Juan Ponce De Leon Claymation

Claymation is using clay for animation. Movie Companies often use Claymation to create series, like the show Wallace and Grommet. Daniel, Couran and I used claymation to create a humorous documentary on the explorer Juan Ponce De Leon, which we recently completed in first quarter. Come visit into our story as I explain the production of the Claymation, and the fun, difficult and learning experiences of the production.

Making clay objects move is obviously fun. Why wouldn’t it be? But I would personally have to say that the making of the audio was the funnest part, which ironically, we had the least amount of time to do. The reason why it was fun was because I like to give objects “life”. Having just balls of clay moving around can be boring. Having music gives it suspense and gets you excited, and having voices tells the mood of the character, and tells you what kind of a person that little ball of clay is. We also tried to add humor in the voices, by saying either stupid or funny things.

Probably the most difficult or otherwise boring part of the project was at the beginning, when we were making the clay figures. It seemed really hard to make clothes for the figures. Also, our clay wasn’t very good, because it would never stick. Even after we made the basic shape of the people, we had trouble creating faces and bodily features. It was very time consuming. Once we got the figures done, they would still fall apart easily, causing more discomfort. We eventually finished.

Over the course of the project, I had many tidbits that I learned. The most important thing that I learned was to anchor our camera. As you can tell, the beginning of the video is very jumpy, and the animation doesn’t look good at all. Over time, we anchored our camera, and the quality greatly improved. I still think that we could have done better in some areas. That is not to say that it’s a bad movie, because I’m very happy with it. I’ll just make sure to keep the camera still for further Claymations, and to also take more pictures.

Claymation can be the easiest type of animation, and at the same time be the hardest and most time consuming. I had fun working with my partners, and I learned a lot by doing this project. I hope to experiment with maybe legos and fingers for future animations.