MrFodder and I went to see the Aardman exhibition that's currently at ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image). Aardman is a British animation studio, probably most famous for the Wallace and Gromit series of films, as well as Chicken Run. The nightmare of a penguin with a rubber glove on its head coming to get me haunted me for a really long time. I love seeing some of the crazy inventions in those movies, and it's truly mind-boggling when you think about how much effort must go into creating each second of footage considering it's done via claymation.
How it works is you set up your scene, take a still photo, move each of the components slightly, take another photo, and so on. You stitch the photos together in sequence to form a video, and it gives the impression that the characters are moving, due to the way our brain processes movement.
A second of footage is usually about 24 frames, so an hour of footage would be 86,400 photos. That doesn't even consider the time taken to set up different angles, and different sets for different characters. Even the little videos I make for work are probably 15-20 hours of filming for 6 minutes of video. I can't even imagine how long it would take to set up 6 minutes of claymation video.
The exhibition has a lot of footage from the various films Aardman have worked on, as well as the sets used, and some of the sketches made during development. Look at the storyboard for just 1 minute of footage!
By far the best part of the exhibition was being able to make your own short claymation video. You're given some plasticine and given about 5 minutes to mould whatever character you like.
Mine (the robot) was probably about 8cm tall.
Then you're given a scene and an iPad, which is held in place on a stand, to take photos with. They used the OSnap! app to create the video.
Here's our wonderful creation (if you slow it to x0.125 speed (you'll need to open it in gfycat), you can really see the individual frames):
(If you can't see the embedded link, you can open it at gfycat here: https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/PointedHoarseDuckbillcat)
We initially just wanted the two of them to shake hands, but the weight of the robot arm was too much for the snowman alien thing, so we thought it'd be funnier if it fell off. We still had 4 frames left to fill, so we had them both fall over. The whole thing was 24 frames in total, and it took us about 5 minutes to take the photos. You can enter your email address, and they'll email you the finished video, which is 2 seconds long and a .mov file.
The exhibit was great fun, though I recommend going quite early in the morning, as the place was starting to fill up when we were leaving. There is an audio guide you can listen to, but you don't need to go there to listen to it: https://guides.acmi.net.au/aardman/ We found it was best to check out some of the earlier stuff, so you get an idea of how claymation works, and then head straight to the back where the studio for making your own sits. That way you avoid having to wait in line and you'll get your choice of background for your video, rather than having to use whatever happens to be available. Then you can make your way through the rest of the exhibit at your own pace. Of course, if you already know how claymation works, head straight to the back, as it opens at the same time the exhibit does (10am). The website says it's here until the 29th of January, but the guy at the front said it's only here until the 29th of October. The website also stops listing it as an available attraction in their calendar after the 29th of October, so I'd say that's probably when it ends.
The cost of entry is $24 per adult, not sure about kids' prices. It took us about an hour to see everything, including making the video.
I've wanted to make a stopmotion movie for a while now. Someone on my old team is really into LEGO, and loves the A Song of Ice and Fire series, so I had planned to do his farewell video as a stopmotion LEGO parody of ASoIaF, but I've long since left the team now, so I think the time has passed. If I had to do it, I'd probably have to start months before he announces his departure, so it's probably not something I can whip up in a few weeks. It's definitely something I want to add to my repertoire though, so I'll keep thinking of ideas.
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