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.