My first real animation was five minutes long, a stopmotion clay
animated piece done as a project for a Multimedia 2 class at Linn-Benton Community
College in Albany, Oregon where I was studying Graphic Design. Since my son Thomas
Blampied had been doing clay animation (using the stopmo feature on our Hi-8 camera)
since the age of eight, I figured it would be a piece of cake. I had even animated
characters in his movies before, at his insistance, and I had been technical director,
setting up his workspaces and equiptment and transferring his movies to our VHS
camcorder which has audio dub so he could add sound. For my class I decided to
combine my animation project with a music video project, and used the song Ray
of Light by Madonna. My piece of cake took over my life, since I have now fallen
in love with animation and I am currently trying to learn to use the program Animation
Master so I can do my next film (already storyboarded) in CG, thus avoiding the
slumping, cracking, and melting of the clay. Now I am struggling with modelling,
boning, and constraining my digital puppets, trying to figure out hair and cloth
faeatures, and....ah....uh...stay tuned. By the way, my son sculpted the aliens.
The spaceship is a pie pan and a metal bowl, with battery powered Christmas lights
inside. The glowing eyes were done by exporting Premiere files as a filmstrip
and using the erasor tool in Photoshop.