Claymation has come a long way from its
start with the invention of plasticine to modern movies such as Arthur Christmas and Pirates! Band of Misfits. It now
incorporates many techniques such as stop motion, CGI, and 3D animation. Claymation
has grown from relative obscurity to worldwide acceptance and acclamation.
Despite
the name, clay animation movies do not use figures or sets created out of clay.
Instead, plasticine, a substance similar to clay is used. Invented in 1897,
plasticine was first used in 1902 for sculpting lightening in a movie. That
small step did not lead to rapid success for the technique. It took six more
years before animated clay sculptures were used in the 1908 movie A Sculptor’s Welsh Rarebit Nightmare. Even so, claymation never caught on and remained an obscure and unpopular
technique until the mid 1980’s. With all the new technology that has been
invented, claymation movies have become increasingly easier to make.
One of the biggest and most influential
people in claymation history is Will Vinton. While studying architecture at the
University of California, he gained an interest in clay and later began
experimenting with clay in film. He joined his experiments with home movies
made by his father in the film Culture
Shock. Will Vinton worked with Bob Gardiner to make Closed Mondays, an eight minute movie short that came out in 1974 and
won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film a year later.
After making a claymation beer commercial with Gardiner, Vinton established
his own studio. He coined the term claymation in 1976 and registered it as a
trademark The
twenty-seven films he produced at the studio in three years serve to display
his growing skill in claymation. In those films, he created more lifelike
figures that imitated human movement more realistically, showing none of the
awkwardness present in his earlier works. In one of his films, The Little Prince, Vinton mixed clay
with oil paint, then had animator Joan Gratz paint the mixture on a glass
frame, film it, and slightly change the painting before shooting it again. In
this way, he portrayed an ever-changing sky in his films, which can resemble a
waterfall, an ocean, or any number of things. His film A Christmas Gift showed his success in achieving realistic and
balanced facial expressions that did not appear grotesque or overdone.
Will
Vinton produced and directed the first all claymation movie, Adventures of Mark Twain in 1985.
Everything in the movie was made from clay, including the sets, people, sky,
water, and the gigantic riverboat/hot air balloon that Mark Twain journeys in
with Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher. The movie details Twain’s
journey to meet up with Haley’s Comet and incorporates classic Twain stories,
including The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County.
Walter Murch was a special consultant to the film and
afterwards received Vinton’s help on his own project, the making of the Disney
movie Return to Oz. In this film,
Vinton had to shoot using a single frame for the first time instead of the
double frame he usually used. He also had to create huge puppets as a way to
let the animators use greater detail. Unfortunately, this made the puppets
increasingly heavy which made adjusting them even more difficult.
Will
Vinton has incorporated new technological effects that have come along into his
studio. In Return to Oz, which was
his and his teams first time to working with special effects, Vinton was
required to use single frames in order to create the required less stylized
look. In 1993 he began to build up a computer department because he wanted to
mix CGI animation with his regular claymation work. The department grew from
the three employees it started out with to include more than twenty full time
employees. Five short films were created using CGI. Mr. Resistor, a stop motion
puppet, became a star when Vinton began using stop motion. His work in stop
motion eventually led to him working with Eddie Murphy and Imagine
Entertainment on the television show The PJs. It was on this project that a
technique which the studio called foamation was used. This technique made
puppets out of foam instead of clay, which made them lighter and sturdier.
In
2003 Will Vinton resigned from the Board of Directors and was shortly afterward
fired. Later, Phil Knight, a man who gained a majority interest in the studio
changed the studio’s name from Will Vinton Studios to Laika as a way to provide
his son, who had been an apprentise of Vinton, with an animation studio. Laika
is the company that has produced the movie Coraline and the soon to be released
ParaNorman.
After
departing from the studio, Will Vinton continued to make movies and work with
other companies on projects. He also created a new company called Freewill
Entertainment where he worked with 3D animation. He started an exhibit titled
“The Amazing World of Claymation” at the Oregon Historical Museum in 2009. This
exhibit included his own personal animation art collection from the films he
has created and worked on. Freewill Entertainment is currently working on a
film tentatively called The Minstrel Tree.
Aardman
Animation has also done great things for claymation. The studio was created by
Peter Lord and David Sproxton in 1972. Their goal from the beginning was to read out to
an adult audience. One of their early works was "Conversation Pieces"
which was aired on Channel Four Television and gave them a chance to develop
their techniques on animating puppets.
In 1985 Nick Park, the creator of the Wallace and Gromit characters joined the
studios where he produced the films The
Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave,
and all subsequent Wallace and Gromit films. In 1989 Channel Four
appointed Aardman Animations to make "Lip Synch" a collection of five
minute films. This collection worked on using real voices and basing characters
off of actual people in the world of animation. One of this collection was
actually Nick Park's "Creature Comforts" which in 1990 won the Best
Animated Short Film Academy Award.
Later the
studio created their first animated television series, "Rex the Runt.”
This series was created both for adolescents and adults and aired on BBC2 in
1998. It received many international awards and led to a different series,
"Angry Kid" being commissioned for BBC2 in 2001. BBC Three
commissioned another series which helped the channel's rise to popularity. The studio’s first full-length film, Chicken Run which was funded by Dream
Works and first CG film Flushed Away opened
in theaters everywhere. The studio has won four Oscar Awards for it’s work and
has gotten world-wide acclaim for its Wallace and Gromit movie The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and the
movie Chicken Run. They will soon be
releasing the movie The Pirates! Band of
Misfits.
Nick Park
has definitely helped to bring the world of claymation into the spotlight with
his characters Wallace and Gromit. He began working on the first Wallace and
Gromit film, "A Grand Day Out" while still learning at the National
Film and Television School. It took him years to finish this film short and
while still working on it he joined Aardman Animations in 1986 and worked on
the music video "Sledgehammer” which is said to be the greatest music
video of its time.
Later he animated, directed, and wrote the "Creature Comforts"
which came out in 1990 and gained great popularity, giving Park his first Oscar
nomination. This was followed up by a second nomination the next year when A
Grand Day Out was finally completed. The next two Wallace and Gromit features
"The Wrong Trousers" in 1993 and "A Close Shave" in 1995
greatly increased the characters popularity. The series also helped to bring
claymation into the spotlight and bring it popularity. Afterwards he took a
break from Wallace and Gromit to work Peter Lords, another director, on
"Chicken Run" which took them five years to complete. Later, in 2003,
he returned to his popular short "Creature Comforts" and created a tv
series for it. Then in 2005 he directed the full length Wallace and Gromit film
"The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” This movie won him an Academy Award for
Best Animated Feature Film and a BAFTA for Best British Film. The film also
rose to the top of the box office charts in both the U.S. and the UK. His
beloved characters are known all over the world and have brought world-wide
popularity to claymation.
People
like Will Vinton and Nick Park and studios such as Aardman Animation have
contributed greatly to the growth of the technique and its popularity. It is
thanks to them stars such has Wallace and
Gromit have come into being. Claymation has been mixed with many special
effects and has become well known throughout the world.
Amey,
Tori, Justin. Claymation Station. http://library.thinkquest.org/22316/home.html
Laika. Laika. http://www.laika.com
Marx,
Flint Rebecca. “Nick Park.” Gotten
from All Movie Guide. Hollywood.
Vinton,
Will. Freewill Entertainment. http://freewill.tv/freewill.html
No comments:
Post a Comment