Two posts in a row and I am sure you still haven’t seen these:

A 360 degree swirl
A short love story
Brokeback Claymation

Now presenting the last of the first batch — I promise :) — of my once upon a time (circa 2006) wannabe attempts at claymation (but is actually only stop-motion animation).

How this is different from its prequel (A360DS) is that here the protagonist (Ramaswamy) remains fixed at its spot — while the camera does a 360 degree parikrama around it. A technique pioneered by the Wachowski brothers and John Woo in Matrix and Mission Impossible series of films respectively — and taken to new heights by Ekta Kapoor in Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi when Tulsi shot her son Ansh :-D

Don’t worry I am not going to subject you to another camera technique Ekta Kapoor popularized in India — the mother-of-melodrama rapid zoom-ins-and-outs!

Unless you ask for it :-p

I am sure you never saw these:

A short love story
My first claymation film

Unless you happened to be one of the unfortunate few who I somehow or the other bulldozed/bullshitted/bribed/begged/beseeched into going through these :)

When I had started my experiments with clay modelling, I was sure my claymation avocation was just history-in-the-making. Today more than a year and a half later, it is just history :(

So instead of letting that go waste, why not subject you, unsuspecting readers to some of my early forays into claymation.

Strictly speaking this is not claymation — just stop-frame animation of clay figures. Maybe the first few rungs of a tall ladder, I never did climb!

In this particular case, the camera remains constant but the subject is moved around 360 degrees. In an earlier film I had tried another technique — where the camera is moved around 360 degrees while the subject remains constant at the centre of the circle. Best seen in Matrix and Mission Impossible.

Claymation :: Sheriff BarClay

Uploaded on Flickr by rahulrazdan.

This is sheriff BarClay, the lead character of my attempted film "Brokeback Claymation".

Initially meant to be clay-animated, the development of this character threw up many engineering challenges. It has been wire-reinforced. His wearing bell-bottomed denims was not as per initial design, but evolved more out of the need to keep his centre-of-gravity within his footfall area. However, if you see in the (attempted) film, even this did not work as per design.

But I got a new film idea… and that is what you finally see, here >>