We have a nice update to the Portland Oregon History Museum Claymation Exhibit. While we have an official press release below, Don Carlson managed to get us a few high quality images of some various items you can see in the exhibit. We uploaded the images to the gallery which you can look at here. Click any image to make it bigger.

There is also a nice video that takes you inside the exhibit with Will Vinton who is trying to bring Claymation back, or so it seems. This would of course not be a bad thing, the old Vinton style clay puppets are what inspired me to make this site. Check out the video here.

From May 15 through September 16, the Oregon History Museum hosts a special exhibit entitled The Amazing World of Claymation. For the first time, visitors will be able to view the historic animation art collection of Claymation founder and Oregon native, Will Vinton.

The showcase exhibit draws from Vinton

Patrick Boivin has done it again.

With his latest stop motion work, he has turned Youtube's viewing format on its ear by making it interactive. The result is very entertaining.

The way he accomplished this was to animate all of the fights separately and then linked them to the main video. When the buttons on the screen flash, the player is instructed to click on one of them and is then treated with a different video of the Street Fighter characters performing moves on each other.

The animation itself is top notch, and is a faithful re-creation of how the characters looked in the original Street Fighter arcade from the late 80's. Small humorous touches (like E. Honda fluttering his hands like a ballerina en pointe) were thrown in to take advantage of what is possible in stop motion and keep it fun.

You can watch the clips starting from the first page here:

Select different characters to see all of the possible outcomes.

Hey, it's Don C.

There is a lesser-known animator from the UK who worked at Aardman and more recently for Laika on Coraline.

His name is Philip Beglan, and everything he does is hyper- realistic, but if you look closely, you can see that it is animated. His personal works suggest a profound influence by Richard Williams. The puppets' faces are extremely detailed, slightly rubbery-looking, and believably human.

Beglan, who also worked on Rex The Runt, used to make dolls,which appear to be made of many different materials. His work is sometimes mixed with live action and his characters, despite moving only every other frame, manage to live and breathe effortlessly on the screen all the way to the last moment.

You can view clips from Philip's films in the panels on the right here.

Hello, this is Don C, filling in for Marc Spess.



Patrick Boivin has completed another short film called Jazz with a General Problem, which you can watch here:

The way it was done has not yet been revealed, but Marc did go into it a little bit in a Youtube video, and I suspect the techniques are similar.

Boivin also made a live action short film in 2005 called Radio. His style is somewhat reminiscent of Michel Gondry's work (both are French). You can watch "Radio" here.

Patrick is definitely on his way up, and is becoming what looks to be a cinematic visionary.