Mon, 05 May 2008 14:16:58 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/ Stop Motion and Clay Animation News Since 2001 en-us http://www.animateclay.com/images/logo.gif http://www.animateclay.com/ marc@animateclay.com http://www.animateclay.com/Article732.phtml In the early 1980's, Liberty Studios in New York was given the task of making an intro for HBO. How they made all the mini sets and models is detailed in a short documentary that you can watch here. Its fun to see how everything is made by hand. If you compare the completed spot to a CG shot done today - the differences are obvious. CG will look more realistic while hand made shots have a different quality. Is it cartoony? How do you describe it? I guess "special" is the best term, since it falls in the category of special effects. Mon, 05 May 2008 14:16:58 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article731.phtml Bright Eye Pictures has released a few really good documentaries about the reclusive Bruce Bickford and his clay animated films. I have only seen one, and was very impressed with the way Brett Ingram portrayed the human side of Bruce. He tied Bruce's life experiences with his art. So weather you like the clay animation style he creates or not, the documentary called Monster Road really made you think. The directors recently released a film based around Bruce again called Luck of a Foghorn. It is bundled with their release of Bruces film called Prometheus Garden, so you can't just buy it by itself. Watch the official trailer for the film here. Check out Mike Brent's Darkmatters blog where he gives his impressions here. As you can see, even Mike was shocked and he is a Svankmajer fan. But in the end he really appreciated Bruces work, so the film isn't for everyone. Thu, 01 May 2008 22:52:16 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article730.phtml There's a neat forum thread by Auteur about the construction of a red haired puppet. The face parts are made of plastic with replacement pop-in mouths. The arms and legs appear to be silicone, and if you go through the second page of the thread you can view the molds. It's a really professional job, and it just shows how well a puppet turn out - even with aluminum wire underneat it. Take a look at the puppet here. Sun, 27 Apr 2008 20:20:40 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article729.phtml It's official...well not really. There's still work to be done but our new server is set up in New York. All sites, including animateclay.com, zombie-pirates.com and stopmotionmagic.com are on a maybe the fastest server ever built. What I'm updating here is actually on the old slow server, so you won't see any improvements to animateclay.com yet. But you can test the Stop Motion Magic network out and see how fast it's running now. Our goal is to move everything around Tuesday permanently. So when you see Animateclay.com with the new theme, you will know we've moved. Since the DNS settings take time to propigate through the system it could take some longer than others to see it. Check out the new Stop Motion Magic site here. Keep The mail system is being set up now and the video uploads need some tweaking to work 100%. You can sign up for an account and create your own personal profile though. Sun, 27 Apr 2008 01:10:42 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article728.phtml There is a new Mac based stop motion program called Dragon Stop Motion. It's full of features that sound very good. Here are some of them: * Full-featured animation grabber, including: Step-to-Live, Toggle, 3-Step, Cascade Overlay, Short Play and Onion-Skin. * Virtual exposure sheet. It keeps you shooting with easy-to-read, on-screen prompts. * Sound / dialogue editing with on-screen phonetic prompts. * Screen draw overlay for critical line-ups and increments. * Animation controls designed specifically for use with a remote keypad. Since I only have a PC I can't try it out to review it, but if you want they have a trial download that is free for test purposes. Check the program out here. Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:45:36 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article726.phtml Misha Klein and Chach were filmed a while back by rocketspaceboy for part of a documentary. It was recently uploaded to YouTube for the world to see. They both explain a lot about their equipment and how revolutionary it is nowadays for stop motion animators. They also explain a lot about lighting and the whole setup they had for the short. The lighting is really amazing when you see it - you realize how much work went into it. Check it all out by clicking here. Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:56:00 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article725.phtml Have you ever heard of the company called Pantograph? I never did until I stumbled upon the Japanese site through YouTube. I can't really comment on the creator of the model kits because I can't read the language. But they are definitely made by an expert. Check out his puppets and models here. Take a look at his clever loop animations here. UPDATE: Brian sent us a link to google's translation of the site which makes it much much easier to navigate. Check it out here. If you want to view the videos you need to use the un-translated link though since google can't translate them. Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:45:13 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article723.phtml Have you ever visited FPS Magazine's web site? It's one of the web sites I visit from time to time to get some of the best coverage of the animation world. Emru Townsend pretty much loves all forms of animation, including stop motion. He blogs news articles much the same as we do here at Animate Clay. Check out his informative blog here for some good reading. Sadly Emru has run into some health problems which you can read about here. He's such a great guy, along with his sister Tamu. Chances are if you have a site like mine they have networked with you and shared some stories with you. So make sure to read the above link to find out if you can help make the ultimate difference in his life. Or, visit the list of registries if you are interested in giving your bone marrow to someone in need here. You can see some more personal photos of Emru's daily life on Flickr here. Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:05:54 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article722.phtml The Gary Bialke tribute is completed. You can watch it here. Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:54:56 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article721.phtml Recently Denver Colorado based animator and film maker Randy Boyum shared with us all his recent films and projects that he has been working on. Randy works mainly in clay, but also makes puppets out of other materials. He is very professional, fast - and I am lucky to be working with him for a client who is also in Colorado. Here is part of an e-mail he sent me just last week explaining his projects. He also sent us images for our gallery which you see by clicking the link at the bottom of this post. Here is his message to us: "The Leprechaun puppet in this piece is a wire armature wrapped in cotton batting, and secured with hot glue. Then felt clothing was glued on. The head and hands are Sculpey hard-baked clay. The rainbow is made of felt too. A Fool's Gold Last fall I animated two pieces for "Larry The Cable Guy's Christmas Spectacular" which aired on VH1 in December. Annoyingly, both pieces were pulled from the broadcast at the last minute for some unknown reason, but they can be seen online. The first piece is a spoof commercial based on the 1960's ads showing Santa sledding on a Noreclo razor, but instead, this spot features Mrs. Claus sledding around on a product of her own. It took 6 days to do the animation, and the voice over is by the guy who did the Pepperidge Farm spots. This link is the only place where the ad can be seen. Mrs. Claus The other piece I did for Larry is a 3 minute short film called "Rudolph Revisited", featuring the voice of Larry as the new guide up at the North Pole. Yes - it's a spoof of the classic Rudolph, with Larry the Snowman visiting North Pole residents to show that not much has changed since Rudolph made his historic flight on that foggy Christmas eve. Larry's people wrote both scripts and produced the soundtracks. I built the set and characters, and did all the animation. I was delighted that they let me duplicate the characters so faithfully, though Mrs. Claus was given a different look. It took about 6 weeks to build the puppets and set, then I shot this 3:20 short in 15 crazy, sleepless days. "Rudolph Revisited" was not broadcast, but it is available on the DVD, "Larry The Cable Guy's Christmas Spectacular", found at stores out there on every single corner. I recently discovered that this film is posted on YouTube. So here it is. Rudolph Revisited" Randy also sent us one final link to his birthday greeting card that you can watch here. The exploding body must have really been hard to do. If you like Randy's work, make sure to e-mail him at RandomAnimation@aol.com. View all the pictures that Randy sent us by clicking here. Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:12:34 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article720.phtml Don Carlson who is a big fan of the old Will Vinton Claymation style made a simple and funny film called Storytime with Pram. He worked a month straight to finish it, and it is similar to the Disney clay on glass sequences Vinton released in the late 80's....or was it early 90's? I'm not sure on the exact date, but check his video out. You won't be dissapointed. Watch it here. Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:41:14 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article719.phtml Dalton Gaudin requested that I create two simplistic robot puppets for a video he was making. The puppets were to make some basic moves and the quality didn't have to be perfect. The sets he built in his studio location were simple and he wanted everything to match. It was fun to make them. They were made with brass tube and lead wire armatures, super sculpey and foam. The video came out really well! You can watch it here. Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:33:11 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article718.phtml So what is Marc up to? Well actually two things. First off I'm working on graphics for the new site. Yes, Animateclay.com will have some changes to it when we release the new version - but we are also working on the next generation site. The new site will be stopmotionmagic.com and have most of the features we talked about in the last site update. It will basically be a social network site for all forms of stop motion. From clay puppets, lego brick films, foam, pixelation, sand and more. It will be run completely by you - the visitors. You can upload pictures, music, videos, create blogs, chat, IM, use the forums etc. It's simply too much to work into this site, so it will be seperate - but we will link to it on the main page. I'm also making a video tribute to Gary Bialke by sculpting his Rudy character from Meet the Raisins. It will be on YouTube when I'm done. You can see a sneak peek of the progress in the picture above. UPDATE Aril 5: The Rudy puppet is 80% done. I just have to sculpt his legs, feet and his shirt. Then I will add his veggie ear parts and put together the tribute video. Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:34:29 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article717.phtml According to a new web site for Ko Lik Films, the Scotland based studio has been around for many years. Did you ever hear of them? If you live in the US like me, these kinds of studios would never have been heard of if it weren't for the internet. The UK and surrounding areas have a really deep history when it comes to stop motion. You just never know who will pop up next! They have a few very nice videos of their work to watch online. In one video called Haunted Hogmanay, it's very hard to see how they did the replacement mouths. My guess is they pop them on and remove the seam lines in a computer. Take a look for yourself at their official site here. Does anyone know how the mouths were done? Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:19:56 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article716.phtml Max Goldberg came up with a neat way of animating your lego minifig mouths. He shows which programs to use and made up some free Lego mouth shapes to download and use on your own figs. It's one of the nicest ways I've seen so far for animating the mouths. Check it all out by clicking here. Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:08:34 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article715.phtml Were going to try out this Technorati thing that everyone's been talking about. Basically Technorati is where people can find us more easily as a place that blogs about stop motion. Will it be useful? We don't know, but it seems like a good way to promote more of what we love. Clay and stop motion animation! They asked us to put a link on our site which were doing below to claim our sites content. Lets see how it works..... Technorati Profile You'll also notice that we put a feedburner and del.icio.ous links to subscribe to our site and news feed on the right side of the page. This allows users the ability to click it once and add it to their updated lists of news feeds. Before we went around it the hard way which required clicking a few links just to get it to work. Most likely we'll be making a few more minor changes before our big change which will be happening soon. The new server is basically completed and being tested to make sure everything is ok. Sun, 23 Mar 2008 22:08:25 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article714.phtml Just the other month a new video was released in Germany for a band called the ASP. I don't understand the German language, but according to the page it's about... "A little eerie gothic tale about love, fear and death." The puppets, lighting, 3-D sets, camera work and animation are all excellent. It's similar to the Corpse Bride look but missing the intricate facial movements. If you haven't seen it already, check out a high quality version of the new video here. Jurgen Kling who animated the puppets for the video wrote to us and give a few more links. There's a lot of nice stuff to check out: The full SD res download and lots of stills here. A stop-motion "behind the scenes" of flash-slideshow here. A "making of" article here. A downloadable "making of" Video about the CG part: here. Sat, 22 Mar 2008 08:30:00 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article713.phtml Last night my dad was surfing the satellite TV channels and he came across some of the latest Robot Chicken cartoons. His verdict wasn't nice. He called it crude and horrible - noting how he watched several toys throw up while a dog came along and ate the puke. While it's hard to disagree with him "am I getting old at 32?" some people obviously enjoy the show. If your one of the people who enjoy it, you might like the theage.com article in the entertainment section called It's lights, camera, action figures. It talks a bit about both Matt Senreich and Seth Green's involvement in the show and what they have done. It's actually really interesting and can be found here. Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:12:18 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article712.phtml Donjuseyo on YouTube made a really nice video called Time Of Your Life where he animates himself through pixelation. The amazing part is how he edited between scenes by using animated pictures he took. So when you go from one scene to the next, it's done through photographs. Take a look at the new video here. Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:44:23 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article711.phtml Animate Clay needs a 957 by 72 banner that will go on top of the newly designed site. For example, the banner on top of this site which reads "The Clay and Stop Motion How to Page". In fact we want the wording to be the same on the new banner. We'll be using our old logo still and would like the new banner to match the colors. Ok here's some new things to keep in mind so that everyone knows specifically what we need: - The size will need to be 957 wide by 72 high pixels - The colors need to match the next site design - The wording must read "the Clay and Stop Motion How to Page" - The rest is up to you. Add graphics, pictures of puppets, surface gages or anything else to make it symbolize the world of stop motion and clay animation. We created a zipped file with all that you will need as an artist to make a banner. The list includes: - A sample made banner of the same dimensions we need - A photoshop document of our "AC" design - The bluestone font we use throught the site - An image of the font in three colors to use as needed - A document with a link to the new site design - An image of the new site design Download the zipped file from our site here. The winner will get a master course of all our DVD's, CD's and e-book! This contest is really important, so the winner gets our most prized item in the store. We may or may not use anyone's logo's, so we can't promise a winner. We do hope everyone joins in and has some fun. We'll post all the designs in the message boards once we get some. We also reserve the right to make future changes to the banner as we see fit, especially since our page is always changing. The only rule is that the banner must symbolize the world of stop motion and clay animation. The 2nd rule is it must look nice, fun, clean and professional since it will be seen by thousands and thousands of people. Once you finish the banner, just send it to us through e-mail in the contact section of this site. The deadline is about two or three weeks when we launch the new site. Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:59:34 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article709.phtml Kramer Klaymation has a nice two part tutorial up on the web that covers almost all aspects of Chroma Keying. Take a look at them using the links below: Part 1 Here Part 2 Here Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:38:12 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article708.phtml Brian sent us some news of a screening that will be happening next month. Here's the scoop: Stop & Go screening at the Electric Works Gallery using stop-motion techniques by visual artists and filmmakers Kissing hats, elephants driving, a man who turns into the sun, and dinosaurs roaming the countryside rarely happen in real life, but at the stop-motion film screening called Stop & Go at the Electric Works Gallery in April, all of this will become ordinary. Established filmmakers and visual artists will use stop-motion techniques to tell stories, examine visual phenomena, and make political statements in a collection of short videos. The Electric Works Gallery in San Francisco will host the Stop & Go screening on April 5th, 2008, with a show time of 8 p.m. The line-up of videos includes both local and international artists and is curated by Bay Area artist and animator Sarah Klein. Klein, who uses hand-drawn images and stop-motion animation in her own work, chose pieces that explore the possibilities of stop motion processes. The animators breathe life into magazine cutouts, homemade drawings, everyday objects, and even the body itself. The result is a selection of videos that are humorous, poignant, and marvelous. The complete list of artists includes Ignacio Alcantara, Tommy Becker, Lilli Carré, Meredith Holch, Sean Horchy, Stephanie Hutin, Lana Kim, Sarah Klein, Mike Leavitt, Michael McHam, Laurie O’Brian, Saelee Oh, Mel Prest, Clare Rojas, Judith Selby, SAF Cakovec Studio, Jen Stark, Melinda Stone, Claudia Tennyson, Sherri Wood, and Andrew Jeffery Wright Screening Date: Saturday, April 5, 2008, 8 p.m. $8-10 suggested donation, with no one turned away for lack of funds Electric Works Gallery 130 Eighth Street San Francisco, CA (415) 626-5496 info@sfelectricworks.com For further information, please contact: Sarah Klein at (415) 310-4225 or thesarahklein@yahoo.com Judith Selby at (415) 626-5496 or judith@sfelectricworks.com Visit the official web site here. Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:30:32 -0400 http://www.animateclay.com/Article707.phtml Don Carlson who has animated for many years and has tried just about every motion capture program out there wrote a review of the program Monkeyjam. You can read here. It should be helpful for anyone who needs a good free program to animate with. Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:57:27 -0500 http://www.animateclay.com/Article706.phtml I got a recent e-mail from a friend who told me that Gary "Gairy" Bialke passed away this weekend. Gary is one of the main inspirations for my work in clay animation - and this web site. You might have heard me talk about him in the How to Sculpt Puppets DVD we sell, or in my writings here at Animate Clay. He worked as both an illustrator, animator and character designer for Will Vinton studios during the mid 80's to early 90's. Probably his best sculptural work on the film Frog Prince would never be seen due to production problems which ended the project. It is my hope that we'll be able to acquire some high quality images of his sculptures to post on this site as a memorial. If anyone has access to some and would be willing to e-mail them to us, we can post them in our gallery. See some of his work on the Frog Prince here for now. UPDATE: We recieved a few pictures of Gary's work for the online gallery from Tony Merrithew and Webster Colcord. See some of his inspiring work here. Tony had some nice things to say about Gary in his online blog called ~An oil painting a day~ here. We also learned that there may be a gallery of Gary's work being put together at a local Portland Oregon gallery called RACC. Meanwhile Gary is being sent to Minnesota where his family resides. They will have a service soon for him there. If your a past co-worker in the Portland area there will be another gathering at Marilyn and Alan's church at on March 16th 4pm to remember Gary. UPDATE from stopmotionanimation.com: (This message is from Marilyn Zornado and Teresa Drilling) Dear Friend, Our dear comrade and colleague, Gary Bialke, passed away on Sunday, March 1st. Let¹s gather together to remember him. Sunday, March 16th, 6:30 pm At Marilyn Zornado & Alan Garren's building in St. Johns 8325 N. Central Street, Portland, Oregon 97203 Please bring food & drink to share. The memorial is starting at 6:30pm, but people are welcome to arrive earlier at 4pm to spend time with friends. A group of Gary's friends, lead by Chel & Laura White, are exploring the possibility of a gallery show of Gary's work this summer. If you have any of Gary's work that you would be willing to lend for a show, please bring scans on CD. We will also have a scanner available at the memorial if you want to bring the art with you. His family has asked for copies of any photos we might have of Gary. If you have questions, please email Marilyn Zornado mz@marilynz.com (or call 503-807-4825) Please help by forwarding this message to Gary¹s friends. Marilyn (I know he used to spell his name Gairy, but a couple years ago he told me he had changed it back to Gary.) Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:09:04 -0500 http://www.animateclay.com/Article705.phtml Shigeru Okada from Japan "Nariomaru on YouTube" created a new short film called the Towelers. It's really simple but shows what can be done with high quality ball and socket ArmaBenders armature kits. You can watch it here. Thanks Brian for the sending in this news! Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:41:45 -0500