Frame: 1 / 8
Rig: Morph Tribute
12 fps (On Twos)
A one-minute painted explainer of how this stop-motion workbench turns still clay poses into movement, followed by the craft behind it and where to read more.
Stop-motion is an illusion built out of stillness. This clay studio, a tribute to the Bristol animation house Aardman, lets you pose a plasticine puppet and string those poses into a moving shot. Every pose hangs on an armature. Drag the brass joints for the head, torso, hands and feet, and the clay limbs follow. The Clay Squash slider squashes and stretches the body for extra bounce. The default Morph scene holds eight poses. Onion skinning shows the previous pose as a faint orange ghost and the next one in blue, so you can space each move evenly. Playback runs at twelve frames a second, which animators call shooting on twos: each pose is held for two frames of twenty-four frame film. So eight poses last just two thirds of a second. That is why stop-motion is so slow. Every second on twos means posing the puppet twelve times, and a ninety minute feature needs roughly sixty-five thousand poses. Try the six frames a second setting to see the motion turn twitchy, or twenty-four for smooth, then capture your own poses and export the strip.
Stop-motion films a physical puppet one frame at a time, moving it slightly between exposures. Played back in sequence, the small differences read as continuous motion.
Film runs at 24 frames per second. Animating 'on twos' holds each pose for two frames, so you need 12 new poses per second instead of 24. The tool's default 12 fps playback is exactly that rate; its 24 fps option is animating 'on ones'.
At 12 poses per second, 8 poses play for 8 ÷ 12 ≈ 0.67 s. A 90-minute feature on twos is 90 × 60 × 12 = 64,800 poses, which is why clay features take years of animator time.
Showing the neighbouring frames as translucent ghosts lets an animator judge spacing: even gaps mean steady speed, widening gaps mean acceleration. Here the previous pose is tinted orange and the next one blue.
Clay puppets are built over a jointed wire or metal armature so a pose holds still between frames. The studio's brass joints and Clay Squash slider stand in for that skeleton and for the squash-and-stretch animators sculpt by hand.
History of the Bristol studio founded by Peter Lord and David Sproxton.
The studio behind Morph, Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep.
How frame-by-frame puppet animation works, including clay animation.
Plasticine puppets, armatures and the history of claymation.
Aardman's terracotta plasticine character that the default rig pays tribute to.
Timings in the video come from the studio's default Morph preset (8 poses at 12 fps); the 65,000-pose figure is simple arithmetic for a 90-minute film on twos, not a count from any real production.