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Hi, my name is Joe Vena. I’m the creative director of the Children’s Museum of the Arts Media Lab and I’ve been with the museum for almost ten years now. I teach stop motion animation and clay sculpture at our clay bar and I love it. Something I love about teaching stop motion animation is that it’s this very, very basic simple approach, but there’s so much you can do with it.

The CMA media lab started years ago through one stop motion animation class and from there, the department has been built up to include not just stop motion animation, but sound recording and pod casting and music production, live film making and we’re just starting to get our feet wet with 3D printing. The media lab is really about story telling. We like to say technical collaborative story telling.

What that means is that our teaching artists are guiding younger artists in sort of, a collaborative story telling process where they employ sculpture and photography techniques, illustration, performance and music to create some larger film or collaborative piece that can then be shared our website and our blog with friends and family all over the world.

If you’d like to know more about Children’s Museum of the Arts and the media lab, please check us out at www.CMANY.org. You can also go to blog.CMANY.org. You can see some of the films made by our young artists, some of the wonderful artwork created in our studios. You should also come to the museum and visit us. See our gallery, our fine arts studio.

We have an amazing early childhood center, and please come to the clay bar where you may find me. That’s where I love to be, behind the bar guiding young artists and older artists in sculpture techniques. So, come and see us. I look forward to seeing you soon. Let’s tell some stories. Let’s make some art.

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How do you animate clouds? This is a good question, and there are various answers to it, depending on the direction you want to go as an artist. I prefer animating clouds with cotton. So I’ll take cotton batting either from the inside of a stuffed animal or from a bag of cotton. You could also use cotton swabs and put them together. Or cotton balls, put them together. This cotton is really nice. It has a good pull to it, and I’ve shaped the cotton more or less into cloud shapes.

And cotton is not as shapeable, say, as clay, but you can coax it. I have three clouds, all made out of cotton. I have my camera pointing down. I’m going to use my multiplane so I get another layer here. We’ve got nice blue paper for our sky. And I think we’ll start with our clouds right there, and what we’ll do is we’ll move them. I’m going to do one cloud back here and another one here at the edge. I think we have a nice sky setup right here. Our desk lamp is giving it the look that some sunlight is coming through the clouds, nothing wrong with that. I’ll take one frame here, and I’m going to move the clouds sort of dreamily and slowly this way across our frame. And that means making very, very tiny moves.

And of course the challenging one is this cloud that’s underneath my plexiglass, and I’m just going to move that as well and take a picture. Gently coaxing the clouds toward that end of the frame. Gently moving them outside with that kind of slow move. There we go. And the clouds have all blown away. It’s a very short animation of clouds blowing through the sky, but you get the idea. A little bit of cotton, a multiplane if you have the plexiglass, some blue paper. You can animate a beautiful cloudy sky and make the clouds drift away. So give it a try.

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So we’re going to animate a flying bird. As with so much in the stop motion realm, there are different approaches we can take. We’re going to animate our flying bird with a paper cutout style, using our multi-plane to give us two layers, a layer for our sky and the layer for our bird to fly on, and we’ll be shooting with our camera pointing down, of course. This is a great way to make birds fly, to make fish swim, because you’re taking the gravity thing out of the equation.

You don’t have to rig your bird up. You don’t have to shoot it in front of a green screen and composite a sky in later. You can simply lay it all down in your layers and fly them this way. So here we go. My bird puppet is made up basically of four parts. I have a body cutout, which I will lay down here. I have a cutout for his head, very, very simple, an eye, a beak. And I have two wing cutouts, which I’ll just place right there. In some cases, you can put your paper puppets together with brass fasteners or thread and tape. Because this is a very basic puppet in just four pieces, we’re going to go without any connections. We’ll just keep them together and animate him, and make sure his parts do not fly away from each other. We’re going to start our bird off out of frame. Take a few frames of just the sky.

And now we’ll enter our bird. He will come in beak first just like that. I see the edge of the beak at the bottom of the frame there. Here he comes. When I’m animating the bird, I’m using my fingers very gently pulling forward and trying to make sure I’m pulling all of the parts at the same time. We’re going to have him soaring up so to speak. He’ll flutter there for a moment, and then he’ll fly out. As he really starts to enter the frame, you want to make sure you’re getting some sort of a flap on the wings. This can be challenging. Do your best. Consider that you might want to flap up one, two, three frames. Hold it. Then drop your wings back down one, two, three frames. Hold it. And I’ll show you what I mean right here. So here he comes. He’s flying in. We’re going to bring both of these wings up a little more. And we’re going to have them beat down now as he gets even higher.

And because he’s not flapping anymore, we’ll drop him just a little bit. And we’re going to drop him a bit more as we bring those wings down, or rather up, bringing the wings up a little bit more, dropping him down. The challenge is that you don’t put your fingerprints on the multi-plane. You don’t want to see this plexiglass level at all. And the other challenge is that you’re moving and isolating these parts in a sensible way so that it looks like your bird is flying. Maybe just tremble him back and forth for a moment, hovering up there in the blue paper sky. And he’s going to go. I’m going to do a nice, swift exit. We’re going to bring his wings behind him, point that head toward the sky. He’s heading south or west. Who knows? He’s going away. And we’ll increase the size of the movements a little bit, and that will increase the speed of his movement in the film. There’s always that moment before you play your animation where you think, “Did it work?” Let’s see if it worked. Let’s see if it worked. He flies in. And he goes out. I think it worked. Try this at home. Draw your bird. Cut it out. Make it fly.

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So it’s fun to pick living creatures and animate those, and we’re going to try out a little animating of some swimming fish. There are, as with so many elements of stop motion animation, there are many ways to approach and attack animating swimming fish. We are going to use actual fish pictures in some cases and fish illustrations that have been printed and laminated. Great way to make an animatable puppet. And you can animate these with a camera that shoots down and a multi-plane. So we could have two layers of our fish. And I have four fish all set up ready to be animated. And maybe we’ll keep our fish just kind of swimming in place for a moment. We’ll just move them ever so slightly before starting, and there we go. We’re going to get a little move on the fish.

Take a picture. And then just the slightest move. You don’t want them to be jittering up and down too much, just moving slightly. It’s really nice to kind of have one fish in front of the other. With the multi-plane you get a sense of depth or a school happening. And perhaps now we’ll begin to swim them out ever so slowly. They’ve made a decision, and they’re going to swim out. It’s interesting to consider when you’re animating that you are creating a picture, and that have picture should have composition.

Think about where the fish are in your frame. Think about what that balance is, and as they move, let them all move sort of gracefully together. And perhaps they’ll get a little bit faster as they exit. And of course, to make your fish move faster in the film, you want to animate them with slightly larger moves. And they’re going to go pretty fast now, because there’s another fish coming. That’s what the viewer doesn’t know just yet. Out go these fish. We’ll have a moment before that next fish approaches, and this fish is going to be a little bit different. We’re having fun with these photo cutouts. So here comes the dogfish. Basically, all I’ve done here is print and cutout my fish, but I’ve also printed and cutout a dog head and just put him over the fish face like that. Feature our dogfish for a moment before he makes his exit. And there you have it. Swimming fish, and a dog fish. Now in this case, I printed these fish. They were already made, and I animated them. I encourage you to try something like this and then make your own fish. You can draw them, cut them out, and animate them.

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A fantastic thing to practice animating are explosions. Explosions are, of course, can be very serious things, but in the case of animating, we can enjoy them, have a little fun. This is going to be a very, very lighthearted explosion. It will be a candy explosion. I have a piece of hard candy set up right here underneath our camera of course. We’re shooting down to make this candy explosion happen. I haven’t animated anything yet. I’m going to start by giving the candy a little bit of a shake before it explodes. So I’ll take my frame, and I’m going to move the candy just the tiniest amount. Remember, we’re shaking the candy back and forth, a little lead up to our explosion.

Tiny move one way, take your picture. Tiny move the other way, take your picture. There are no set rules, of course, to how you make an explosion happen in stop motion animation. One good thing to keep in mind, however, is that an explosion happens like this. Out. So you want to animate your elements to come out. As many or as few as you want burst from the candy and disappear from the screen. We’re going to make our explosion happen with some of this funfetti, because yes, it is a candy explosion. We’ll also employ some of this cotton. Cotton is wonderful in animation for clouds and of course smoke. In this case, we’ll be using it for smoke. And we’ll see how it goes.

We’ll start by adding some of the funfetti. And I’m also going to mask the candy if I can. A little extra funfetti for that first moment. Take our picture. Boom. I’m now going to employ just a little bit of our cotton. It gives a nice smoky look in particular if you pull it out a bit. We don’t want to pull it out too much yet, because our explosion has just begun. We’re going to put our cotton here. At this point, we will remove our piece of candy. It’s no longer necessary. It has at this point just begun to explode. Let those pieces fly out now. And remember an explosion is going to happen with some speed, so it doesn’t have to be the tiny moves we were using when we were making the candy tremble.

This can be a faster move, which means you’re making larger movements with your pieces. We’ll take some more of this funfetti. It’s always good to make sure that every element of the explosion is moving out that way and that nothing is staying still. Your viewer could see that thing that’s still, and it kind of kills the explosion. I think that will work. We’re emanating out. We’re going to take our piece of cotton, our smoke. We’re going to make it a bit wispier and larger. We’re also going to push our elements out. And now things are really flying away. We’ll let our cotton go into pieces. The smoke is blowing in all directions. And I’m at the point where I’m basically going to clear the frame now.

Cap the explosion with an empty frame. Everything has blown away. Very sad. One last sweep, and I’ll just kind of clear off the station. And I’ll take a last few frames here. And we’ll watch our explosion. Candy trembles and boom. So try an explosion at home. Be careful, of course. And take what I’ve done, modify it, do it differently. Do it bigger. Do it better. Enjoy yourself.

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When you’re creating a stop-motion animation, it’s fund to give yourself challenges. One particular challenge I really enjoy is the animation of fire. This is something you can do in many, many different ways.

We’re going to find one fire trick right now. I am going to share it with you. We have our camera pointed down. We’re going to be working flat against this table here that’s covered with black paper.

What we have are paper cut-outs of flames. We have three different colors of paper. In the back we have cut-out of gel, orange lighting gel, or acetate, which gives you a nice little shine to it.

Sometimes you can use only paper or only gel. You can do it 3-dimensional. Some people use wax and light it from within. But this fire trick is very, very simple. It is something you can try at home, and we’ll show you how it works right now.

We have our fire positioned just under the camera right in the center there. We’re going to feature the fire in this animation. We have our fire positioned just so, and I will take a picture. We’re going to take another set.

We’re going to move our first fire out and match up our second fire. It does not have to be perfectly matched up and because it’s a different cut-out, it won’t perfectly match up. You want that slightly-off look in your overlay. Then you take your next picture.

We’ll move that fire set-up out of the way, and we’ll go into our third fire set-up. Again, place it without necessarily matching it completely up because they’re different. Take that picture, and we’ll go back to our first fire.

We’ll match it in there, and take our picture. Move that one out — picture of our third fire.

Now, I could do this all day. I love it, but we’re going to cheat a little bit in this case. We’re going to cut-and-paste our frames to repeat the six pictures that we’ve just shot.

We’re going to stop motion, click here, get all of those frames together, copy them, and paste them. Repeat it a couple of times there. When we play it through, we’ll see our fire’s a-burning.

That is the basics of animating fire, a very simple approach to it. I encourage you to try this, and then try some of your own methods for fire animation. Heat it up.

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So we have a fully realized, nearly fully realized, armature here. We’ve got some workable hands. We’ve given a tail to this armature as well. I think the next step would be adding a head. We’ll make this a basic sort of a cat-inspired creature, so we’re going to make a cat head for this creature. And we will use a nice lightweight Styrofoam ball. You want to keep anything that’s up on top of the puppet in particular nice and light so it does not get top heavy.

That would be a huge problem when you’re animating. Rather than just stick this Styrofoam ball on as it is, I will carve it just a little bit, maybe taking just a small amount of that Styrofoam off so it’s not completely round, kind of cutting in sort of where the cat’s cheeks would be. Maybe I’ll flatten out that face just a little bit. I’m kind of happy with those cuts that I’ve made. I’m just going to use my finger now and press in a bit. Kind of imagine where the eyes will go on your head. The head will sit right about there. Next step is covering the head, and I’m going to cover the head with a very thin layer of red clay. I’ve already added some red clay to the feet of my armature as well to keep it standing. Ultimately, we probably cover the whole armature. For now, I’m going to focus on covering the head. I take very, very, very thin amounts, and I apply it to the Styrofoam. Your clay will stick very nicely to the Styrofoam.

You might even get a nice texture underneath as well. You want to use just enough to cover the Styrofoam, not so much that you are weighing down your armature’s head. OK. So I have a nearly fully covered head here. The next step I think would be to determine it’s going to be a cat or catlike creature. So we’ll do some ears off of the top of the head. I’ll use the same color, and I’ll use as little clay as possible. I’m going to go for small ears, because I don’t want to weight it down. I’ve added a couple of bits, and I’m going to pinch them flat, and then a bit pointy. Flatten them out. Get them pointy, rather catlike. It’s important as this point to make sure that your head will fit on the puppet and that it will balance as well. I have a loop here of wire up on top, and I’m going to go in and just cut that loop so I can open out my wire a little. And I’m going to go into the bottom of the Styrofoam and just pop it on there.

And it looks like our cat will balance. Now there are wonderful details you can add to a head and a face, of course. For our cat, I’m going to use just a little bit of white clay, and I’m going to roll out a couple of little white ball shapes, maybe a kind of chin as well here. Then we’ll pop on the chin and little cheek. It’s nice to use something that is not clay necessarily. I have these wonderful plastic cat eyes. Then I’m going to take the plastic eye, which has a little post on it, and I’m going to just press that right in the middle of the blue. I feel it connecting with the Styrofoam, and I’ll pop it on like that. And take another one, press it right there in the middle. Sometimes, it’s good to take your head off while you’re working, too, so you can really see what you’re doing. So there we have it.

Our cat puppet is nearly there. He’s nearly finished. And a great thing to remember when you’re building puppets like this is that of course that structure, the wire, the wood, and the Styrofoam, but it’s also very important to get those little details, the eyes, the nose, the mouth. Be creative with the details. Try new things. Enjoy.

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So you have a wonderful puppet ready to go here. Perhaps you would like to add some details. A really wonderful, sometimes challenging, detail to give your puppet would be hands so that the puppet can grip things, pick them up, raise up a finger with an idea, give a thumbs up, etc. I don’t use the heavier aluminum wire for the hands. Instead I use a kind of a craft wire. You can find this in most art stores. It’s a rubber-coated much lighter wire. It does the trick for the hands. You don’t want to weigh your puppet down too much with more aluminum wire. So I take the puppet here. We’ve built in a loop to his arm already. This is going to be a three-fingered sort of a cartoon hand.

So much of building your puppets and building your armatures is trying out new things and figuring out how it works. There are definitely some great ways to do this, but there’s always room for new ways. In this particular way, I’m going to loop in the wire and twist it so that it’s locked somewhat onto the hand. In a moment, we’re going to add some masking tape here as well to really stick it together. But I want to get one loop going on one side like that, and then I’m going to bring it in just a bit and do another loop here on the other side. This will create basically two loops, two places where you can cut to create your four little digits there, three fingers and a thumb.

Once you have this shape, you can go ahead with a bit of the masking tape, always good to have your masking tape around. If it’s thicker, you can rip it into thinner strips. Then you want to go in there and lock that wire into place a bit. Simply looping the wire won’t always do it. You’ll need to involve some adhesive from time to time. You can even tape into that whole hand there. Just make sure your wire stays locked down. Now take a look at the loops and consider finger and thumb length and where they fall on the hand. You don’t necessarily want them too spread out, although it all depends on what it is that you are making. If it’s some strange creature, of course, You decide how those fingers and thumbs should go. I want the middle finger to be the longest, so I’m just going to adjust slightly here. I want to make sure my thumb comes down a little bit lower, so I’m going to bring that down. The more you work with wire and armature building, the more you will learn about what you like to do, how you like to do it. Once I have these loops in a place that I’m happy with, I will start to cut them.

I make a cut in the middle of the first one here, somewhat in the middle, and bring up one finger and one thumb. Because I want a taller middle finger and a shorter pinky finger on this cartoonish three-fingered hand, I’m going to make sure I cut so that that is taller, the middle finger, and shorter at the pinky. These are fairly long fingers, but we can go through and adjust those as well. And there you have it, a wonderful hand with working fingers for your armature. And you can then cover that hand with clay. You can paint it. You could also do tiny bits of fabric or even paper to be glued onto the hand. The sky is the limit. But give yourself a hand.

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So, how do you make a good, sturdy puppet for animation? There are a number of ways that you could create a puppet for your animation. I like to start with a wire armature and build from that wire armature. So, I take some aluminum wire, kind of a thinner gauge like this. And I’ve rolled out a pretty long piece.

And I’m going to fold that piece this way and then cut it so I now have this length of wire. I’m going to start at the top. The loose ends meet down at the bottom. I’m going to take my finger and my thumb, and pinch and twist the wire to create a kind of a neck for my puppet. I’m going to then take another piece of the wire, loop it out, pinch there at the base of the neck, and twist my puppet’s first arm. When I pinch out the the next arm from the wire, I’m going to do it with a longer piece of wire. I’m also going to measure up and make sure that the arm is roughly matched with the other one, and we’ll pinch and twist that as well. Now that we have two arms and our neck, we will pinch and twist the body. Next I will roll in the wire, wrap it back in to the back, and this will be for the first leg. You want to tuck those loose ends in once you roll them in there. It’s not a bad thing to give your wire armature decent-sized feet so he can stand. You can always reduce the size of the foot later, but at least to start, you might want some of the extra wire there. Measure out for your next leg.

There. And twist that in. Twist. Next leg. And you’re starting to get a sort of a humanoid form, human form. This of course could also become a four-legged creature of some kind if you just bend it down. So, the wire acts as a kind of a skeleton for your puppet. But if you’d like to bulk it out a bit, you can use Styrofoam, and you can cut that Styrofoam down if you need to. You can also shape Styrofoam with your fingers. If you want to give your puppet a belly, a chest, you can add that. And with some masking tape, lock it onto your armature. We’ll go back to him standing up for a moment. Another thing you can do is add a little wood to the leg to give your armature a knee. This also strengthens the legs of the armature. I’m using a very thin dowel here, but you could use bamboo skewers or even toothpicks if they’re long enough. I’ve got the wood against the leg and I’m going to tape it on. You should always have masking tape within reach when you’re building puppets. Really, when you’re building anything.

And I’m wrapping the tape around the wire and the wood. I want to get exactly the length of the leg covered. And I wrap that tape in nice and tight with no air pockets. Make sure that the mechanics of it work. I’m going to break that leg off the bottom there, so now I have this straight leg, and I’ll adjust it and then break the knee in there as well. So, this is the only place where that will bend, otherwise it stays straight. You can do this for the arms as well. It helps to do it for both legs.

Here’s another similar guy. He has both of his legs already on there, and we’ve taped in a nice, big belly for him. So, here we have him. A beautiful armature filled out with some Styrofoam and some wood, all ready to go. He’s standing, which is a good sign. We haven’t even added any clay yet to his feet and he’s already standing. And he’s ready to become the character he’s meant to be.

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So when you’re approaching a more complicated puppet and how to animate that puppet, a few good things to keep in mind is that your puppet’s feet are nice and flat there and they’re sturdy. They’re holding your puppet up. In some cases, animators would drill the feet into the floor for each step. We’re not going to get that complicated. We’re going to keep this kind of simple. You can see that this puppet here is a work in progress. His arms are still just the exposed wire.

You can see the tape and the wire for his hands. We’re going to work with him just like that. The rest of him is covered with clay, but he is made of wire and Styrofoam and wood. His eyes here are made of plastic. So we’ll start very simply with our puppet. We’ll bring his arms down a bit. We’ll kind of put him at rest. I think we’ll even have him looking down a bit as well. And we’re going to take a few pictures of him just like that. You’ve established with a few frames. Now I’m going to go in. When I animate my puppet, I’m going to steady his body with one hand, and I’m going to move his head just a little bit with the other. When I get my hands and body completely clear of the shot, I’m going to take my picture. We’re not going in with much of a plan here. We’re just going to kind of riff on this for a moment.

So we start with a puppet looking up at the camera. A few like that. We can adjust his eyes a little, eyelids. Twitch the ear a bit. We can move that tail a little, too. He has a tail back there. Move the tail a little more. Always make sure that your puppet is steady with every move that you’re giving him. Remember that you want to move your puppet in very small increments, too. If he’s making large moves, it’s all over much too quickly, and it moves so fast that your viewer can’t even really see what’s happening. Teeny tiny moves. Keep numerous parts moving at once, too, if you really want to give him life. I’m going to have him start to walk out this way. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s good to have a little extra clay on hand sometimes to execute a convincing walk, to make something stick when it doesn’t want to stick. That little extra bit of clay really helps. So we could continue and have him walk all the way out of the frame, something that it will take a great amount of time to do. And I intend to do it, but not right now. Those are the very, very basics of starting your animation with a complicated puppet like this one. Remember to be super-creative every chance you get, and that you can go a lot further than I’ve gone.

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So when you’re creating a stop motion animation, it’s good to go in with a plan. Sometimes executing something very simple like making an item grow or shrink can be a lot of fun. In this case, we are going to use clay to make some shapes shrink and then possibly grow again in our animation. We’re working with a camera on a tripod that’s shooting right here at this table, and we have these clay shapes set up right here. They are in our shot. They will be in our animation.

And rather than go in and change them each time we take a picture, we’ve created a whole bunch of incrementally shrunken shapes, and we’ll switch them out as we take the pictures. So we’ll start with these shapes right here, and we’ll take a few pictures of them before we begin to switch them out. So we’ll take the yellow cube and get a new one in there. Match it up. Red and red. And we’re using our overlay to match these shapes right back up, and we’ll take our picture. I’ll make sure that I’m clear of the shot. And we go back in. A new round of shapes. And it’s good to really match each shape to the previous picture that you took. This can sometimes take a moment, but it’s definitely worth it. You don’t want your shapes shaking back and forth too much. You want them shrinking.

Always make sure you clear your shot before you take your picture. It’s always good to save your animation as you go. So we’ve been gradually making shapes smaller and smaller by replacing them. So I’m going to play it through and watch the shrinking happen. And now I think we’ve shrunken down enough. We can cut, copy, and reverse our frames so it goes from being shrunken to growing back. And this is a fantastic animation exercise. You don’t just have to make shapes. You can create tiny elephants that go into large elephants, and you could grow and shrink elephants. It’s up to you. Get creative with it, but give it a try. The very small to the very large and switching out to transform things.

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We have our clay face. We are going to animate the clay face to blink. And what we do to make the character blink is take some clay. It can be the same color as the clay you’re already using or a different color. We’re using the same color here. And I create a little series of shapes here, two half-moon shapes for the half eyelids, and then two full flat circle shapes for when the eye is fully covered with the lid. And we’ll take a few pictures of our guy just as he is. Maybe adjust an eyebrow a little bit. Adjust the mouth. It’s nice to, even if very subtly, keep your character alive. Little moves.

And now we’ll go in for the blink. And we’ll start with the half eyelid. Rather than just drop an eyelid over the top of the eye, we’ll take a moment here and let it.

Picture of the half eyelid. We’ll remove the half eyelids. We’ll go to the full eyelids. Sometimes you’ll find it’s a little bit big. You want to reduce the size of your eyelid to fit just over the eye. You don’t want to see any of that eye sticking out from the eyelid. You just want it to be covered enough. You also want to press it on so it looks to be covering the eye, but you don’t want to push it in so far that it becomes difficult to remove. Full eyelids take a moment. It will be a longer blink. We’ll remove those full lids. We’ll go back to half lids, and that one. And then we’ll go back to our fellow wide-eyed. And we’ll give him a quick little turn of his eyes after his blink. Sometimes it will take you a little while to execute something in stop motion. It does take a lot of patience and focus, but I think you’ll find it’s worth it. And there is our blink. That’s just one more wonderful thing you can do with your clay face.

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We’ve created a clay face to make a stop-motion animated film with. We’re going to bring this face to life right now.

We have our face all set up here, ready to go. He’s made of clay. His eye brows and his mustache are also made of clay. The only thing not-clay here are his wooden-bead eyes which we can turn with a toothpick.

We’ll start off by just taking a few frames of our face with nothing happening.

Now we’ll begin the movement. When you’re starting out, it’s nice to be subtle with your moves. Make something happen, very basic expression. You can raise up the eyebrows a little bit. Take a picture. Eyebrows are a big part of the facial expression, of course.

As I mentioned, with a toothpick we can turn those eyes in their sockets just a little bit, tiny move. Take your picture. Make tiny little movement of the eyes looking one way. Adjust those brows maybe. Adjust the mustache if you like. Take a picture.

If he’s going to just look in that one direction for a moment, you might take a couple pictures looking in that direction before we change it up again and have him start to look in the other direction. Our face would be looking suspiciously around. That’s the idea.

Now that we have him looking in just this one direction, I’m adjusting his lip just a bit, too. Just a little push up of the lip, adjust the eyebrow, and we’ll take again just a few frames in that position before we go back to the middle perhaps.

We’ll play that back. He should look to one side and the other — a little smirk. It’s a simple start to animating a clay face.

There is much, much more you can do, but remember, start simple. You can always go further with it, but start simple.

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So a really great stop motion animation exercise is to create a face and animate that face. And we create that face out of clay. We’ll start with a larger piece and an extra piece of clay here. I’m going to sculpt the face out of this clay, and I’ll save this piece for facial features. We’re going to be animating with a camera up here, shooting straight down into the face so the face will appear right there. We’ll start by taking that piece of clay and maybe flattening it down a bit more in the shape of a face. I’m going to do something vaguely human, I suppose, though you could do a cat face or a dog face, or a monster face. I’m liking this shape as it is, just like that. We’ll roll out another piece of clay and maybe add a nose.

Roll out a kind of a teardrop shape. Place it on the face. Smooth it in there a bit. Press in a bit where you’d like the eyes in your face to go. And we’ll take some more clay here and work out some cheekbones for that face, build it up a bit. Some brows. Come in here with a different color, just slightly different for that mouth. Roll out some lips. Maybe mix in a bit of that color just where the eyes are going to be. You can use a toothpick to create some nostrils. And when it comes to the eyes, you can use beads. Press them right in there. Beads are great for eyes, because you can turn them.

You can use that eye, that bead as it is, or you can go in with a permanent marker and do a little black, just add a little black inside the eye. Bling it out a bit. But of course, you can add ears or hair. Eyebrows are very important to face. I’m using clay of a different color, some darker, sort of light black clay here, and I’m going to roll out little worm shapes. Make him some eyebrows. And we’ll give him a mustache as well. Why not? Pop it on there. OK. We now have a clay face with which we can animate.

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Once you’ve created your clay character, perhaps you’d like to make a place for the character to animate in. Dressing your set in an animation is important, of course, and there are many directions you can go in. We’re going to be working with a camera directly in front of us, shooting against this backdrop here. You could use any color of fabric or paper to create your backdrop.

This is a nice light blue, sort of for a daytime sky. It’s mounted on a piece of foam board with something heavy taped to the back of it so it stands up. Next I think we’ll add some hills, little green rolling hills, and we can do this by starting with a piece of cardboard and drawing out our little hills on the cardboard, and then cutting with an Exacto knife or scissors into the cardboard. And you want to cut your hills out, and in most cases you should be able to just pop it right off once you’ve cut with a knife. Cutting with scissors might take a little bit longer. Whatever gets you there. And you have your hill piece just like this, which depending on how you like to animate, you could just make it work just like that, or you could begin to cover your hill with green clay, whatever color you’d like your hill to be. And you can take bits of that clay and just smear it right on there. Once you’ve covered your entire hill, you might get something like this. You can texture it with a tool, add details.

A little piece of clay on the back is good to keep it sturdy and standing, and then you can set it up right in your scene there. So we have a couple of little rolling hills, again simply by cardboard back, smearing clay onto the front. Next we could do a tree perhaps, and rather than just build the tree out of clay, we’re going to use what is called a wire armature. This is just an aluminum wire. You can get it in most art stores and sculpture stores, maybe even some hardware stores. To create a very basic tree trunk form, you take the wire between your fingers, do a little loop down there on the bottom, and just start to twist that wire, twisting the wire until you feel like you have a sufficient trunk, and then you have two branches coming off of the top. That loop I like to take and kind of stand up. You can cover that armature with clay. Take some brown clay to represent the tree bark, small amounts of it. We’ll just press it onto that wire and coat the wire all the way up the trunk. And what the wire enables you to do is create a form that is fairly skinny, thin, but that will stand up. The clay alone, without the wire acting as a sort of a structure or skeleton, would fall over. We’ll use some moss for the leaves of the tree, and you can get moss outside, of course. But you can also purchase moss. There are not really right and wrong answers here. It’s about how you’d like to creatively interpret your scene. “Creative” being the word of choice. Get creative with it. I’m using these bits of wire up at the top and spearing the moss right in there, nice bright green contrasting with our brown tree trunk. Add that in there. One more touch we could add would be clouds. And just like everything else, you can go in a number of directions with your clouds. I like good old cotton. You can rip open a stuffed animal, an unloved stuffed animal, and take the cotton out of that stuffed animal. You can also buy cotton. You can use cotton swabs. I’ve added a little bit of masking tape to the back of the cotton, and I can just pop that in there. And now we’re really getting a sense of place for our animation, some wonderful trees, some hills. Of course we have our blue sky and these nice cotton clouds as well. And you could animate your clouds to move back and forth in the sky. You could animate your trees to blow in the breeze. And of course, we could use maybe a little character here as well, a red dog perhaps. Not a big red dog, just a medium-sized red dog. So there it is. We have a scene now, complete with a character. Remember as you’re creating a set for your animation, be creative with it. A lot of the elements that you might use to find your sense of place are things you can find around the house, at the local store. So go for it, and have fun.

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So if you’d like to make a clay character or a clay puppet to be animated, there area few great tips I can give you. First, get some clay. The clay that you animate with is really up to you. There are a variety of modeling clays on the market. You’re probably looking for a non-drying, non-hardening modeling clay, something with wax or oil in it so that your puppets don’t harden up on while you’re animating. That would be a bad thing. So we have some of this red modeling clay here, and I’m taking a whole bar, and I’m softening the clay in my hands first. When the clay feels soft enough, I’ll roll it out. And I think I’ll start by making a very basic humanoid puppet, two arms, two legs, a head.

You want to keep in mind that your puppet needs to be sturdy. So using your finger and your thumb, you can start on the bottom of your oval of clay by pinching out a leg and another leg like so. As you’re pinching, keep in mind You want your creation to be able to stand, maybe even walk in your animation. So you want to keep those legs fairly thick. You want to bring a head and two arms out on top. Same pincher fingers, same approach. We’ll start with the head, gently pinching one way and the other way. And really I’m not pinching the head right now. I’m pinching a neck.

You leave yourself a little clay up on the top, and that will actually just be your head, and you can round it off. Be gentle as you pinch. Try standing again. Once you have that head, you can pinch out an arm on one side and an arm from the other side. Stand him up again. Is your figure animatable?

Does he or she balance? These are important things to consider when you’re building a puppet to be animated. So we could also create a four-legged creature. It’s a similar approach. Suppose we were making a dog. Pincher fingers. You can start almost anywhere on the puppet, but pinch out that neck and that head first. It’s great to work from one piece of clay, rather than taking a piece off of another piece of clay and sticking it on, say for the tail of your dog, where it’s likely to maybe just fall off during animation. You don’t want that. It’s best to pinch that tail. I’m pinching the legs of the dog. Again, you just want to consider will the animal stand? Can you animate? So again, when you’re making a clay puppet to be animated, use one block of clay, one piece of clay. Pinch those parts out.

Make sure your subject can stand, that you can move isolated parts of him or her. And of course, this is just the beginning. You can add eyes, a nose. You can add a mouth to your puppet. Different colors, accessories. But this is a great way to start and perfectly ready for animating.

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So you can create stop motion animated films with so many different types of materials. I think one of the most effective materials to use, of course, would be clay. And clay is a great great material for stop motion animation because it’s so easy to change the form of clay. When animating with clay, you would apply the same rules you apply when you are animating with found objects. You would do things in small increments.

So we have a ball of green clay here, set up with our camera pointing down to it. We’re lighting with this little clip light. We have our computer, with which we’ll take pictures of the clay by hitting the space bar. And we’ll move our clay a little bit. We could also, not just move it, we can change it. I’m moving the clay a little and I’m taking my thumbs and pressing it a little bit flat. Taking a picture. Move it. Flatten it. Take a picture.

It’s great to take your time with your animation. Don’t rush through. There’s that sound. I’m going to flatten it out a bit more. Take a picture. Maybe we’ll start to flatten it and split it as well. We’re going to go in here.

I’m just using my fingers to press into the clay and make these changes. I’m going to go ahead and start to really separate it. Take a picture. This is something that you want to happen gradually, in small increments, not necessarily all at once. A little more. Picture. Move it a little more. I’m pinching and breaking the clay in the middle just a bit. And there’s a moment right before it’s going to snap.

And now these separate pieces will fly out of the frame.

Something you will notice is that the clay will leave behind a little bit of clay sometimes, or a little bit of oil. And that’s OK. If you prefer not to have that oil left behind, you can animate on a wipeable surface, a dry erase board, a piece of plexiglass. In this case, you will see a little of that oil because we are animating on paper.

Now that those pieces have gone completely out of the frame, I’ll take a few more pictures, and we’ll play our film.

And that’s just a very very basic approach to animating with clay. There’s a lot you can do with the clay.

That’s just a start.

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So it’s good to know that when you’re animating found objects, you can animate with almost any object you can find though some objects work better than others. For example, animating with a block may prove easier than animating with a ball because the block will stay where you put it whereas the ball may roll away.

So using something that you can control is a good way to start. And we have a block here, small orange block and we’re going to set up the block underneath our camera, which is here shooting down to this table where we’re setting our block covered in black paper. The camera sees only an amount of the black paper and now it sees the orange block. The camera is connected to our computer with the fire wire. Of course we need to keep that connection intact and we’re using a software called iStopMotion.

When we animate with iStopMotion, we take pictures with the space bar. We’re going to start our animation with our block in the frame. That’s right in the middle of the frame and I’m going to take a picture hitting the space bar.

We animate 15 frames per second so for every 1 second of our movie there are 15 pictures to see. So a 2 second film would be made up of 30 pictures and so on. You’re not simply turning on a camera and moving in front of it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. You’re taking a still picture, changing your subject, taking another picture, changing your subject.

So we’ll start by taking just 6 or 7 frames of nothing happening and now we’re going to move our block and move it up just a little bit. The software shows us the picture that we just took and the picture that we’re about to take. This is called the overlay or the onion skin. We drag to this side. This is only the picture that we just took. If we drag this little icon here that’s only what the camera sees.

As an animator, you should keep it right in the middle there. It shows you where you were and where you’re going. They are valuable things to know when you’re animating. You want to make sure that your moves are very small. Moving in small increments will create a slower motion to your block. If you make larger moves with the block, it will appear to move faster in your film.

We’re going to exit our block from the frame, shadow and all. Stop motion animation requires quite a lot of patience and quite a lot of focus but the results are often very magical and well worth it. And the block disappears. Fun stuff.

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One of my favorite ways to create stop motion animation is through using a multiplane. And what a multiplane allows you to do is add a layer to your film, add a layer to your animation. And you can build multiplanes that will give you numerous layers. In this case of this multiplane here, we’re just adding one layer. The way that we add this layer is by taking a piece of plexiglass.

That’s what we have right here, good, transparent plexiglass, thin. Thick is good if you’re working with very heavy animating subjects, but this thing piece is just fine for what we’re doing. And we have the plexiglass propped up almost like a table above another surface. So again, we could add a layer, another layer, and another layer. And many animators do wonderful things with these multiple layers. In this case, we’ll just add the one. And the layer affords you the opportunity to animate things in the same film, but they don’t ever have to touch each other. The bear that we’re placing in here is going to be our background, and we just set it there. And this fly here, he’s going to be in our foreground.

He’s going to passing by the bear, and we’ll animate him up on top of the plexiglass. When you’re animating with a multiplane, lighting often comes into play. You want to get enough light underneath and on top. So sometimes it requires multiple lights. In this case, we’re doing it all with this desk lamp. So we’re going to start off by just taking a few pictures of our bear with our iStop Motion software here, taking pictures with the spacebar. And now we’ll have our fly enter the frame, and he’s going to come through pretty fast. So I see him down there in the bottom of the frame. I’m going to take a picture. We’re going to move that fly over the plexiglass. Take a picture. Move him.

Take a picture. The multiplane gives you a really nice effect. Our fly passing seamlessly by our bear. And the fly is coming to the end of the frame. He exits the frame. Take a last few frames. See our fly and bear multiplane animation. And again, this is a very simple version of the multiplane. I encourage you to take it much, much further. Add layers.

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So you don’t always have to make a plan when you’re creating a stop motion animation, but it’s a pretty good idea to go in with a plan. And one way to plan is by creating a storyboard. Many film directors use storyboards, and they use different styles of storyboards. what a storyboard basically is is a piece of paper with panels drawn out. They represent a frame or a shot of your film, and there can be any amount of space for you to take notes as the director. How much you draw in your panel, how many notes you take, is up to you.

You’re the one planning the film. It doesn’t have to be a perfect, beautiful masterpiece. What it has to be is a clear map, a way for you to get through your film, something to go back to if you ever get lost or lose focus. So we’ll put a title for our film up here in the space provided. We’ll call it “Duck.” And we’ll go in here to our first shot, and we’re going to decide that our first shot is just the water. So we see the line here for water, and we could put a little sun in the sky because maybe the sun is out. And we’ll number this shot 1, and maybe it’s going to be the same shot, so we’ll call it 1A. And we’ll say “Water Peaceful,” if you want to describe the mood. Again, it’s up to the director. It’s up to the person making the storyboards how they choose to do it. In shot 1B, our duck will begin to come into the frame.

So we’ll draw just the head of the duck coming in there, and maybe a little arrow pointing to show that the duck is moving. “Duck enters.” It’s the same shot, sort of the third part of it. The duck has fully arrived, and we show that he’s arrived. “Duck quacks.” And we make little lines. That’s a symbol to show that he’s quacking. It’s a simple drawing, but if I were to try and animate this sequence, I would know where to begin and how to move through it. So making a storyboard is a great way to plan out your animation.

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So, if you would like to set up your own stop motion animation studio, there are many different directions you can go in. Here’s one of them. I have a digital video camera, fairly compact model, rigged up to a C-stand by a clamp right here and it’s pointing down to the surface right here which have covered in black paper. The C-stand is actually mounted to the floor. C-stands come in different sizes. You don’t need a C-stand to clamp to. You can clamp to a coat rack.

There are many different ways you can set up your aerial camera. The camera is connected through a FireWire to this laptop here. On the laptop, we have the I-Stop Motion [sp] software. There’s a variety of software that you can employee for stop motion animation. We happen to use I-Stop Motion. Very, very simple way to create stop motion animated films. The connection between your computer and your camera with a FireWire is very important. If you bump the wire out of either port on the devices, you will lose the connection, then you’ll have to set it back up and you risk losing your animations.

It’s important in your station to be very careful. Stop motion animation is about having control over a particular situation. Really being careful in your station and setting things up in a way that is comfortable is good as well because stop motion animation takes some time. Creating a stop motion animated film, you may be there for a while so make it comfortable, make it pleasant. You can light often with a desk lamp or a clip light. Sometimes there’s enough lighting in the room. If you happen to be animating outside, you can even just animate in the daylight. To wrap up, the basics of home stop animation studio would include a camera of some kind, FireWire or USB cable depending on the software that you’re using, your computer of course, and some stop motion animation software. That’s something you might want to research, there are many different stop motion softwares. Find the one that works for you.

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What is stop motion animation? Stop motion animation is basically when you take a photograph of something and you change that subject you’re photographing in a very small way and you take another picture and you change it and you take another picture and you manually change it. Take another picture and you change it. Each time you’re taking a picture, you’re making sure to take your hand that is manipulating your subject out of the picture.

Change the subject. Take another picture. Change it. Picture, change it. Picture, change it. Picture. When you play back through those pictures, flip back through them like a flipbook. You would see your subject move. Naturally, the subject’s never really moving. You’re moving it with your hand, but if you play back through the pictures, no hand is there. The subject seems to take on a life of its own.

To be a bit more specific here, let’s imagine that we have a camera trained right on this plastic rhinoceros here and we take a few picture of the rhinoceros like this and we go in and we move the rhinocerous a little bit and we take a picture. Move him, picture. Move him, picture. Move him, picture. Every time you’re taking your hand out of the way before you take the picture. Move the rhinoceros. Take a picture. Move the rhino, picture.

Were you to play back through all of those frames, all of those pictures, you’d see the rhinoceros move. You can apply stop motion animation to so many different things. You can move sound objects like this rhinoceros, but you can animate with paint, with cut out paper, with clay, of course. You can animate even with live people. That’s called pixilation. You can do this at home with a variety of cameras and computers.

I definitely encourage you to look further into stop motion animation. Stop motion is a fantastic art form. It’s been around a long time and those are the basics. That’s what you need to know.

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How to animate water is a great question, and there are so many different ways to animate water in stop motion animation. One way that I like to do it is with clear hair gel. Now this can get a little bit messy, of course. Keep this in mind if you’re trying it.

But the hair gel has a great water look, obviously, when it’s transparent. And what we’re going to do is lay the hair gel over this little riverbed that we’ve created. The riverbed has been made with a brownish clay, and then we’ve stuck a bunch of actual rocks and shells into the clay to have that sort of bottom of the riverbed look. We have two pieces of cardboard, and they’ve been covered with green clay, and we’ve textured them to look like grass. So these are the banks of our river.

Our hope is to spoon some of the hair gel right into the river and then just manipulate it slightly, animate it slightly as we’re picking up our images from the camera directly above the river. So here we go. I think it’s best to spoon the gel in, and you want to avoid getting the gel on the grass. You only want the gel over the rocks in the riverbed. We’ve raised the banks on the cardboard on either side, so if the gel does start to run, which it will as it warms up, it doesn’t run onto the grass but runs underneath it. Hair gel is gross. Just going to say that. Now it’s time-sensitive. Again, as the gel starts to heat under the light, it will liquefy and start to melt out. We want to use it just as it is right now in this moment. So we’ll take a picture, and I may use the spoon instead of my hand to manipulate the gel.

I want to do this in a very even fashion. I’m going to drag through, just moving that gel slightly. And I’m going to take a picture. I’m going to go back through. I’m going to just drag the spoon along the surface of the gel and take a picture. Dragging it along the surface. Things to keep in mind, the water in a river like this would be flowing in one direction only, most likely. So keep your movement’s going in one direction, like the band. It’s actually very therapeutic and soothing to animate hair gel. So there you have it. Now I can go back through here and cut and paste our frames so that we get a nice, longer animation of the river flowing. We’ll play it, and there it is. Very, very cool.

There you have it. This is one way, a fairly complicated, maybe sticky way, of animating water. Try this at home. Try some new water animation techniques. Let your creativity flow.