When was the last time you played with plasticine?  Most of us have memories of our five-year-old selves, rolling out the clay into long sausages or balls, flattening them and blending the colours. It was mesmerising.  Clay is not a medium that most high-schoolers would consider using. However, my tenth grade Design Technology class had a full day to "play" with it in a Stop Motion Clay Animation Workshop.   Artist-in-Residence, Mark Boylan from ICT Links, Ltd., led the workshop.

Students were introduced to video samples of a variety of stop motion films, clips from Chicken Run, The Curse of the Were Rabbit, Creature Comforts, and Pib and Pog, to name a few. If you would like to see some of the films shown, visit see Atom Films or Aardman Animation online.)  Mark also showed a film of a backstage tour of Aardman Studios and shared some of his experiences.

We were all surprised to learn that the film Chicken Run took four years to film and two years to edit. Sometimes they only shoot three seconds of film in a day! Mark  also told us that the figures are not complete underneath the clothes. Only the visible parts are made of plasticine. There is just wire underneath the clothing, making the figures much lighter than they appear. Each character has many sets of interchangeable lips and eyes to create the illusion of movement. A wire "skeleton" is used as a framework to stablise the characters and make it easier to move them without causing damage.

With "hands on" their own clay characters, the students experimented with making shapes and figures. They filmed small changes and/or movements, using video cameras on tripods and laptops. They discovered that if the program was set up to shoot 24 frames per second, they needed to take 3 to 4 shots in order to slow down the movement of their characters. Otherwise, the figures would display a flurry of motion that was over in seconds. The process requires patience and precision.

The iStop Motion software displays a ghost image of the previous shot, called an "onion skin".  This allowed our filmmakers to see how much to move their figures to create the illusion of motion. The real challenge with two or three students working together was to make sure there were no hands in the frame before the picture was taken!

Mark came with van full of equipment. He brought posters which illustrated how to create a man or woman and various creatures. Students learned how to change characters' expressions with different eyes and how to shape the lips for specific sounds. He provided us with extra plasticine, cameras and tripods. He showed us how to construct a three-dimensional set for a background and suggested materials to create the foreground.

By the end of the workshop, students had a good grasp of the skills needed to start their clay animation projects. Visitors to our class throughout the day were impressed by their skills, focus and confidence. Our only regret was that we didn't have more time. Since that workshop, these high-schoolers have been designing and planning individual animated films as the final "product" of the Design Technology course. As Wallace said in The Curse of the Were Rabbit, "Oh, Gromit. We've created a monster."