I’m in awe of animators who work with clay and Plasticine, as apart from needing the skill of animating, they have the extra skill of sculpting. My skill in sculpting is pretty non-existent, and I was deterred at school after managing to sculpt two pretty impressive pieces. One was a dinosaur, which looking back is rather odd for me. I worked for days on the texture with the end of a biro pen, getting every little scale and wart. I can’t deny there was some satisfaction from such painstaking
detail, and the act of smoothing it out with water was pleasantly tactile. It was a triceratops and I had found a suitably lively pose suggestive of a beast in motion. Being about ten inches in length, it was perfect for animation. The other piece was a larger than life size human hand, again caught in some action. Years later when I saw Trnka’s masterpiece The Hand (which mixed an exquisite puppet with a large clay and sometimes real hand) I had a sense of déjà vu, as I had unknowingly built a similar story around this hand. Like the triceratops, there was a week’s work put into the texture, suggesting veins and fi ngernails, and trying to fi nd the right pose. The night they both went into the kiln together, I could hardly sleep, desperate to see the hours of work come to fruition. Come to dust actually: as the exploded pieces lay ruined so did any thoughts of ever working with clay again. I gave up frighteningly easily.
It’s a shame, as I enjoy the transformations possible with claymation, and the rawness of it, but in this instance I would lack the patience for the sculpting. In the lengthy period of resculpting and smoothing out I would probably lose my sense of movement and performance, so it amazes to see so much performance out of Wallace and Gromit, and in such lively fi lms as Will Vinton’s tour de force The Great Cognito, in which a single head and shoulders transforms into many of the major fi gures from World War II. In many respects I like shooting ten or more seconds a day as I can tangibly experience the performance. I’m not sure I could at one or two seconds a day. How claymation animators ever time a gag over such an extended period is beyond me.
Apart from the labour-intensive work involved, I would miss the texture of rich and lavish costumes and wrinkles in the skin, although looking at Wallace and Gromit this never seems to be a problem, as the sets are so lavishly textured and tactile. The contradiction between all the steel and rivets and bricks of West Wallaby Street and the smoothness of Gromit’s skin and Wallace’s chunky pullovers just shouldn’t work, seeming to belong in diff erent fi lms, but it does. Maybe it’s this contrast that gives them their charm. The other thing I would miss through working with clay is a certain elegance of the sculpting and the movement, but then again Wallace and Gromit are hardly static. I respond to the fi nesse and delicacy that fi nely engineered puppets give, especially in long legs and arms and fi ne fi ngers. Claymation is particularly good for overemphasising the facial expressions and squashing and stretching, and I’m not sure that’s how I think as an animator. I’m probably far tighter and controlled, which is not always a good thing. I don’t always try for realistic movement, and love a fl orid performance, but I’m uncomfortable with stretch and squash in a physical puppet as I feel it destroys the credibility I’ve tried to set up. I would rather suggest the weight and inertia through the performance than through distorting a puppet.
Most claymation, probably owing to the sheer time constraints and labour, is shot in double frames, which works for most people, but personally, I love single frame, and would be happier shooting fi fty frames for a second. That would give me the detail and complexity of movement I would like to achieve, but it would be pretty impossible to shoot the required
amount each day. I fi nd that when I’m totally absorbed in a shot, I get into a quick routine of move–check–click–move–check–click. There are some actions where fi fty frames a second would be a waste of eff ort, but then there are many movements, like Ratty playing the piano in The Wind in the Willows, that would benefi t from this number of frames. As it was, there were just not enough frames available to reproduce the exact movement, but then the suggested movement
I found was better. I have a feeling that if a lot of claymation were shot in single frames, the boil on the surface, which is a considerable part of the charm, might be too manic. The feeling is that doubles work for some situations, and singles for others. Much of it is due to budgets. I would, though, encourage colleges to teach singles as the norm, showing the subtlety and richness that is possible before making the personal decision to work in doubles.