Claymation Production and History
The Chevron Cars commercials are produced in a 3-D animation process, also known as "claymation" (short for clay-animation).
The history of claymation dates back to about 1897, with the introduction of a material called plasticine. In more modern times, a man named Art Clokey started producing claymation advertising films in the 1950's, and then went on to make the famous Gumby and Pokey television show, which brought claymation into the households of many children. The Gumby and Pokey series ran from 1956 until 1963, and Gumby made a come-back in the 1980's.
Other famous claymation sequences include a skeleton scene in the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts, the 1985 animated production of The Adventures of Mark Twain and the 1988 Meet the Raisins by Will Vinton.
In 1989 Nick Park created the wonderful Wallace and Gromit animated series and later went on to produce a number of other films starring Wallace and Gromit before Aardman Animations worked on the famous Chevron Cars commercials starting in 1995.
While conventional commercials are shot on 35 mm film at 25 frames-per-second, the claymation production requires stop-action photography, shooting up to 30 individual frames for each second of film.
The car character model in each and every frame has to be hand-sculpted by the animator to slightly change the car's expression or movement, then the scene is shot by the camera. This process slowly repeats itself one frame at a time. And there's much more to it than changing the form of the mouths. The animators try to capture eye movements, glances, shrugs, eyebrow raises -- every little detail that gives personality to these cute little cars.
It's amazing how much work goes into each second of these film clips, but the result of all this hard work fills each Chevron Car with life and personality. You can view some of the more recent Chevron Cars T.V. film clips at the ChevronCars.com website Drive-in Theater.
Posted: Apr 4, 2005
Comments
Wow cool stuff but who was the first person to ever use plasticine?
- Posted By: kool bananas on May 22, 2008
grate history but you can shoot quaity claymation at only 7.5 frames a secound
- Posted By: lone wolf on January 21, 2007
This helped me do my project!!! Woooo!
- Posted By: -Clown- on October 17, 2006
♥
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ThAts So CoooOool
i LoVe
ClAymATion!!
LikE OmGzzZzzzz
- Posted By: KaTyY on March 25, 2006
