The task we were set was to create a form of animation from any of the styles that we had been studying for the past several weeks. Some of the animation styles included traditional animation, which involved hand drawing every frame for the sequence, another style was claymation, which was a combination of stopmotion and the use of clay, some famous people notable for this work are people such as Nick Park and his claymations such as Wallace & Gromit.
What my partner (Alex) and I had decided to work on was claymation, as this meant there was chances to be more creative, even if you did not have the artistic talent. What are plot was something being eaten, however we knew this was way too broad and that literally anything could be eaten in claymation. To help expand our ideas we had decided to play with some clay and create some random characters. What Alex and I realised what that complex character figures were very unstable and unable to keep a pose for long periods of time, so what we decided on was to keep characters basic, as this then meant we could do more with the figures. So when then came to to a total of four characters, a hand, a Venus fly trap, an octopus and grapes.
What I felt myself and Alex had done well was that we were able to complete the project in a such short amount of time, and that what we had produced was deemed very decent to ourselves. We had worked well together and even though we lacked artistic talent, we had managed to create the characters we had planned on.
What the other peers had commented on was that they liked that background the animation, what we did was get coloured paper and make some basic shapes, such as a tree and also used the leftover clay as background scenery. They had enjoyed the characters and its short story along with the music and the sound effects that went with it, however they did comment that some of the shots moved out of its original position, an example is when the paper for our background moved and this is seen on the animation.
A comparison to our animation is anything that Nick Park has created with the use of claymation. In comparison our animation is very amateur, when you look at ours and Shaun the Sheep, you can see a notable difference, more specifically the fluidity in the animation and the movement of the characters. In our animation, the characters felt very stiff and moved rigidly, whilst in Shaun the Sheep, the animation looks very smooth, and the transitions look unnoticeable and the characters are very flexible and move fluidly. What I had noticed was using the clay was that it lost its ability to hold poses when it became exposed to room temperature/being handled too much as this caused the clay to go much more softer.
To improve for next time I will make sure that still object, such as background are never touched, and make preventatives of it being moved. I will also make characters more quicker, as this then means I am handling the clay less and thus avoiding it becoming too soft.
