Animateclay.com

Character Designer Tony Merrithew Interview

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:54:29 -0400

Sculptor, painter and animator Tony Merrithew has a recent interview on the Character Design blog. Tony is well known as someone who worked on the pioneering Claymation projects for Will Vinton back in the 80's and 90's. He still works with the studio "now named Laika" as a character designer.

His last big project was on the film Coraline where he sculpted many of the characters. In the interview he talks about his typical day working at the studio, how he makes his sculpts and a lot more. There are even a ton of pictures to look over of his past works. You can read the full interview here.

If you feel like exploring some more, visit Tonys official blog here.

Claymation Exhibit Update

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:07:17 -0400

We have a nice update to the Portland Oregon History Museum Claymation Exhibit. While we have an official press release below, Don Carlson managed to get us a few high quality images of some various items you can see in the exhibit. We uploaded the images to the gallery which you can look at here. Click any image to make it bigger.

There is also a nice video that takes you inside the exhibit with Will Vinton who is trying to bring Claymation back, or so it seems. This would of course not be a bad thing, the old Vinton style clay puppets are what inspired me to make this site. Check out the video here.

From May 15 through September 16, the Oregon History Museum hosts a special exhibit entitled The Amazing World of Claymation. For the first time, visitors will be able to view the historic animation art collection of Claymation founder and Oregon native, Will Vinton.

The showcase exhibit draws from Vinton

Animateclay.com Upgrade/Testing/The Unknown

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:56:43 -0400

We're going to be playing around with the server today, as well as trying to test an upgrade to the core software that runs the entire web site. It runs on what is called PostNuke currently, but it's an older technology. The new update upgrades us from PostNuke to Zikula. I can't say much more then that, but if you notice the site acting strange it's due to the updating and testing we are doing behind the scenes.

Take a look at an in-progress theme I am going to try emulating after the update is done here.

I've recently set up a comment system for news posts. If you login and click the headline link of the news story, you can comment and rate on that story. If there isn't any major abuse of the comments - I'll keep them up. For now everyones first comment is moderated - but after that your comments will show up immediately.

Another thing I set up is a nicer private messaging system so that anyone can send messages to other users on the site. So if someone makes a comment and you want to chat privately, every member has up to 50 messages in their inbox and outbox. Plus you have the option to get an e-mail every time someone messages you.

It seems now anyone can submit news articles using the Submit Article link at the top left side of the page. It is yet to be tested, so I don't know what to expect. But anyone who logs in and wants to write for the site can. If it goes as planned all I need to do is check your news post or article and add it with the click of a button.

The RSS feeds are also a bit nicer and will allow for news images to be sent to e-mail subscribers, and all links will work. Before this was pretty limited with the PostNuke setup, so it should be nicer for all existing and new subscribers!

After a lot of experimenting, we're trying out some new message boards. The update is possibly temporary if we can fix our old forums. Most likely if we can't fix the old forums I'll try to see if there's a way to archive all the old messages for everyone to read. From what we can tell the integration into the new Zikula CMS isn't working for most of the other people who did the upgrade as well. So give the new forums a try and let me know if it works for you. Just don't write long or important messages, it's set up only as a test for now.

Note to webmasters, if you linked to an area of our web site, most of the URLs have changed. You may need to update your web sites!

Secrets of Clay Animation Revealed 3 Completed!

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:14:39 -0400

It's been a long time since I wrote about the updated "Secrets of Clay Animation Revealed 3" book. We planned to release it some time ago, but ran into a small problem. The main reason for its delay was that one of our interviewees needed to get an image verified and given the "OK" by Laika Entertainment. Was the delay worth it? I thought it would be and so I gave Jeremy as long as he needed. The images he sent in are really inspirational, but unfortunately we could only use one in the end. However anyone who sees it will have a LOT to inspect, as it's an image of his workbench with all the little gadgets and armature parts laid out as he works.

If you bought a copy of our previous version of Secrets Revealed, please e-mail me at Marc at animateclay.com and I'll send you a download link for free. This means anyone who bought a copy since it's original release in 2001.

Pirates!: New Stop Motion Feature by Aardman

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:33:42 -0400

Aardman Animations in the UK plans to create a new feature film through a contract with the Sony Corperation. Richard Bazley will be creating the puppet designs, however he's taken the images off his blog. You can still see three designs and read more about Aardmans new contract on Slashfilm here. You can read even more fresh details about the film on Aardmans official thread where it was recently announced here. It looks to be a very fun stop motion film and will be released somewhere around 2012.