Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:59 -0400 http://animateclay.com/ Stop Motion and Clay Animation News Since 2001 en-us http://animateclay.com/images/logo.gif http://animateclay.com/ marc@animateclay.com http://animateclay.com/Article771.phtml These past two days I've created a couple of new video posts about my experience with two people you don't hear much about - but who helped me understand most of what I know in clay animation. The first is Webster Colcord. Webster was the second person to hire me and the person who revealed tons of secrets to me that Will Vinton Productions used in creating their Claymation TV commercials and specials. Watch my video about him by clicking here. The second person, John Ashlee Prat is even less known than Webster. At the time I met him around 1990, John Ashlee told me that digital camera equipment was the way the future was headed when it came to stop motion. He was 100% correct! He also worked for Will Vinton Productions and I was fortunate to meet him several times, and to work with him along with Webster. Watch my video about him here. Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:59 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article770.phtml I've just completed the second video news article...hmm can you call it an article? Or maybe a vlog post? I'm not sure exactly what to call them yet, but I talked about a new technique anyone can use to promote their films on YouTube. The technique is one that I found by accident on YouTube by an internet marketer. The formula works so well that I actually recommend it only if you make a film that is serious. That's because if you make a bad film and market it in the way I describe, a lot of people will actually see your work as bad and avoid you. So keep that in mind, especially if you are just starting out. If you have a film that is really good that you are proud of - the technique if done properly will help you get noticed. The whole purpose of that is to get you seen by as many people. This helps you network with others, get you hired in studios - or in the case of Blunty on YouTube - a deal with Warner Brothers! See what I'm talking about by watching the latest video post on YouTube here. Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:26:50 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article769.phtml Megan Brain has been busy making cut-out characters for a Summer Olympics commercial for United Airlines. It involves lots of paper, lots of exacto knives and a lot of patience. It is similar to the Super Bowl ad that came out a year or so ago where the same paper characters were used. Take a look at what Megan and her team came up with by visiting her blog here. Watch the commercial on YouTube by clicking here. And finally I decided to try out a new program called CamStudio to take you through the news. What do you think of video news for Animateclay.com? Is my voice too nasally sounding to be a news caster? You can watch it here, and make sure to comment on the video. Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:18:39 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article768.phtml A few years ago I reviewed the DVD called Harvie Krumpet, and now it's free to watch in full on YouTube. It was created by Adam Elliot and produced by Melanie Coombs. The story starts out explaining Harvies bad luck from the start, and the narrator takes you through each stage of his life in a humorous "faktual" way. If your wondering why I mis-spelled factual, find out by watching the hilarious 22 minute film here. Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:38:57 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article767.phtml If you haven't heard of Bob Burns, most likely you don't know the story behind how he was able to find the original King Kong armature that he goes on tours with. Bob is just one more person who helps inspire others by giving almost everyone complete access to his Kong armature. Even if your a stranger who has an interest in stop motion, he will allow you to hold and pose Kong without giving it a second thought. Recently Bob went to the latest Wonderfest on July 19th and gave a five minute chat to the audience about how he got his hands on Kong. Take a listen on YouTube by clicking here. Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:50:40 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article766.phtml Coraline is being billed as the largest stop motion feature film ever produced. There are 40 stop motion sets being animated on at any given time, and will be shown in 3-D wherever theaters have that ability. Hopefully they will list some 3-D theaters you can visit locally on it's release in February 2009. Recently Laika decided to set up a promotional display of the stop motion puppets used in the film. The surprising part was that the puppet faces are built with replacement upper and lower faces. This is similar to Miss Spider in James and the Giant Peach. Although it looks like the seam line is removed digitally afte the shots are completed by the animator. Laika which is rapidly expanding now employs about 425 people, has two features in production "Jack and Ben" as well as TV advertisements and commercials. So it seems that the business management is doing a good job for the studio which went nearly bankrupt during Will Vintons stay. You can visit Laika's official web site here. Take a look at some different gallery images of the Coraline puppets at the San Diego Comic Con below: Gallery 1 Gallery 2 Gallery 3 Watch a video of Neil Gaiman talk briefly about Coraline to Pulp Secret on YouTube here. Sat, 26 Jul 2008 23:16:45 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article765.phtml Well after months of set-backs, tonight is the night when I am going to start creating the new how-to DVD on creating sets for stop motion. The camera batteries are charged, I have new video casettes - and I'm planning to shoot tonight. If you have some particular thing you want to understand with regards to set building, please e-mail me as soon as you can so I can include it. My e-mail is Marc@animateclay.com Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:24:32 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article764.phtml Recently while reading Kramers Klaymation blog, I came across a recent post about a facial expression book by Mark Simon here. When I saw it, I knew that these books were something I needed to get. So I quickly went to Amazon and bought both the Babies to Teens book, as well as the book titled Facial Expressions which covers the 21 to 83 age range. The books were surprisingly cheap. Just 15 bucks each, and they have thousands of images of different subjects. I even found the authors official site for each book here and here. If you look around there is a free e-book download of expressions provided you give the author your e-mail address. That's not a bad trade-off! The book is definitely a must-have for the animator who either wants to draw, sculpt or model the various expressions. In some cases you can't just use a mirror, because as you age your expressions are going to look different. How does a new born baby smile effect the face? It's definitely different than a 21 year old. The books have some age progression images so you can see the effects, as well as a phoneme section. So if you want to sculpt replacement mouths for example in the various talking positions - they have a front and side view of all the possible shapes. So to be direct - these books are a must have! I loved looking through them and plan to use them for my future puppet sculpts. If you don't own a copy you really shouldn't pass these up! Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:20:30 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article763.phtml I decided to add a new chat room to our site. In the past there's been a lot of chat room scripts, but they are really boring. Recently Google came out with this thing called Google Lively. It's sort of like the 2nd Life site, but it's a bit more fun. So give it a try and let me know your thoughts. You can watch YouTube videos that we put up in it, make your own personalized character and talk about your projects. Take a look at it here. I think it's really cool. Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:26:37 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article762.phtml Recently I found three new videos on YouTube. What my eyes saw shocked me. I didn't think that there was a studio utilizing the cartoony characature style of Will Vinton's past. Most studios use either the Aardman style when they use clay, or they use some other material like foam or silicone. Studio H in South Korea creates puppets that are both detailed and made of clay. The reason why I personally love that is because of the translucency that clay gives to the life of a sculpt. It's sort of why they use wax as the main material in wax museum personalities. It emulates the skin of of a person in the way light reflects off of it. Combine a realistic skin look with puppets that are semi-realistic and you get a lively puppet. Studio H produces a few shows . The Arari Show which is a series of short humorous animations for teaching elementary Korean expressions to viewers from other countries. It also has a show called....Englishow. They infuse the culture into their work and believe in making R rated shows that are educational and funny. At least according to their "about W" page. So if you have some spare time, check out their web site. It is fairly vast, but you need to click all over the place to see the pictures and movies they uploaded here. If you would rather skip to some YouTube videos, your going to miss out on a lot. But if you'r short on time, here are what they uploaded so far. Video 1 Video 2 Video 3 Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:10:47 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article761.phtml With all this talk about Harryhausens Clash of the Titans being remade into a CG film, you'd think that clearly film makers know what's best. CG has so much more to add to characters because you can add things like miniscule details, veins, microscopic hairs and textures, camera moves....the list goes on and on. Well of course there's nothing wrong with CG, in fact I like CG films. Monsters INC. is one film I actually think is excellent, as well as most of the Pixar films. But what if I found that stop motion was able to evoke more of an emotional response in people when they saw two identical short films in the two different media. I have, and the proof is undeniable that people really do love stop motion more than CG if it's done well. This post isn't a jab to CG, it's just to make a point that stop motion films aren't fossils of the film era and should be taken as a viable way to make money in films. Ok the first film is a car commercial for the Citroen C4. It's a viral video that was made just to get lots of views in an effort to get the car noticed. It's a clever film, you can watch it here. The second is a film that duplicates the first film and is by Patrick Boivin. Watch his version here. Judging by the amount of comments and the "over 700" ratings for Patricks film, stop motion is the winner. Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:42:54 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article760.phtml Most new animators usually come up against one big problem. Making their characters talk. It's not very difficult and can be done with some free programs if you know where to look. Recently on Stop Motion Magic, Sidmjam posted a nice tutorial that he wrote for others to learn how he breaks down the recorded audio. Take a look at what he has to say here. Grayden from Stop Motion Magic also wrote to tell me how he broke the sound down for his latest animation here. He uses a program called Toon Boom Studio, so for anyone interested read the tutorial on his web site here. Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:56:34 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article759.phtml I think I've now seen possibly the most gory and disturbing clay animated film on the internet. Japanese animator takena on YouTube made a film called Chainsaw Maid. It starts out innocently enough, and then turns into a gut churning film with a maid who defends the home of a simple family from zombies. The technical aspects of creating the animated scenes are top notch. It's not for the faint of heart. If decapitations and blood offend you, don't click todays link here. Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:13:52 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article758.phtml MOLI Roller recently did a two part interview with Ron Cole. Ron is one of the most talented guys out there and is fairly new to utilizing the internet. However he is not new to special effects and has worked in the industry for 20 years. In just under a years time he has posted his film trailer for "in the Fall of Gravity" on YouTube, created a how-to video on mold making "see our Master Course" and is starting to get lots of attention. MOLI is one of the more recent places to interview Ron in a two part video series. They are short videos but very inspiring. If you watch them just make sure to slide the volume slider up. They - for some reason automatically mute all the videos when they play. See part 1 here. See Part 2 here. Visit Ron's Blog See Part 2 here. Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:09:11 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article757.phtml Against the wishes of stop motions greatest animators Ray Harryhausen, Legendary Pictures will be re-making his classic Clash of the Titans. According to their official site.... "Legendary Pictures is an independent production company that was founded in June 2005 to create, develop, co-produce, co-finance and distribute major motion pictures through a unique strategic partnership with Warner Bros." When Ray Harryhausen first found out during an interview at the premiere of Peter Jacksons King Kong re-make, he was visibly mad. Watch his reaction by clicking here. The stop motion community recognized that Ray's "Legendary" work was being re-made against his wishes and there is a lot of talk on all the animation blogs about the new film. Recently Paul J. McConnochie made a short film explaining the situation. If you want to honor Ray Harryhausen make sure to link to the video on your own animation sites, forums and blogs. Take a look by clicking here. Make sure to comment on the video "it's the new updated version now" and rate it 5 stars. Here are some other locations of the video for you die hard Harryhausen fans. Linking to all of these on your site will help the video get lots of publicity: Click here to view the same video on google. Click here to see the video on MySpace. Click here to view it on Yahoo Videos. Click here to view it on Revver. Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:55:45 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article756.phtml There is a lot of debate over CG films taking over stop motion. The truth is that computers can make a big difference in the look of stop motion for the better. Especially when it comes to things like smoke, fire, rig removal, environmental effects and style. Carlos Lascano created a kind of stop motion CG hybrid film called A Short Love Story. It uses a lot of effects and camera moves most likely done in an editing program like Adobe After Effects or Premiere. Take a look at it here. Big Studios have been using computers to accent stop motion probably around the time of Nightmare Before Christmas. In that film they used CG snow flakes during the final shots because it would have been too hard to do by hand. Well...maybe not too hard, but very very time consuming. Recently Portland Oregon's Laika studio released a short film called A Dream for Hokusai. What they tried to achieve was a transition between 2-D drawn backgrounds into stop motion backgrounds. It's a simple process "so it seems" where they just fade one element into another as layers. Again it's probably done in something like Final Cut Pro or After Effects. Take a look at how it turned out here. Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:56:23 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article755.phtml Blogger and stop motion animator Castlegardener wrote a tutorial for some very simple ball and socket joints. He made some of his own when he realized he needed a flying rig for a shot in his latest film. The construction is simple enough for most people to do on a low budget. Check out his how-to guide here. Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:38:42 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article754.phtml Phew, it's been a lot of work to get the site to where it is today. The new design is completed, the affiliate program is ready for anyone to join and the new site stopmotionmagic.com is finished. So what's the next plan? Well I have two plans, and the first one will take me a while. It's going to be a new newsletter. If you subscribed to our newsletter, most likely you only got a few mailings when something big happens at the site. The problem is that the newsletter is broken. It doesn't work properly - and it is a major chore for me to use and send messages. What I originally wanted to do was have a weekly newsletter with tips on clay and stop motion. So that's something I'm working on now behind the scenes. A free weekly newsletter, and the best part is it will be automated. This will help free my time so that I can work on new products....like the set building DVD that I desperately want to create. I need to write 48 tips before I can create the new newsletter, and once it's done anyone on the old newsletter will have to join the new since it will be deleted, along with all the members. Once we're ready to move things over we will send out a message for anyone who wants our weekly tips. If you want a stop motion tip explained in the newsletter just send me a message and I'll make sure to include it. Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:25:47 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article753.phtml Recently while surfing around for news I came across a project that sounds really promising. It's a film being produced in Canada called Edison and Lio. There is an 80 person crew working day in and day out up in Vancouver, and it is the first Canadian-funded stop motion feature. There are a few web pages we found about the film with plenty of pictures and stories to check out. Here are some of the good ones: Vancouver studio tackles painstaking animation project Photos of the "Edison and Leo" stop-motion movie set Edison and Leo, and Automatic Duck There is a rumor that the producer Bill Vince of the feature recently died. Is it a bad omen for Canada's stop motion industry? We hope not. You can read the rumor here. Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:54:44 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article752.phtml Are you a Brick Filming Maniac? If you are we found a site you might want to bookmark. It's called the Brothers Brick and is created by a small group of dedicated Lego fans. They report on all the latest Lego brick and minifig releases and are heavily involved in the Lego community. Recently they visited a Lego convention called Brickworld 2008 and took lots of pictures and videos. Check out the latest Star Wars Death Star Lego sets they filmed here. So if you love making Lego films you should definitely check this blog out here. The only negative is they don't cover Brick Films very much. Just the new Lego releases and major news. If you want to watch only films made with Lego - the most popular site is of course.....Brick Films. Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:08:38 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article751.phtml With a budget of just 20 million dollars, Frederator's producers Fred Seibert's partnered with Kevin Kolde and Eric Gardner will be working on a Neverhood feature film. And yes - it will be in stop motion! Frederator was formed in 2007 and will work with Doug TenNapel to help out. Doug is the original designer for the characters and the video game. The news is actually fairly old and the Neverhood feature is one of the first films they plan to make. This means they may already be pretty far into production. At least one year this month. Read the official announcement about the Neverhood feature and Frederator here Check out Frederator's official web site here If you haven't seen the Neverhood video game, it had some really hilarious clay animated cut-scenes. You can watch both a funny cut-scene and some in-game play scenes here. Watch Doug working on some scenes for a film which may or may not be for the Neverhood feature here. Wed, 18 Jun 2008 08:30:00 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article750.phtml Justin Kohn has started working on a new business selling what he calls Mechanical Sculptures. What they are - are very precisely made stop motion armatures, where the armature itself is a work of art. They are meant to be animated as a way forthe buyer to express himself. The idea is neat and the designs are a lot of fun. If you go through the site you can see the armatures animated in short clips. Take a look at what they have so far by clicking here. Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:21:48 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article748.phtml Now that you've seen everything, check out this crazy film by Mike Vinz. It's called Cardboard Tron and is a re-make of the original 1982 film.....you guessed it....Tron. They incorperate live action along with the stop motion in a pretty seamless way. It's really low budget but just shows what you can do with some construction paper and a digital camera. Watch it online here. Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:41:32 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article747.phtml J Dan who joined the Stop Motion Magic site uploaded a neat video called Learning to Ride. He makes his videos using simple wooden mannequins that you can buy in craft stores. Only he spray paints them silver and puts them in funny situations. Check out J Dan's profile on Stop Motion Magic here, and check out his Learning to Ride video here. You can buy his DVD's which have more episodes "and of high quality" on the officlal Sylverados site here. Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:22:58 -0400 http://animateclay.com/Article746.phtml Cuppa Coffee Studios in Canada has been hard at work on a new TV show aimed at teens to young adults. It's called Life's a Zoo and is a new type of business model for stop motion. The studio plans to push the show not just on TV - but on the web as well. You can read one of their press releases here to learn more about it. Or just skip to the good stuff and see the trailer and sneak peek preview video below: Click here for the Trailer Click here for a Sneak Peek Check out the official site here. For now it's under construction but will be full functional by spring. Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:38:28 -0400