Class: Experimental Animation: Exploring Manual Techniques
Shot on: Sony A7siii @ 10fps
The Brief:
Produce a “complete work” including considerations of structure, beginning and end, pacing and arc… even if completely abstract. Combine at least three animation techniques to make a project of your own direction and interest. Must include a title sequence and at Minimum of 40 seconds/Maximum 4 minutes.
Concept:
After completing my midterm, I became interested in reframing the clay puppet as a conscious subject, as opposed to the disposable tool I had come to see it as. In most claymation workflows, the puppet is replaced once the clay cracks and its limbs become unworkable. I wanted to invert that logic by telling the story from the puppet’s perspective, where it experiences animation as both life‑giving and exploitative.
Audience
The primary audience for this piece was my animation class, a group already familiar with the frustrating disintegration of their clay models. Leaning into that shared experience, I framed the opening as a transition from a familiar workspace into the world of the puppet. In the edit, I underpinned this transition with the music’s evolution from diegetic to non-diegetic in the opening sequence.
Narrative Framing
The puppet exists entirely within the animator’s studio. It is only alive when observed through the camera, and it is surrounded by the remains of its predecessors (seen in the opening shot). From the puppet’s point of view, animation is an ontological precursor: life is intermittent, performative and externally controlled.
This framing led me to a central question inspired loosely by Toy Story: what would a puppet want? The answer I arrived at was companionship. If the animator is the source of the puppet’s life, then the only model for existence the puppet can understand is animation itself. The puppet’s solution is to animate a companion, replicating the same painstaking process that brought him into being.
Process as Story
A key decision was to visually emphasize the labor of animation rather. The hand‑drawn sequence within the work mirrors the real process of frame‑by‑frame construction, allowing the puppet to become both character and animator. This recursive structure reflects the class experience directly: the effort required to produce just a few seconds of movement becomes emotionally legible on screen.
I wanted the moment where the woman breaks through the projection and comes to life to function both as an achievement and an escape for the protagonist. Initially, this escape takes the form of dancing; the enjoyment of a deeply human pleasure. It culminates in their escape at the end of the work through the passage the woman entered: a fragile happy ending.
Outcome and Reflection:
The project received an A, and I finished the class with an A as well. More importantly, the discussion with the class afters its screening illuminated the resonance they felt with the opening and raised some interesting observations: ultimately, the work asks whether creation can ever be separated from exploitation.
Although I was very happy with how this turned out at the time, there is always room for improvement. I have realised that the use of text in the middle sequence would have been more impactful if replaced by repetition of the animation process itself—showing not telling.
Additionally, I wish I had used the clay’s materiality more, experimenting with its adherence to squash and stretch principles. At the time, tight time constraints and concerns about accelerating the puppet’s disintegration made me cautious about extreme deformation. However, a great place for this would have been after the puppet falls off the camera, where I instead relied on cropping to convey impact.
Were I to remake the project, I would commit to animating the entire film with a single puppet, allowing material decay from constant manipulation to accumulate visibly over time. Rather than hiding damage through replacement, the puppet’s deterioration would become part of the narrative arc. In this version, the final scene would likely feature an extremely bedraggled puppet being dragged off-screen by his companion, underscoring both the cost of endurance that animation requires, for both the animator and animated.
