Claymation Animation Gumbasia & Morph

Evaluation

What is Gumbasia animation? Gumbasia animation is the first created clay animation created by Art Clokey produced in 1953, which consisted of a 3-minute short clip conveying several different shapes which their size and angels are manipulated creating an abstract feel.

As a pair, we where given the task to create a short a clay animation using the gumbasia technique. The first area in which we needed to tackle was the actual theme we wanted our clay animation to be based on, which meant critical thinking had to come into play and also analysing previous gumbasia animations so that we where aware of the types of movement we could undertake. After evaluating several clips we then began to create our characters using clay relating to our initial ideas of a conversation between a child and a student. We then used the software istopmotion to take individual snap shots to create our clay- mation at each movement made by our characters to indicate flowing movement. I believe the amount of ideas generated by the group helped the creation process, but throughout the development stage, some members of our team skived away from working together meaning our animation wouldn’t be completed on time scheduled.

What is Aardman Animation? Aardman animation is a British based animation studio. The studio based in Bristol is famously known for films created using stop- motion clay animation techniques; characters such has Wallace and Gromit where invented by this production company. The company was founded in 1972 and began producing short animated motion pictures for the BBC; and currently the company is working on a larger scale Aardman production company have been announced to create 12 shorts films using the Nintendo DSi studio.

Morph created by Aardman animation is a children's character created from clay mainly directed at deaf children as the animation uses sounds sounds instead of actual words. There are several strengths with using clay animation as you can animate and manipulate the clay morph character easily and can easily be remolded, there are also disadvantages as creating the animation is very time consuming as individually images have to be taking of each slight piece of movement toconvey a change in its transition. 

Creating our morph for our animation was very time consuming as there was limitations to what we could make as we didnt have enough time and lack of experience in creating our morph. Whilst filming our morph animation we came across several obsitcals when the clay got very warm and the characters arms and legs where breaking of evidently meaning remaking our morphs several times.

The difference between our cut-out animation and morph animation is that we where restricted with our imagination as cut out animation meant we had to work with a flat surface and not being able to make our character turn 360 degrees. In my own opinion I don't think that there is a big difference in using clay animation or cut out animation because you are using the same techniques, but one type of animation is using clay and the other one is with paper. 

If i was given this task again, the things I would do differently is plan my time wisely and create a story board of what will be happening in the animation so that half way through I dont forget what the animation is about and not skiving of and talking to friends so that i could get all work completed on time.