How The Clay Heads Were Made

Background

The X project offered us the opportunity to engage students who would not usually be involved in, what could be described as, a technological project.

These comical animations are the result of students in 5th and 6th year combining traditional clay modelling techniques and advanced technological facilities to achieve the desired effect.

The original objective was to capture something on-screen which had a 'different' feel and which might generate some interest in the General Election with pupils is the school.

After some initial research into both prominent political figures and political caricature, we decided that the "plastic" nature of clay might offer a degree of flexibility and generate a lively effect on screen. Several experiments were undertaken with the production of the final heads taking about 3 hours hard work.

How the heads were made

We didn't feel it was necessary to pay attention to the technical aspects of firing clay the heads, since they would never be fired. At this stage, our plan was to photograph the heads and transfer them to the computer as still images. However, when we began taking the shots we were intrigued by their presence on the computer screen, especially when the camera captured the moving images. This lead us to experiment with one small animation loop which was mainly to satisfy our own curiosity (...to see if we could make it work). This was a great success and enthused by their success, both students and staff agreed to proceed further.

Hardware and Software used

Various hardware and software products were used during this project. They are listed below together with a short description of the part they played.

Being a school some of the products are truly ancient, given todays standards. Never the less they have provided a valuable and stimulating resource, stretching the imagination and technical capability of both staff and pupils at Ellon academy...

• Apple Macintosh LCIII 4x80 Computer with LC shot 1 image grabbing board was used for all image digitising.
• Images saved as PICT files on the Macintosh.
• Images manipulated with Aldus SuperPaint III (basically to remove background and thus ease animation requirements)
• The master animations were created in HyperCard 2.2 with Addmotion (maximum number of frames in any loop was 30)
• Finished animations were exported from HyperCard as PICS animation files
• Our Macintoshes are not equipped to handle the internet so we initially used Graphic Convertor 2.3 to save each frame of the animations as a GIF file, these were then saved to a PC Floppy and passed to our computing department to create the GIF animations, then we discovered (on the internet) GIF Builder for the Macintosh.
• This program was down loaded and brought to life with BINHEX and Unstuffit Programs, making life much easier for us.

We hope you enjoy our Holographic hall of horrors, we aim to e-mail the "RLPs" (Real Life Politicians) for their impressions and to guide them to our survey carried out to find what issues local young adults feel are important in this Election.