Clay painting animation is a form of clay animation, which is one of the many kinds of

stop motion Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames i ...

animation. It blurs the distinction between

clay animation Clay animation or claymation, sometimes plasticine animation, is one of many forms of stop-motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually plasticine clay. Tra ...

cel animation Traditional animation (or classical animation, cel animation, or hand-drawn animation) is an animation technique in which each frame is drawn by hand. The technique was the dominant form of animation in cinema until computer animation. Proc ...

and

cutout animation Cutout animation is a form of stop-motion animation using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or photographs. The props would be cut out and used as puppets for stop motion. The world's e ...

. Clay painting animation (which is also a variation of the

direct manipulation animation One of the many forms of stop motion, but certainly blurring the distinction between stop motion and regular flat (drawing or "cel") animation. Direct manipulation is a simplified variation of graphic animation which involves the frame-by-frame ...

process), is animation where clay is placed and flattened on a flat supporting surface and moved like "wet" oil paints as on a traditional artistic canvas to produce any style of images, but with a clay 'look' to them, filmed frame-by-frame by an animation camera (shooting from above, and in a traditional

animation stand An animation stand is a device assembled for the filming of any kind of animation that is placed on a flat surface, including cel animation, graphic animation, clay animation, and silhouette animation. Traditionally, the flat surface that the a ...

) after each small adjustment of the clay images. The clay-painting process has also been used as a background, photographically combined with other forms of animation, and even live action.

In the United States of America

Pioneering this technique was one-time Vinton animator Joan Gratz, first in her

Oscar Oscar, OSCAR, or The Oscar may refer to: People * Oscar (given name), an Irish- and English-language name also used in other languages; the article includes the names Oskar, Oskari, Oszkár, Óscar, and other forms. * Oscar (Irish mythology) ...

-nominated film ''The Creation'' (1980) and then in her Oscar-winning ''

Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase ''Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase'' is a 1992 American animated short by Joan C. Gratz. Summary Consisting of 2-D claymation, it features famous paintings morphing into each other. List of artists featured The works of several artists are fea ...

'' filmed in 1992. A variation of this technique was developed by another Vinton animator, Craig Bartlett, for his series of "Arnold" short films, also made during the late-80s/early-90s, in which he not only used clay painting, but sometimes built up clay images that rose off the plane of the flat support platform, toward the camera lens, to give a more 3-D stop-motion look to his films. Gratz has also collaborated with other animators such as Portland, Oregon's Joanna Priestly to produce films that animated 3-D objects on the flat animation table. An example is Priestly-Gratz's ''Candy Jam'' film, made in the mid-90s, which can also be defined as object animation. Buzzco Associates produced a series of bumpers for

Nickelodeon Nickelodeon (often shortened to Nick) is an American pay television channel which launched on April 1, 1979, as the first cable channel for children. It is run by Paramount Global through its networks division's Kids and Family Group. It ...

in 1998 using clay painting.

In Russia

In the Soviet Union, the technique was made famous by Alexander Tatarsky with films such as ''Plasticine Crow'' (198

and ''Last Year's Snow Was Falling'' (198

. Typically, the technique was used to animate stories where the narrator wasn't sure of the story he was telling, and so characters and landscapes would morph into different shapes. Currently, Tatarskiy is head of Pilot Animation Studio, one of the biggest animation studios in Russia. Each episode of their current project, the patriotic series of animated short films "Mountain of Gems", starts with a complex clay-painting animation about the culture associated with the story and where they are located in Russi

External links

Kim Noce's film ''After''
(watch a clip for free)
Clip of the clay paintings at the beginning of Pilot Studio's films
(10 mb) Animation techniques Stop motion Clay animation films {{animation-stub