Stop-motion with clay
Do you know ‘Chicken Run’? This popular film starring chickens was made with mouldable clay figures. This form of stop-motion is called claymation or clay animation. For every sound a chicken makes, a different beak was put on the figure.
The children’s series ‘Shaun the sheep’, about a clever sheep who has all kinds of adventures on the farm, is also claymation.
Stop-motion or not?
The makers of ‘The Lego Movie’ wanted the film to look homemade. Basically as if a child had put the film together himself. That’s why they made it look like it was stop-motion. But actually it was just made by computer.
Why didn’t the makers actually use stop-motion? Because that would have taken them a very long time. They did make the credits in classic stop-motion style and that 3‑minute-long piece took 3 animators 2 months of full-time work.
