Claymation: A Career in Stop Motion Animation

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ClaymationA Career in Stop Motion Animation

• By Zhiming Wang and Amy Stevens.

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Early films using stop-motion!

• 1902 A Trip to the Moon
• 1933 King Kong
• 1963 Jason and the Argonauts
• 1980 Star Wars Episode V - The Empire Strikes
  Back

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What does Stop-Motion Entail?

• Take a puppet or prop.
• Pose it photograph it with a single frame of
  movie film.
• Move it slightly and then snap another frame.
• Repeat 24 times and
• you have one second
• of your film!

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Wheres the Physics?

• Armatures Aluminium or steel, with ball-socket
  joints
• (silver soldered, chrome plated) at places of
  articulation.
• E.g. Corpse Bride miniature cranks in the
  puppets ears control their facial movements for
  lifelike expressions.
• Skin State-of-the-art hybrid plastic skins
  include injected foam-latex and high-tech
  urethane.
• Other techniques Cell animation and CGI.
• General animation principles, e.g. path of
  action, arcs, momentum.

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More Modern Stop-Motion

• Can help create evocative and highly styled
  films such as Nightmare before Christmas.

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Wallace and gromit!

• The Wallace Gromit characters were sculpted
  of clay, with metal skeletons beneath. Animators
  had a variety of mouths they would swap on to the
  characters to mimic speech, each simulating the
  shape of the lips for different phonetic sounds.
• Nick Park (one of the Aardman team who created
  Morph) continued to explore the potential of
  modelling clay-based stop-motion animation and in
  1989, with a risible budget, started work on his
  short film A Grand Day Out, the first Wallace and
  Gromit4 adventure. And it was successful. So
  successful that actual money was spent on the
  successors, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave.
  But modelling clay actors were not receiving the
  recognition they deserved. In an attempt to
  head-off any injunctions, the Motion Picture
  Academy of America awarded Oscars to the latter
  two films.

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Jobs and Job prospects!?

• Jobs in an animation studio include
• Sets, Rigging, Operations, Finance, HR, PR
  Features (departments).
• Especially
• Model Maker
• CGI
• Technical Director
• Animator/Technical Animator

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Animation as a Career Path

• No one definite path.
• Course at film or art school could help.
• Research watch films, keep up to date with
  trade/technical press.
• Try to establish industry contacts and join
  organisations such as ACM (technical animator).
• Develop a show reel.
• Apply to animation/television
• studios.

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Qualities Needed.

• In general
• Willingness to work hard
• Attention to detail
• Highly Organised
• Good Communication skills
• Team player attitude
• ENTHUSIASM!!!
• More specifically
• Good eye for visual composition
• Technical Aptitude
• Familiarity with programming concepts
• Good problem-solving ability

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Pros and Cons

• Pros
• Doing something you love
• Exciting/Challenging
• Working with a team
• Employees highly rewarded by companies

• Cons
• Need extra qualifications
• Very competitive
• Only get jobs in big companies??
• Uncertain future

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Another potential area of interest.

• Max Planck Institut Informatik
• Modelling and Animation of faces MEDUSA and
  LEONARDO systems, respectively.
• Former look of a face is approximated by
  predicting and modelling the layers of tissue on
  the skull.
• Usual approach physical sculpting with clay.
• New approach anatomy-based virtual head model is
  fitted to a scanned skull using statistical data
  on skull/tissure relationships
• Introduction of an algorithm for generating
  facial expressions of pure and mixed emotions.

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Conclusion.

• At the end of the day, we get paid to play with
  toys, so how bad can it be?
• - Corpse Bride co-director Mike Johnson.