Will Vinton Studios on "48 Hours"

Will vinton needs to do Stop motion again, Aardman are still going strong and I think stop motion needs to be brought out of the shadow abit.

The only time Dan Rather came to Portland I can remember is when the Koin Tower opened up and broadcast the CBS NEWS to the country in 1984

I think Will Vinton and his team of animators where genius' of their time. I'm a huge fan, it's unreal how talented everyone was, it's a shame stop animation isn't done like this anymore. It was extremely entertaining to watch!

4:22.....epic

If you come out of retirement, I hope to work with you on something.

I still think clay is the shizznit, but if it were more rubbery and less bleedy, that would be rad. Sculpey III is fun to sculpt, but it sets up and breaks apart because it's a polymer. As an animator, I would like to see a hybrid wax that stayed pliable at room temperature while also pigment saturated.

There are a couple of wax/clays like that. Pongo is a brand that we used to use at Vinton's. I think the Harbut's clay that Aardman uses is more waxy. The later Van Aken clays that we used had a lot of bleedy pigment and got very chalky. The older stuff under the Leisure Clay label was better. In my own work I would always blend in Van Aken's ivory clay and mineral oil to both cut down the color saturation for the camera and to get a better consistency.

I wasn't around when Leisure clay was used, but from the looks of the Claymation documentary, it was very different from Van Aken today. VA is very dry. Marc Spess said that mineral oil, for some reason, was no longer optimal for smoothing clay or making it softer- he recommends olive oil. I've used both and prefer the olive oil, mainly because it's not derived from petroleum, so there is no toxic shock level. Oddly enough, the ivory that I've bought was chalky, so I could't use that workflow.

I think it's interesting that you mention cutting down the saturation for the camera- I thought that color saturation on film was lower by default than it is for video. It's kind of cool that cutting the saturation of the clay was part of your job- it's something I never would have thought about.

Do you have any idea what happened to Leisure Clay? I'd like to get my hands on that! John Lemmon gave me some Pongo samples, which works really well for sets. If I could find a local Pongo supllier to beat the shipping and handling...