How To Make A House Background For Clay Animation

Clay is an awesome medium for stop motion characters since you tin change the characters in small ways as the activeness progresses. Filming a claymation video is easy to do from habitation or the classroom. In this post, I'll describe best practices for planning, capturing, and editing a claymation video.

What is Claymation?

Claymation (short for "dirt animation" or another name for plasticine animation) is a type of stop motion animation where each moving piece is made from malleable clay. The blitheness is created past shooting a photo of the scene, repositioning the characters slightly, and repeating the process. The pictures are then played in rapid succession to give the impression of smooth motion. Information technology's a fun, like shooting fish in a barrel style to bring your imagination to life.

For this tutorial, I created a kitten working on a claymation, only the possibilities are countless!

Kapwing kitten terminate motion animation

Tutorial: How to make your own claymation

Step i: Planning and Ready up

Shooting a claymation is fun only time consuming, so it'south important to have everything planned out alee of fourth dimension to make the process equally smooth as possible. Beingness properly prepared for you project is vital to its success, and then have fun and take your time with it

Supplies

• Modeling clay or plasticine (available at near art stores and online for $5-$10, I used this one)
• Smart-telephone with photographic camera
• Calculator for editing
• Household supplies for set up
• Record

Storyboard

A storyboard is a sequence of drawings that outlines your scene. Your storyboard should successfully convey all the information you lot might need during shooting.  Keep in mind that considering you're not working with sound, your story will be told through action..  Your storyboard will give you an idea of what the pictures should expect like, what and how action volition occur, and the amount of time the action will take. Y'all can time how long it takes you to do an action (walking across a room, for example) as a reference.

Describe on scrap newspaper, in your journal, or even on a whiteboard. Don't worry about making it look pretty, information technology's merely for you.

Here is the elementary storyboard I created:

My claymation is short and sugariness so I only needed ii panels to plan, but you can use as many panels equally you think yous demand.

Characters

You can create your characters based on what y'all draw in your storyboard, or create your characters and and then draw out their activeness. Considering your characters are clay (equally opposed to human actors), they tin can be as crazy as yous want. Don't exist agape to experiment!

Some tips for working with modeling dirt:

• Clay can be hard, so play with information technology in your hands to warm and soften it
• Mix the colors you take to go the colors you lot want in the same way you would mix paint (use more of a light color and less of a dark color to preclude the dark from overwhelming the light)
• Make sure your character can support itself (my advice is to keep characters modest and stocky so their body tin back up their heads but if you're looking to create a more advanced character consider using wires to create an armature that you tin can build around)

Set Design

Call up virtually what the earth your character lives in looks like. You can build a background from structure paper, household objects, collaged magazines, a printed photo, or a solid color sheet of paper like I did (simple, but for a claymation studio set it does the fox!) Recollect about how your characters volition move through the set to help decide what you lot want to include. Three-dimensional elements that your character tin interact with can take your claymation to the next level. My kitten has a desk with a set, camera, and computer to create her claymation.

Lighting

While natural sunlight is generally awesome for pictures, not then for claymation. Nature is unpredictable and the sun could move behind a cloud or exist obscured past a large bird at any time! The all-time place to shoot is in a room with steady lighting. To make sure yous aren't casting whatever shadows on your scene, avoid standing between your set and the light. Get artistic and use lamps or flashlights y'all accept available to create dissimilar moods (read more than about lighting here.) If you are worried about your light moving, tape it down!

Camera

You don't demand a fancy photographic camera to create your ain claymation, any smartphone photographic camera will do. Make sure it is fully charged and that it won't to become to slumber on you lot (you lot can arrange your lock/slumber preferences in settings).

To continue the camera as fixed as possible, create a tripod. I used an ice cream container (any paper or plastic cup will do) with triangles cutting out that I filled with rocks to weigh it downward and proceed it from moving.

Cheap tripods are bachelor online (such as this ane) that come with a remote and then you can have pictures without e'er touching your phone (fifty-fifty better for stability!). Your setup should look something like this:

My final stop movement setup

Use record generously to fix things in place then a moving light or shaky camera doesn't distract from your action!

Stride 2: Shooting

Y'all've done your planning. You've congenital your characters and ready up your scene, lighting, and camera. You have your vision in your mind's eye and have drawn it out in your storyboard. Now brand it happen!

Position your grapheme, remove hands from scene, snap the photo, and repeat! To make the procedure go faster, enquire a friend to shoot the pictures while you focus on adjusting the grapheme's position.

If an action is very fast, it will take fewer frames for the action to occur, so you want the movement to be more extreme between each picture. If an action is slow, the opposite is true: you want smaller movements between pictures. You can move parts of your groundwork as well if that makes sense in your scene (for case, a flag blowing in the air current.) Luckily, yous have it all planned out in your storyboard!

Step 3: Editing

Finally, you lot become to see all your hard work come up together! Transfer your pictures from your telephone to the estimator and put them in a "Claymation" folder. They should be labeled in the lodge y'all took them so make sure to continue them in that order. If they are non labeled properly, sort them by engagement modified and rename them numerically (0001, 0002, 0003, etc.)

To edit your photos into a seamless animation, upload your files to Kapwing Video Maker. Y'all tin sentry the video preview to get an thought of what your claymation will await similar.

• Ordering: Rearrange the photos to brand sure they're in the right lodge. If y'all want to repeat or dull an action, y'all tin can upload duplicates of those specific frames, and you can delete frames to make the action motility faster.
• Tempo: For a seamless stop motility video, cull the shortest Epitome Duration (0.2s) and so that the frames transition chop-chop.
• Size: Choose the frame size yous want (I went with ane:1 for Instagram, but there are options for YouTube and 9:16 besides).

When your video preview looks right, click Create to procedure the video!

Subsequently your claymation video finishes processing, you can download the MP4 or share the link with your family and friends! Kapwing also has tools for adding filters, text, music, or sound furnishings, if you want to make your claymation more heady.

Cheers for reading! I hope this post helps other creators make crawly claymation videos. Looking forward to seeing your creations!

Source: https://www.kapwing.com/resources/create-your-own-claymation-video-at-home/

Posted by: hewittsuffele.blogspot.com

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