Animation Techniques

I've been experimenting with a couple of different animation techniques during this module. I've tried a little bit of stop motion animation in the past, and I thought I'd try some different approaches within the technique. The first style I tried was 'claymation', which is stop motion animation made with plasticine. I used a very simple idea of a stalk growing up from the ground and then flowering.

As with all stop motion animation, producing a clip even as short as this was time consuming, and fiddly. Plasticine is definately a harder medium to work with for animation than id anticipated, even for something as simple as my video. All in all, it seems like quite a lot of hard work for a not particularly great result. You would definately need to invest a lot of time to produce any halfway decent results, so hats off to all the people who've made some of the incredible claymations out there, they must never leave their basements.

The second style I tried was a drawing on method, gradually building up a picture line by line, and erasing parts as they change.

This technique clearly has its limitations, and a shadowy after-image of the erased parts remains behind after. There is an amazing animation that takes this idea much further, onto a massive scale using different mediums.

Just the scale of it is impressive, and the action going on in it is trip-out craziness. I can find no wrong with this work, I absolutely love it.