1st November and 8th November
Why choose the stop-motion animation pathway?
It has a primal nature. It can never be perfect. This is something that attracts me a lot. And that’s because people are touching it and moving it for every frame, and the animators have full control of it. There’s an undeniable reality that I don’t think any other medium can give to the audience. The audience will know these things are real even if they don’t know exactly how they move, how big they are and what’s behind them. But using stop-motion comes from my desire to do handmade stuff and achieve my art pursuit just like what Laika did. So it’s as much our desire to keep it going as what we believe is the public’s desire for handmade stuff that really feels like.
I enjoy the process of making clay because it is very tough and it is an artistic material with a sense of freedom, which I really appreciate. But at the same time, because of this characteristic, it makes clay stop-motion animation very difficult and it requires a high degree of patience and concentration to produce a good output. It requires a lot of patience and concentration to produce good results. You need to be very careful with the clay, and if you are too strong or lax and the clay is different from the last frame, it will show up in the animation with a big error.
The second clay animation we experimented with is a morphing character. In this session, we need to choose a type of emotion that we are interested in. And then we need to design a character based on it and morph the character into an animal that might have the same personality of skills or outlook.
Also, when filming, clay stop-motion animation requires you to make adjustments with every frame you shoot. Then it will take a long time to shoot. The lighting, set and focus settings need to be consistent, otherwise, the animation will be inconsistent and the quality will be compromised. Therefore, the preparation for the start of a stop-motion clay animation includes scripting, split-screening, preparation of the clay characters and so on.