ClayMation

Producing a stop-motion animation using clay is extremely laborious. Normal film runs at 24 fps. With the standard practice of exposing 2 frames for each shot, 12 changes are usually made for one second of film movement. For a 30-minute movie, there would be approximately 21,600 stops to change the figures for the frames. For a full-length (90-minute) movie, there would be approximately 64,800 stops, and possibly far more if parts were shot with single frame exposed for each shot.

Clay animation can take several forms:

Freeform clay animation is an informal term referring to the process in which the shape of the clay changes radically as the animation progresses, such as in the work of Ivan Stang's animated films.

Strata-cut, an animation, in which a long breadlike loaf of clay, internally packed tight and loaded with varying imagery, is sliced into thin sheets, with the camera taking a frame of the end of the loaf for each cut, eventually revealing the movement of the internal images within. Pioneered in both clay and blocks of wax by German animator Oskar Fischinger during the 1920s and '30s, the technique was revivied and highly refined in the mid-'90s by David Daniels, an associate of Will Vinton, in his 16-minute short film Buzz Box.

Another clay-animation technique, one that blurs the distinction between stop motion and traditional flat animation, is called clay painting (also a variation of the direct manipulation animation process), wherein clay is placed on a flat surface and moved like wet oil paints (as on a traditional artist's canvas) to produce any style of images, but with a clay look to them.