Making a Claymation video.

With Claymation, I've learn that you have to be careful with Morph's (Or anything you make with Play-Dough/Clay) arms, legs and head because it can be easily broken if twisted too far. In this blog, I'll explain how I made a Claymation in my Media lesson.

First of all, I gathered all my equipment up like always. My equipment consisted of my Play-dough/Clay Morph, a Sony hand held camera, a Firewire cable and a tripod. When I'd gotten all of the equipment that I needed, I set it all up (e.g. Put the Sony camera onto the tripod, stood up the tripod properly, plugged the FireWire into the iMac and the Sony camera and then placed Morph into the shot I wanted) and then opened iStopMotion to start taking shots one frame at a time. After finishing the shots I wanted, I saved it as "Morph and top hat joy" so that I could tell which iMovie video it was.

 

I then went onto Final Cut and used a Voice Over to sound a bit like Morph. I also used Voice Over to make it sound like he had actual footsteps (Footstep noises) so that it added more effect to the video. Once I had finished with Final Cut and saved it, I then Exported it to QuickTime Player and watched it again to see how my Claymation had turned out. Safe to say I was happy with it!

Finally, after I'd finished watching it through I uploaded it onto YouTube and renamed the video to "Sir Morph". The purple writing "Sir Morph" below is my video post on YouTube, feel free to put feedback on the Claymation!

Claymation.

Today in media, we were working with clay/play-dough and were asked to make Morph. Before we started making Morph we were shown how he looks originally, then we were given some orange/red play-dough which I squished and warmed up to mould it. After the play-dough was soft enough for me to mould, I started to shape out Morph's body by pinching bits of the play to make the head, arms, legs and nose. When I had finished shaping the body and moulding it out properly, I then added the eyes which consisted of two white blobs and two black blobs.

I then made a little top hat as a prop because I thought it would look funny and cute to add to Morph's look. With this, I had completely finished with Morph's play-dough model and took pictures of proof that this model was made entirely by me with no help making it.

I then took some equipment from the media equipment room. I took a Sony camera and firewire so that I could link the Sony camera up to the iMac and then I could use iStopMotion again to make Morph move; making a little clay animation. After I took the pictures on iStopMotion and then watched it back to see if I had made any mistakes, I saved and imported it onto Quicktime Player. This allows me to then upload it onto YouTube without any problems (Wrong format and such).

After importing it onto Quicktime Player , I uploaded it onto YouTube and then named the video "Top Hat Morph". With this, I had finished what I needed to do. Then I watched it over two times to make sure it ran smoothly. And sure enough it did. My work was finally finished.

Drawn Animation

In this post, I will talk about how I used iStopMotion to create a flip book animation and how researching animation helped me to understand how they used to create animation in the olden days when they didn't have the technology that we have now.

First of all, I drew the image of what I wanted (which in my case would be a firework shooting up and then exploding) onto square pieces of scrap paper; being careful to trace it the best I possibly could. When I was finished drawing and tracing the image from the original piece of paper, I then used a scanner as the first experiment. As the images didn't come out as well as I wanted them to, I used another method. I took an animation rostrum, a sony camera and a firewire cable. Then following onto setting the equipment up (Turning the screw into the camera to hold it in place, then plugged the firewire into the camera and then plugged the other end into the Mac) and then searching for the application "iStopMotion" on the iMac; clicking on it and then setting it up so that it would be at twelve frames per second and then set the Preset at DV PAL.

After setting everything up and placing the Sony camera the way I wanted it, I started to take pictures on iStopMotion one picture at a time. Whilst doing this I had to make sure that the pictures were in/almost in the exact same place so I marked the animation rostrum with pencil when I placed my pictures on the rostrum's work space. I could see the next picture because you were allowed to turn the opacity down on the image on the screen. When I had finished taking the pictures of the "moving" image, I took the camera off of the animation rostrum and then unplugged the fire wire; placing them gently onto the other desk along with the animation rostrum. The images that came out were better than using the images from the scanner so I decided that I'd stick with this method and upload the video once I had finished tweaking it. I watched the video over and over again to see if I had made any mistakes (Fingers in the way of the picture, the firework moving too quick, the firework in a totally different place etc).

I had to then export it and then save the video as My iStopMotion Movie Export. I exported it twice just in case it didn't work the first time (I couldn't find it the first time so I exported it again).  Making sure that I saved it into the movies folder and then exported it. I then looked into my movies folder and found that both had exported into it so I watched both to see if they had changed in quality. It had only changed slightly and I chose to upload the second video because it seemed more clearer when I had saved it.

After doing all of this and finally finishing, I uploaded it onto YouTube and waited for it to upload. when it had uploaded, I named the video "Firework" and left a description that said "Drawn by myself, made on iStopMotion and then uploaded here. Enjoy!"