Claymation Experiment

This was my first attempt at 'Claymation' a form of Stop Motion in clay; quite commonly used by Aardman for 'Wallace & Gromit', you could argue that Wallace & Gromit are the most famous claymation characters. I partnered up with Ashley Popay as we'd worked together previously. We wanted something simple to do and not like the rest of the class. We came up with an idea based on the Loch ness Monster. The idea was to be kept simple because more often than not the best animations are the most simple. I made the Loch ness monster character and Ashley made the lake and trees to set the scene. We started taking pictures moving the monster a little bit each time so it would give the illusion it was moving in the water. After it had swam round to the front we made it dive into the water by bending the shape of it and cutting it into pieces to give the appearance it was disappearing in the water. For added affect we used a clay tool to draw ripples in the water. As an extra idea we decided we would get rid of the trees, I removed the first tree by grabbing it and pulling it off so it could no longer be seen by the camera. To get rid of the other two trees we gave the illusion that Ashley's hand hit one of the trees and caused it to roll and knock the other one and itself off screen.
We then uploaded the pictures onto the computer and used Adobe Premier Elements to edit the frames and include titles. We found that the movement was really smooth and the ripples in the water worked out really well showing a strength we had in movement. The weakness of our animation was that watching it through you could spot that it flickered with the lighting. Next time if we were to do it again I'd make sure that flash was on for all photos and that the lighting was kept the same. Personally I found this animation a success and an improvement upon our last animation using a whiteboard.