CLAYMATION OPENING TITLES

THE PROJECT

Tfou is a French show dedicated to children's cartoons. Les Tutos Fous is a creative interlude in the sequence of animated tutorials. Magic, make-up, cooking, dancing, hairdressing, decoration. Whether it's a boy or a girl, the show fills all desires. As specialists, stars step in to help and advise.

Inspired by the show, we led a 3D claymation opening titles workshop!

Art direction, storyboarding, modeling & animation: Thomas CHARIER
Creative direction, lighting, shading, compositing: Mattias PERESINI

Project realized within the Mattrunks Studio.

Production from 2P2L
Copywriter: Benjamin JOSSE
Project Manager: Juliette PONCHELET

~ 2018

Paving a path to next gen stop-motion

TV visual identity is normally associated with the program it serves. The credits develop the identity of the show by emphasizing its genre ingeniously. This graphic introduction reminds the viewer of the unique and original aspect of the show. It is in the vast majority purely digital and develops around the title of the show.

My approach was to focus on the craftmanship aspect of tutorials while preserving a flexible production through computer graphics. Stop motion conceives a certain closeness between creators and spectators. Its manufacturing defects and its simplistic aspects result in a sincere, pleasant and memorable work.

This practice nevertheless remains very time-consuming and allows almost no retouching.

Les Tutos Fous is a creative French show dedicated to children's cartoons.

This program stimulates the imagination of children and pushes them to become actors in the creation. It goes beyond the simple contemplative show by offering playful experiences accessible to all.

The introductory credits for children must be fun, impacting, and simple to understand. The attention of a toddler is very easy to disturb. Semiology and graphics are decisive in prioritizing the actions of such a short introduction.

The youth program is a medium where graphic strategies are pushed to their extremes.

The animations are exaggerated, the expressions are closer to the caricature, the colors are saturated, the values of shots remain very simple and for the most part remain fixed.

All the possibilities of the workshops are presented. This succession of actions and movements reminds us the actions of the hand and its power of shaping. The various object shapes focus on all categories of tutorials.

The tools compose the scene but do not block the reading of the information. They all have their symbolism and correspond to most of the materials used in the show. The colors are bright, attractive and warm, but are in line with the graphic strategy of the Tfou program.

They have been deliberately prioritized and make it easy to identify the main actor.

The use of a main actor in modeling clay makes it easy to link the different themes of the workshops. This element is the narrative thread of the credits and intervenes in the diegetic appearance of the final title.

This project stands out with an unconventional approach to 3D. To simulate a classic stop motion film in a digital process it was necessary to work with the same approach as a traditional animator. At each frame a new scene is created with each its unique objects.

This approach facilitates morphing animations while leaving the possibility of returning to the animation and its environment.

script

A clay spool falls on a worktop and twirls a card castle and dragging tools on the workshop table.

The dough bounces, is levitated and turns into a first letter.

The modeling of this letter is done in rotation.

Creative tools gradually appear in the background.

They arise from the table, off-camera and pop just like magic.

Other letters are formed independently to form the final logo.

The last elements are placed in the field and finalize the composition.

storyboard

The youngest viewers have a lower analysis and reaction time than average. The film cut was dosed not to attack their reading of the information. Always in this logic of anticipation, the division of the various actions and the precision of the camera movements benefited from an in-depth study upstream of the production.

The last vignette supposed an open end and started the beginning of the workshop.

conclusion

This project shows that handcrafted production is possible if the stages of creation are carefully developed upstream.

This kind of animation is democratized by the appearance of new means of expression such as sculpture and animation in virtual reality, I’m thinking about Oculus Medium and Quill. These mediums are obviously the tools of the designer of tomorrow. They miss them more than a thoughtful implementation in the production pipeline.

And now it's done!

At the time I made this project on Cinema 4D. There was no native stop-motion tool and we had to imagine a new process for the project that was not optimized at all. At the time of writing this post the Blender Foundation has just released a brand new addon that allows artists to transform any digital sculpting over time, in the same spirit as a real stop-motion animation.

This new feature will change a lot for stop-motion lovers.