Claymation: Clay-Animation

Claymation is the most amazing type of animation to me, in terms of the level of difficulty. Back in the day, before computers were in every household, animations could be created by taking actual clay figures as the 'actors,' and photographs of them as the frames for the movie!

Claymation is a form of stopmotion, because after each motion made in the clay, you have to stop to take a picture: The way this worked is a clay scene was set up, then it was photographed 360 degrees around (to get all angles), and then whichever objects/clay figures had to move next were moved a tiny bit, and the photographs were taken all over again. In the end, you had a zillion pictures, and each set for each frame was for only 1/24 of a second ... so for a movie 100 minutes long, you had 8,640,000 pictures! Now, I'm sure that number was decreased if a clay's pose was the same for multiple seconds, but still, it was a lot of work!

To give you an example of what claymation looks like, here are some examples:

Wallace and Gromit

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Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)

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Anyways, I hope you appreciate the artists behind the next movie you watch that has been done using clay animation, because they sure did spend a lot of time to make the movie great!