What is clay animation and how does it work?
Clay animation has been made famous by films and series such as Pingu, Gumby, Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit. If you or your students aren’t familiar with these, you can check out selected clips of them all on You Tube. It follows the similar rules to other stop-motion forms of animation, making use of a series of individual pictures that, with some speed applied, appear to move. This is due to a principle known as the persistence of vision – the pictures move so quickly that our eye can’t tell that they are separate and fills in ‘the gaps’, joining the pictures together. For a really great (and student friendly) explanation of this concept, check out http://www.privatelessons.net/2d/sample/m01_03.html There’s even a great little moving diagram showing the difference between an image moving at 5fps (frames per second) and 12 fps. The one main difference about clay animation as opposed to other forms of animation such as cell animation or 3D animation is that the characters are crea
