How Animation Works: "Moving Pictures" use a concept called persistence of vision to create an illusion of movement. A movie is actually a series of still images running through a projector at about 24 images a second. A person watching these images sees movement -- an optical illusion.
You can make your own animation by making a flip book.
Draw a series of pictures in a pack of post-it-notes and then
flip the pages very quickly. Your drawing should appear to move
and become animated!
Using this animation definition and some imagination we started
our first clay animation project.
We made a simple clay figure using a pipe cleaner for an armature. An armature is like a skeleton underneath the clay. An armature allows you to bend and move your clay figure without the clay falling apart. We strung several balls of clay along the pipe cleaner to create a worm. We used a special kind of clay designed for animation. It is made from plastilene which is oil based and makes sure that the clay never dries out or hardens. We used wiggle eyes for his face.
We placed our worm on a white backdrop and took four pictures with a digital camera shown below. We used a Logitech Quick Cam to take our pictures. It is not a high resolution camera but it is inexpensive, easy to work with, and comes with it's own stand.
1 -
worm straight
2 -
a small hump in the worm's back
3 -
a large hump in the worm's back
4 -
the worm turning his head to look at us
We imported these digital pictures into an animation program that allowed us to line them up in order. We lined the pictures up like this: 1 - 2 - 3 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 4 - 4 - 4 - 2 - 1.
We aligned the series of pictures using an "onion skin" technique. This allowed us to view each frame on top of the previous so that we could make sure that we aligned the head of the worm in the same position in each picture. The term "onion skin" is used because the view of the pictures during aligning is very transparent so that you can see through them just like each layer of an onion. Aligning the pictures is very important. We wanted to make sure that the animation we saw was the worm crawling across the table and not the worm's head jumping around because we had jiggled the camera or moved the worm off center during our photo shoot.
Finally, we exported our file as an animated gif
running at 3 frames per second looping indefinitely. Here is
our final product!
Check back as we continue to experiment with clay animation. As we learn we will add lighting, backgrounds, sound, and of course more animated characters!
If you would like more information about clay animation techniques, history, tips, and an idea of what kinds of jobs this skill would help you get check out Claymation Station.