Hard Work All Lost

The biggest shame of Virginia Tech is the waste of life. Hard work for nothing. Lives lost before the really start. Dreams shot down. Future families never to be. Sons and daughters never to be had. I hate when I lose a couple of hours worth of work. I can go hysterical.
But twenty years, that's the shame. Roughly 600 years of life was taken. Not to mention the lives they could have saved. The world will keep turning, and few will remember. I didn't know any of them, they were just numbers in a headline.
But the numbers that I saw, makes me want to dwell on living the years I have left then giving glory to the murderer and perhaps spawning more of them and creating future travesties. I don't want to be a number on a headline.

ANGRY kids, are they a problem?

Angry Kid
Another Aardman creation, Angry Kid features a hideous red-haired freak along with his sister in minute long escapades. It really is a new form of claymation. It uses the bodies of real people with superimposed clay faces for the animation. Whether sniffing his finger for god knows what or dry heaving, he always makes me laugh.
If Angry Kid were a real human being he would coin new meanings for “Smell my Finger”. He would be a rock and roll prodigy who lives with his “Mum” and “sis”.
His escapades are eerie and irky, and half the time his face just makes you want to throw up. And even though he’s just a fictional character, you can literally smell how gross he is. Yet none of the dissuades any viewers from becoming Angry Kid addicts.
I recommend watching at least one of his shorts found at http://www.atomfilms.com/, and if your not instantly hooked, take up heroine, cuz you should have no fear of addiction.

The Mechanical Rooster vs. The Little Christian Boy

I have overheard many arguments as to which is the better. Robot Chicken, or Moral Oral. Robot Chicken, like “Family Guy” caters to those with a lack of attention span. In the form of clay and action figure stop-motion, they parody many movies along with characters and actors in the eighties. Moral Oral takes a different stance and makes fun of dogmatic Christianity and the many teachings found in the Bible. Needless to say the outcomes are as outrageous as the miracles in the New Testament.
Arguers claim, “Robot Chicken is godsend for claymators. It is funny, stream line entertainment and relatively artistic free. It’s hilarity makes up for the lack of frames per second. It really is a good show and when the hell is the next season coming up.”
Moral Oral gets less support as it doesn’t feature celebrity voices mainly found from “That 70’s Show”. “It’s funny and true. Christian ideals are as fundamentally flawed as the ones Oral brings about. It’s more character developed, unquestionably, and follows a linear storyline.”
With the diverse amount of comments upon both claymations which air one after the other late at night on Adult Swim, these seem to be the summary of arguments. But according to this which one would be better.
And so begins the battle of--------
The Mechanical Rooster vs. The Little Christian Boy
Round one: Laugh factor
Moral Oral brings about many jokes about the Church and spends much time building up a story with great punch lines throughout. Robot Chicken has no story but is just a series of punch lines in the form of short sequences.
Winner: Robot Chicken
Round two: Artsy Fartsy factor.
Moral Oral creates a fifties like city in which all the people of Moral County live in. Plus they have more bendable parts then action figures. Robot Chicken creates action figures to look like celebrities, but damn those rigged action figure joints for taking away claymation realism.
Winner: Moral Oral
Last Round: Enlightening factor.
Moral Oral conveys a great satire of life in the church. Making fun of every facet of Christian life. Robot Chicken has speils about every movie and actor in the past twenty years, plus adult film star Ron Jeremy. But will that be good enough.
Winner: Moral Oral.
Winner by Knock Out: me for fixing the fight.

Nick Park's Influence

Nick Park's "Wallace and Gromit"

Nick Park is by far my most captivating film maker mentor when it comes to claymation. The creator of the “Wallace and Gromit” series and movie, as well as “Chicken Run”, “Creature Comforts” and any more that I’m not aware of.
He’s really been an inspiration to me and most likely other claymators as well. His first job, undertaking his first published film ever costs his financier roughly ten grand. And with it he makes a journey to the moon to gather cheese. He wasn’t exactly a pioneer of claymation as most Gumby experts and old “Drummer Boy” enthusiast would say.
Yet what helped me the most was his special features in his DVD versions of Wallace and Gromit. But DVD’s weren’t streamline till I was around sixteen, three years before I could watch two hours of bonus features. So neglecting the wire skeleton, I was abandoned to fail in many of my endeavors.
Yet I am mostly intrigued by him in that he shows the huge market for claymation. He has spawned many new and exciting claymations. Maybe not directly from him, but since his appearance it seems to me that many more followers of the sort create television shows whose fundamentals are clay.

Molding Movies

There’s nothing more aggravating then clumping different assortments of colored clay into characters and having them move on the television screen. It’s hard work, back breaking to say the least, and at the end of the day you realize you spent about fifty bucks for ruined clay, around fifty more hours making it into artwork, and another ten hours destroying it to make a two minute claymation.
I’ve been doing claymation since I was thirteen and to say the least I do not have the patience of a saint. The feeling of creation is the best part. You create a variety of characters, and many copies of them. You grow attached to each copy. They aren’t numbered but rather given names like Bob, and Jimmy. And they become your armada of actors as you undertake the hard journey of making a claymation.
The point is, the creation is like mothers work. You spend fifty dollars on random colored clays that don’t dry, and spend roughly two days worth of hours creating an assembly line of characters. Needless to say, tons and tons of creativity come in hand as you don’t want ten copies of a shitty looking field mouse named “Henry”.
The second part is the battle. You’ll catch yourself saying “Fuck” more then most Valley girls say “Like”. It truly is a war as you’ll go through about two replicas of one character trying to get a scene just right. And you don’t even want to know what happens when a character falls down and doesn’t match up in the next frame and pretty much ruins thirty minutes of stress induced labor to make a cute dog smell a rose.
After you destroy all your hard earned dollars and ruin your once good friends, its time for the editing. Relatively mindless; cut-paste, cut-paste etc. Sound, lighting, audio dubbing, the works. Then you have yourself two minutes and thirty seconds of heaven. I don’t know why I do it, I haven’t the patience to hit a golf ball in the lake without throwing my clubs at some old people nearby. But I believe it’s the most honorable form of filmmaking. Your heart and soul have to pour out on a claymation, a good one at least. It’s getting messy, down in the trenches work, where you receive all the two minutes of glory.