THE WAR - clay animation from 1982

Back in '82 and '83 my cousin David, my brother Kevin and I made several animated clay movies using a Super-8 film camera. Even though we were frustrated with all the film scratches and washed out colors we couldn't figure out how to make it any better with the equipment we had at the time. It's funny because nowadays professional movie studios pay big bucks to artificially reproduce this scratchy film look.

We made this film one Sunday afternoon after church. Even though it's less than a minute long, we probably spent five or six hours making it. From the all the blood and violence it doesn't appear we learned too much in Sunday School that day.

The animation in this video was by my cousin David and me. The music was recorded by my brother Kevin and me.

We kept making movies up until the day the $50 bulb in the lamp burned out. Since we only got $1 allowance each week (and usually I'd lose mine as a punishment for something) we never replaced the bulb, and the filming ended.

ANOTHER SONG AND MORE ANIMATION

Some of this animation was already posted before, but not all of it. There's a new song here too. I have about 3 seconds of footage on my motorcycle. I rode it for years, and that's the only picture or video I have of it. It was a Yamaha Maxim XJ 650. I think it was a 1981 or 1982 model. It had a drive shaft instead of a chain. I never had a lick of trouble out of if and I regret selling it.

I sold it because when I moved to my current home I didn't have a garage to keep it out of the weather. After I sold it I used the money to build a garage. Then I didn't have a bike to keep in it. What a gyp!

My brother and I accidentally discovered something on the guitar solo in this recording. Out of laziness we didn't want to plug in some more wires and set up the electric guitar for the solo, so we held a microphone right next to the strings on the electric, about 2 inches from the pick action. An echo effect was added. We thought it sounded like an early Beatles guitar. (Just the solo guitar in the middle, not the rhythm. )

SONG and CLAY ANIMATION

Here's an old clay animation I made in the 1980s when I was 13. It stars my brother Kevin as the boy, and my mom as The Mom. For a kid not yet 7 years old I felt like Kevin did a darned good acting job. My mom went the vaudeville route. After the 1st couple animated sequences in this video I learned to keep my lamp in the same place for each frame, which cut down considerably on the blinking.

The song was written and recorded 7 or 8 years ago. The song is longer but It fades out early to match the length of the video. I looked through my songs and this was the closest to the length of that video. Kevin (who is the boy in the video) is playing bass on this song. The song is about being lazy and reveling in it.

BATTLING CLAY - animation

This is one of many clay battles which occurred on my back patio when I was in high school. One person could make these movies alone but it was always more fun when my cousin David and my brother Kevin were involved. Usually the projects would last for as long as they kept our interest. When we lost interest, we would kill all the clay guys off and go watch cartoons or ride our bikes.



They took a long time to make but we never got bored with it. Sometimes you could actually see the sun setting in the backgrounds of animations that only lasted about 20 seconds.

The flashing gun blasts in this movie were created by taking a needle and actually scratching the frames of film. The clay guy's gun shoulder was animated to jerk back and forth, and then when the film was developed I looked at the tiny pictures on the film and did my best to scratch them in the right places. Scratching the film was my own original idea, but later I read in magazines other people were also doing it.

For as long as they took us to make, we expected our movies must last for hours and hours. It took about 2 weeks of waiting for the film to be developed. When we finally got the film back and got to watch our movies it was both thrilling and heartbreaking at the same time. It was fun to actually see the things moving around, but it crushed our spirits to learn all the work we did amounted to no more than a few minutes of screen time. It never failed, one of us would always say, "That's it? I seem to remember there being more."

POPSICLE STICK MAN STOP-MOTION ANIMATION

Here's another animation from back in my high school days. The jointed man was made with popsicle sticks, dowel rods, and wooden macrame' balls. I used white thumb tacks for his eyes, and yarn for hair. I used blobs of clay to stick him to the ground in the shots where he's off balance. I still have this guy and he's held up very well.

This particular stop-motion animation was quite frustrating at the time because my spotlight bulb burned out and a new one was $50 and I couldn't afford it on my $1-a-week allowance. I found this cheap $10 flash gizmo I could plug into the camera and it was supposed to flash each time I took a picture. It didn't. It would only flash when it felt like it. Maybe 60% of the time it would cooperate.

The nice thing about the old lamp was I could just leave it on and not worry about it anymore. This new flash thing was a horrible piece of junk. I think after this experience I didn't mess with the movie camera too much anymore.



Now with digital cameras it seems fun again. There are downloadable freeware programs which automatically string consecutive photos together into an MPG or AVI. Windows Movie Maker will do it, but the frame speed won't go any less than 1/8th of a second per frame. Ideally it should be 1/24th of a second or things look jerky.

Using a digital camera would give a much clearer picture and better colors. These movies I made in the 80s are all washed out and scratchy. That being said, I suspect after I made a movie with a digital camera I'd be tempted to change it to black and white and add artificial scratches.