Anyone Familiar with Stop Motion?

[Cello]

Yeah, I'm, uh, new. I wasn't sure where on the internet could I ask this question, so if there's a more appropriate place to post this, could any of you provide me a link?

I'm taking a claymation class in high school, and I'm actually quite nervous about it. It's even more significantly different than traditional animation than I imagined. I don't even know how to do character designs and storyboards properly, because now I have to think also in terms of what I can do with my team's time (semester ends near the end of January), our budget (which, in typical high school fashion, is pretty much zero ), and with clay, which is pretty thick and therefore clashes with my typical skinny-armed characters. I'm excited for the class, but at the same time I'm not really sure what potential I have with the medium.

Basically, do any of you have any good blogs, books, DVDs with special features... Anything that will help me with my class? Anything would be appreciated.

[daveneale]

nightmare before christmas has a few tit-bits in the bonus features...and should be informative from the standpoint of long skinny figures-I guess any modern stop motion with bonus features is gonna have some kind of insight-though NBX is the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Mabe check out the 3D section of the forum-there are some pretty awsome threads on modeling in there and Peter Konig (link at in the banner at the top of this site) im sure would be very interesting for you.

[Cello]

nightmare before christmas has a few tit-bits in the bonus features...and should be informative from the standpoint of long skinny figures-I guess any modern stop motion with bonus features is gonna have some kind of insight-though NBX is the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Mabe check out the 3D section of the forum-there are some pretty awsome threads on modeling in there and Peter Konig (link at in the banner at the top of this site) im sure would be very interesting for you.

Well, to be honest the NBX won't help me much because we can only work with clay, not foam latex like the film uses. However, I will check out this Peter Konig's stuff, so thanks!

[Brendan N]

Ask Steph Laberis - she did some stop motion stuff in college I think, similar to what you're doing now.

[daveneale]

Is there a reason your just working in clay? When I was doing my degree I did a stop motion...kind of winged it, but it turned out pretty cool-the way I made my main character was by modeling in clay, then making a plaster cast of the clay model and painting latex into the plaster mould, layed in some wires and then made the costume with some fabric, glued onto some thin (I think metal) sheet. It was by know means perfect but it did the job. Im sure your high school would be happy to help if your willing to put in the effort (and belive me, there is a loooot of work involved ) Oh and btw the animation ended up pretty cheap to produce-it was the man-hours that were expensive.

[pomegranate]

http://www.stopmotionanimation.com/ check this site out. it's like the conceptart.org for stopmotion. they have a lot of tutorials and a forum where you can ask questions.
also i recommend you to watch a lot of stop motion an claymation animation, you'll probably watch them focusing a lot more on the technical aspects now that you want to do it yourself, than you might have before.