

Once the character was sculpted  I rented some lights and went about creating a set for the scene. I tried several different lighting setups to see what would work. Lighting the scene was probably one of my favorite parts, because you can achieve so many interesting effects just by moving the light a little bit.

When I was ready to shoot, I began animating. There was a lot I learned about the difficulty of stop motion on this project. My set and character were quite small, and I kept bumping pieces of the set as I worked. The armature was not very flexible and in the more extreme poses it was difficult to work with. One trick that did help me was that because I was shooting with a digital camera, I could flip back and forth between the live view and the previous frame, just like in hand drawn animation.

 Once all my scenes were shot, I did a lot of paint fix, and I assembled the final edit in imovie and quicktime.



Music track is called "Find your Thing" and belongs to Kaiser Permanente.