Claymation Creature Design Challenge

Assignment: You are going to throw a great big party for Halloween this fall, and you are starting the planning process early! You know your theme is going to be around scary creatures from the imagination, and rather than sending out a paper invitation, you have decided to change things up this year by designing your own digital version of this year's part invitation, and want to make your own animated gif. file (one of those quick, short animated clipart images that shows motion) that you can embed somewhere on the document. Given the theme of the party, you need to create a model of creature (from your mind's eye), that you can use to generate an animated gif. file. First, you'll need to come up with the creature itself, and then you'll need to use the skills you learned in a recent tutorial about "how to make an animated gif." to produce an "claymation video clip" (animated image) of the creature that could be used in the digital invitation you plan to send out to guests!

Morph Chart

For my morph chart, I tended to think like a biologist with my categories so I chose body shape, covering, movement, sense, and environment. So obviously my categories mimic common attributes you'd find when studying taxonomy or evolutionary biology. (BTW, if you are perhaps looking for an interesting resource on this, check out the PBS series The Shape of Life.) To add a little more fun I added special traits because it felt like a bit of science-fiction made sense for a Halloween project.

I'm a terrible artist, so sketching felt a little terrifying for me. In the end, I think it helped me get outside my own mind though because I was out of my comfort zone. That can be a good thing when you're looking to be creative with design and it's pretty much necessary if you want to innovate.

For my creature, I decided to go with an octopus-style body shape because I thought it'd use the ping pong ball to the best advantage. I also enjoy Steampunk as a genre, and there is something about an octopus that is just fascinating on many levels.

I selected a skin-like covering because the clay seems to fill that role best. If I were to do this challenge again, I think I would have used a clay tool or the marker to add some dragon scales because it would have been more visually interesting.

I thought given the shape of my creature, a kind of sliding or slithering motion made the most sense, though I didn't end up using that too much in my actual GIF. Again, if I'd had more time, I envision my creating slithering off at the end, but I was trying to hold myself accountable to the time limits. (As someone with ADHD I have terrible time sense, and can easily go down a rabbit hole of endless iteration and perfectionism, especially if I find a project intriguing. So setting time limits is really important for me.)

I decided to add antenna because I think they're cute and interesting. I wanted to be an entomologist as a kid, so I'm a bit obsessed with insects. That made insect features a given. I thought the antenna gave a nice alien feel to the creature.

For special traits, I opted for color-change, because I thought it would be visually exciting with different colored clay. This provided to be harder to execute than I expected.

The hardest part was choosing an environment. In the end, I went for a simple white background to represent snow. I don't feel like I really enhanced that item in my GIF. I think I overthought the materials restriction and should have taken the opportunity to play with my background more.

Storyboard

I know this wasn't required, but it helps me plan. I really like using storyboards from animation projects and video so that I can visualize the flow of the story. I would never write anything without an outline. For me the storyboard provides the same structure for visual projects.

Animated GIF

As I mentioned above, adding the clay to do the color change ended up being more challenging than I expected. Trying to smooth the clay on over that Kcreature without moving it or my set-up too much was hard.

In retrospect, I should have taped down my background and done a better job of marking the location of the creation on the background. Then I could have simply pulled him out and adjusted the clay more easily. Instead, I was trying to add clay with him in place, which obviously meant the background and creature shifted some. It would have been easier to make multiple creatures in advance and swap them out, but since I needed to use the ping pong ball and was limited to two bags of clay, that simply wasn't possible.

I also had trouble with my phone as it kept shutting down the camera app on me. Every time that happened I had to touch my phone, subtly shifting its position. And then I had to try to get the Zoom set correctly. I retook the first few photos several times, writing down the exact Zoom and such in an effort to at least keep his size the same. I wish I had an "onion skin" feature in my camera app for projects like this. I could have switched to using my DSLR camera and then do a quick edit to crop the photos and line them up or shoot into stop-motion animation software (I like HUE Animation Software), but that would have meant more time with post-editing, which I didn't really have for this project.

So long story short, I suspect this is one of those projects I overthought but didn't give myself enough time to execute. The result is ok, but I know I can do better.