And here’s H.o.p.’s second claymation. Which was way toooooo ambitious. Again, he did the claymation, photographing everything himself in sequence, did the story, models and all. Then I helped him put it together first in Photoshop then Quicktime. We experimented and went with six frames per second and had most of the dialogue displayed at about 6 to 7 frames, which is too short a time. Anyway, we’ve basically sat in the same chair for the past three days working on this. I think he learned a lot from it. Claymation models get filthy looking real quickly and he hasn’t yet learned how to work clean and keep this from happening. He began late Monday on another little movie about the robot (didn’t get into it though, I think he has run out of steam on the robot) and pointed out to me how clean he was keeping the models. He could have used some armatures but will save that for a later project.
We’ve had the clayamation clay waiting for him for a number ofl months. He tried it out a while back then put it back up and went back to doing sequence photography of cut-outs. He also has been experimenting with armatures and not come up with anything he likes yet.
Then several days ago he pulled out the clay and out of the blue started on his film project of the Robot Goes Bowling, immediately followed that day by the Robot versus the Monster.
The opening is, I think, his nod to the famed film short Godzilla Meets Bambi. (He’s already referencing favorite directors! How cute.) He saves everything which is annoying, and has demanded for several years I not throw out our old broken globe. He insists he can use everything. And here he pulled out the globe to use it in his animation. (Two weeks ago I almost threw it out, tired of it taking up closet space and imagining there was no use for it.) And I’m quite taken with that ending, the robot’s self reflection.
Today he was going through looking at some claymations by animators and saw some ready-made armatures and called out “That’s what I need!” You can see from the robot the problem of not having an armature. The clay needs an armature in order to hold its shape and alone doesn’t have the strength to stand up on its own.
H.o.p. took over 250 photos for these two claymations, which with reduplications added up to over 900 frames for the Robot vs the Monster movie and over 130 for the Robot goes Bowling movie. Now, 250 photos is not that much actually for a claymation, but it’s a lot for an 8 year old in one day. Each photo means that after taking it he had to work with the model on the scene making it do something and then another photo and then working with the scene again, and so on. And we don’t have a tripod. That’s a lot of work for one eight year old to do without any help, as he had no help with that part at all. The models may look clumsy to the viewer but H.o.p.’s interest this time around was, I think, just getting a claymation done.
The movie is Quicktime and compressed way way way down for the internet.
Leave a Reply