Claymation® Years Part I

The Raisin Age

This is a small sample of some of the work I did while working at Will Vinton Productions. Of course there are pix of those late 80's pop icons, the California Raisins. All of the photo's are mine, but since the work was done while employed with W.V.P., all characters are copyrighted by them, the California Raisin Board, Alpo....etc."Claymation®" is a registered trademark of Will Vinton Productions, Inc.

I started at Will Vinton Productions shortly after the second Raisin commercial. (January 1987) At the same time, the studio was doing the Domino's Pizza Noid spots. A lot of the animators( myself included) thought the Noid was a much cooler character, but somehow America just couldn't get enough of those raisins. It was really weird working on something that was such a big pop craze. I still don't get what the big deal was all about.
But while we worked on them, the California Raisin Board sent us all the free raisins we could eat. Yum.

Animating a shot for the "Claymation®Christmas Celebration". The plastic surface is a frontlight/backlight setup. This is one of the simplest and oldest ways to create a matte for animated characters. What you do is expose one frame of the actual characters. Then you turn off the set or 'front' lights and turn on the 'back lights. This makes a nice clean black silhouette of the characters. Now you have the original animation plus the hold out matte on the same piece of film. In post production the footage can be composited with what ever you choose for the background. In this case, the Raisins appear to fly over the city.

The results of all of our hard work was winning the 1987-1988 Primetime Emmy® for Outstanding Animated Program. This is the certificate given to individual animators and crew. The statuette sits in a glass case in the lobby of Vinton Studios.

Working on a shot for the first of two Raisin spots for Raisin Bran cereal. As an in-joke, fellow animator Webster Colcord, made a caricature Raisin of me that appears in the audience. Will Vinton directed this commercial and actually shot a couple of the background plates. Chuck Duke was the chief Raisin and Flake character designer.

While we were working on this spot, the news magazine "48 Hours" was working on a story about the commercial industry.  They were all over the studio shooting footage.   I even made the cut when the story aired.  If you didn't blink, I could be seen at this set listening to Will describe the shot.

Animating a shot on "Raisin Ray" for WVP. Ray Charles appeared in clay caricature as himself playing piano with the California Raisins. (caricature by Mark Gustafson)

Production trivia note: In the original storyboard there was a close-up of Ray's hands on the keys of his piano. I worked for two weeks making a highly detailed miniature piano with moving keys. Every little piece was custom machined and meticulously polished. Within a hour after finishing it, the director Mark Gustafson told me that he had received a call from the clients telling him that the shot had been cut from the commercial . Doh!

Last I saw of this piano model, it was sitting on a shelf in Mark Gustafson's office gathering dust.

The candy characters from "Raisin Ray". They are blown away by the coolness of Ray Charles and the raisin band.

Production Trivia Note: WVP shoots all of their own reference film. This is to guide the animators in animating the characters. Many times, it is shot while recording the dialogue of professional actors or voice talent. But what would happen quite often for non-speaking characters, a director would grab whoever was handy and get them in front of a camera to act out the action of the character. I was one of the candy characters, along with Doug Aberle and future"Hey, Arnold" creator Craig Bartlett.

This is a Raisin character I designed (with suggestions from Michael Jackson Raisin designer, Carol Ashley) for the Michael Jackson Raisin commercial. Remember that one? A Jackson Raisin performs in concert with a backup group of singers/dancers. She was intentionally designed to look like Jackson's sister Latoya. In fact Jackson himself actually approved this character. (he had final approval on all character designs) But it was cut when it was decided to have only male rapper characters back up Michael Raisin. That's show biz.

This is a raisin I designed for "Raisin Ray". Can you guess which 60's rock legend he resembles?

"Meet the Raisins"
Star Trek Spoof: Star Truck

Animating a shot on "Meet the Raisins" special for WVP. A film within a film, the Raisins star in a low budget spoof of Star Trek. Being a Star Trek fan, it was fun to animate this sequence for the special. Two of the Raisins were direct spoofs of Kirk and Spock. Barry Bruce directed.

Mr. Spore (Spock) gets down on the bridge of the Enterprise. This was one of the rare Raisin characters that actually had ears. A detail that was completely unseen on screen was that wacky flair at the cuff of their pants, just like the original Trek uniforms. If you have any of the Vinton work on Laser-
disc you should freeze frame scenes like this. Most of the animators try and top each other with as much weird obsessive detail, or as many inside jokes as they can get away with.

For instance, Mr. Spore's sensor viewer was a ViewMaster viewer. And on one of the viewscreens in the background was a black and white picture of the USS Enterprise.

When characters are animated, one way to track where a character has been is to keep a locked off video camera zoomed closely on that character. Small marks on the screen with a water soluble marker are used as reference points. In some shots an animator may use as many as three different cameras, one for each axis. (X,Y, and Z) Any of you Ray Harryhausen fans will be familiar with small registration pointers that dimensional animators use to track where a character has been. The video method is just an updated, modern version.

Additionally, the camera(s) are used in conjunction with a digital frame grabber. This allows the animators to keep track of a shot while you're working on it. Unlike computer animation, where you are constantly able to see previews of your animation, clay animation is a bit like bomb disposal. One wrong move and you're screwed.

Here's an example of what I mean. Before the use of frame grabbers, if a character or set piece was knocked or fell over, the shot could be ruined and you'd have to start the whole thing from frame one... with the same deadline, no extra time. (which ,by the way is probably one of the punishments in hell) Frame grabbers give you a second chance. If you have a camera trained on what fell, you can move it back into position and by toggling back and forth through the previously captured frames make sure there is no 'jump' or bump. Gary McRobert at Vinton's deserves a huge pat on the back for adding this technology to the toolbox of animators at WVP years before the Video LunchBox systems.

Note: McRobert produced the very first digital frame grabbers used by the studio. He designed both the software and hardware and produced the boxes with the hep of Richard Malinowski. Now however,Will Vinton Studios uses almost exclusively the Video LunchBox digital frame grabbers from Animation Toolworks.

"To boldly go where no Raisin has gone before..."

This set was designed by Joan Gratz and built by Jim McCallister. I did all of the set detailing and rigging of lights. The scanner that Mr. Spore(Spock) looks into was made to resemble a Viewmaster 3D viewer. Note the image on the far right view screen. There's the Enterprise photo I mentioned earlier.

Also visible in the sequence is a green tree air freshener. This was an in-joke started by animator/director Larry Bafia. (Remember the running gag in "Repo Man"? A character removes one from a repo'ed car, holds it up, and says "Ya find one in every car". Larry and his team animated the first segment of the Raisin special and Larry made sure an air freshener was prominently featured in their sequence. Once it was in one segment, almost everyone else made sure to add it to their sequence. Check it out. "Ya find on in every sequence".

This Raisin was never seen outside the studio. He was just a fun project that was shot in 16mm as a focus leader for the dailies. The focus leader is a short piece of film that is spliced onto the front of the dailies to give the projectionist time to focus before the actual shots begin to run. If you look closely at the helmet, the initials of WVP replace those of the OCP in the movie "Robocop". The gray body armor was sculpted in Sculpey so it wouldn't be distorted when I moved the arms and legs to animate him.

The Man with the Golden Raisin

Here's an odd one. This was a golden Raisin I made at the request of one of the producers for Will Vinton. (that's Will the guy, not the studio.)The Raisin was originally sculpted by Chuck Duke for one of the Raisin Bran commercials. I used that mold to cast it out of a material called Bronzini™. It's an epoxy plastic with brass filings suspended in the resin. When it hardens you can actually polish this stuff up like bronze. It's the only one ever made.

"Quick! Throw me the idol, I'll throw you the whip!"

...more Claymation® work
...Claymation® Filmography

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