Today marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of Art Clokey, a pioneer in the field of stop motion clay animation, who is best remembered for what green shapeshifter?
"clay animations, produced by Premavision Studios. Art Clokey Arthur ""Art"" Clokey (born Arthur Charles Farrington; October 12, 1921 – January 8, 2010) was an American pioneer in the popularization of stop motion clay animation, best known as the creator of the character Gumby and the original voice of Gumby's sidekick, Pokey. Clokey's career began in 1955 with a film experiment called ""Gumbasia"", which was influenced by his professor, Slavko Vorkapich, at the University of Southern California. Clokey and his wife Ruth subsequently came up with the clay character Gumby and his horse Pokey, who first appeared in the ""Howdy Doody"
"latter. On October 12, 2011, Google paid tribute to Art Clokey’s 90th birthday with a doodle featuring clay balls transforming into characters from the show. The doodle was composed of a toy block with a ""G"" and five clay balls in the Google colors. Clicking each of the balls revealed the Blockheads, Prickle, Goo, Gumby and Pokey. In a 2014 episode of the Disney XD's ""Gravity Falls"" called ""Little Gift Shop of Horrors"", the character of Soos Ramirez appears in the ""Clay Day"" segment resembling Gumby. Various Gumby merchandise has been produced over the years, the most prominent item being"
"Eli Noyes Eli Noyes (born October 18, 1942 in Amherst, Massachusetts) is an American animator most noted for his stop animation work using clay and sand. Eliot Fette Noyes, Jr. was born the son of noted ""Harvard Five"" architect Eliot Noyes and his wife, interior designer Molly Duncan Weed Noyes. He is the brother of Fred Noyes. He graduated from Harvard University in 1964. In 1964, Noyes created the animated film ""Clay"" or ""Origin of the Species"" which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. The film is considered one of the earliest examples of clay"
"form of ""character"" clay animation, where the clay maintains a recognizable character throughout a shot, as in Art Clokey's and Will Vinton's films. One variation of clay animation is strata-cut animation, in which a long bread-like loaf of clay, internally packed tight and loaded with varying imagery, is sliced into thin sheets, with the camera taking a frame of the end of the loaf for each cut, eventually revealing the movement of the internal images within. Pioneered in both clay and blocks of wax by German animator Oskar Fischinger during the 1920s and 1930s, the technique was revived and highly"
"refined in the mid-1990s by David Daniels, an associate of Will Vinton, in his 16-minute short film ""Buzz Box"". Another clay-animation technique, one that blurs the distinction between stop motion and traditional flat animation, is called clay painting (also a variation of the direct manipulation animation process), wherein clay is placed on a flat surface and moved like wet oil paints (as on a traditional artist's canvas) to produce any style of images, but with a clay look to them. A sub variation clay animation can be informally called ""clay melting"". Any kind of heat source can be applied on"
"Tom Luckey Thomas W. (""Tom"") Luckey (January 6, 1940 – August 19, 2012) was an American architect and sculptor, best known for inventing abstract playgrounds called Luckey Climbers. Luckey also created furniture, merry-go-rounds, and interiors. After graduating from the Yale School of Architecture in the late 1960s, Luckey began remodeling friends' houses and doing experimental projects, including one described as transforming: In addition to interiors and furniture, he also designed merry-go-rounds; one, inspired by square dances, moves riders from one seat to another as they go around. A mutual friend introduced Luckey to Agnes Gund, who insisted he contact the"
"especially those on the 1950s CBS program ""Suspense"", which Autolite sponsored. In the 1960s and 1970s, independent clay animator Eliot Noyes Jr. refined the technique of ""free-form"" clay animation with his Oscar-nominated 1965 film ""Clay (or the Origin of Species)"". Noyes also used stop motion to animate sand lying on glass for his musical animated film ""Sandman"" (1975). Stop motion was used by Rankin/Bass Productions on some of their television programs and feature films including ""The New Adventures of Pinocchio"" (1960–1961), ""Willy McBean and his Magic Machine"" (1963, 1965) and most notably seasonal/holiday favorites like ""Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"" (1964),"
"Clay animation Clay animation or claymation, sometimes plasticine animation, is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is ""deformable""—made of a malleable substance, usually plasticine clay. Traditional animation, from cel animation to stop motion, is produced by recording each frame, or still picture, on film or digital media and then playing the recorded frames back in rapid succession before the viewer. These and other moving images, from zoetrope to films to video games, create the illusion of motion by playing back at over ten to twelve frames per second. The techniques involved"
"nominated for Academy Awards. In 1977, Vinton made a documentary about this process and his style of animation which he dubbed ""claymation""; he titled the documentary ""Claymation"". Soon after this documentary, the term was trademarked by Vinton to differentiate his team's work from others who had been, or were beginning to do, ""clay animation"". While the word has stuck and is often used to describe clay animation and stop motion, it remains a trademark owned currently by Laika Entertainment, Inc. Twenty clay-animation episodes featuring the clown Mr. Bill were a feature of ""Saturday Night Live"", starting from a first appearance"
"Sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Nightmare"" was released, as was ""The Sculptor's Nightmare"", a film by Billy Bitzer. Italian animator Roméo Bossetti impressed audiences with his object animation tour-de-force, ""The Automatic Moving Company"" in 1912. The great European pioneer of stop motion was Wladyslaw Starewicz (1892–1965), who animated ""The Beautiful Lukanida"" (1910), ""The Battle of the Stag Beetles"" (1910), and ""The Ant and the Grasshopper"" (1911). One of the earliest clay animation films was ""Modelling Extraordinary"", which impressed audiences in 1912. December 1916 brought the first of Willie Hopkins' 54 episodes of ""Miracles in Mud"" to the big screen. Also in December"
"George Rickey George Warren Rickey (June 6, 1907 – July 17, 2002) was an American kinetic sculptor. Rickey was born on June 6, 1907 in South Bend, Indiana. At a 1985 retrospective show, he later recalled that as a very small child, he was fascinated by the window latches in his home. These latches, which can be found in many historic South Bend homes, operate conically at counter-intuitive angles that are oblique to the ""apparent"" design of the otherwise rectilinear form of the latch. ""One expects the latch to open by pulling, but it's a conical crank, you see."" This"
"Claire Parker Claire Parker (August 31, 1906 – October 3, 1981) was an American engineer and animator. A graduate of MIT, her best-known contribution to the history of cinema is the Pinscreen (""Écran d'épingles""), a vertically-mounted grid of 240,000 sliding metal rods that are first manually pushed into position to create lit and shaded areas, then filmed frame by frame. While the hand-operated, mechanical Pinscreen superficially shares characteristics with early ""optical toys"" like the zoetrope, it is distinguished by being one of the first devices ever to produce animation by reconfiguring a set of individual picture elements, later called pixels."
"Claire Parker Claire Parker (August 31, 1906 – October 3, 1981) was an American engineer and animator. A graduate of MIT, her best-known contribution to the history of cinema is the Pinscreen (""Écran d'épingles""), a vertically-mounted grid of 240,000 sliding metal rods that are first manually pushed into position to create lit and shaded areas, then filmed frame by frame. While the hand-operated, mechanical Pinscreen superficially shares characteristics with early ""optical toys"" like the zoetrope, it is distinguished by being one of the first devices ever to produce animation by reconfiguring a set of individual picture elements, later called pixels."
"1916, the first woman animator, Helena Smith Dayton, began experimenting with clay stop motion. She would release her first film in 1917, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's ""Romeo and Juliet"". In the turn of the century, there was another well known animator known as Willis O' Brien (known by others as O'bie). His work on ""The Lost World"" (1925) is well known, but he is most admired for his work on ""King Kong"" (1933), a milestone of his films made possible by stop-motion animation. O'Brien's protege and eventual successor in Hollywood was Ray Harryhausen. After learning under O'Brien on the"
"1990. Hicks Lokey William ""Hicks"" Lokey (April 5, 1904 – November 4, 1990) was an American animator. He is best known for his work at Fleischer Studios. Lokey was born in Alabama. He worked as an animator for Fleischer Studios (1934-1938), the Walter Lantz Studio (1938–39), Walt Disney Productions (1940–41, where he provided character animation for the ""Pink Elephants on Parade"" segment in ""Dumbo"" and ""The Dance of the Hours"" in ""Fantasia""), and Hanna-Barbera (1959-1986). In 1990 Lokey received the Winsor McCay Award for his lifetime of work in the field of animation. Lokey died in Los Angeles on November"
"name ""Gumby"" came from the muddy clay found at Clokey's grandparents' farm that his family called ""gumbo"". Gumby's appearance was inspired by a suggestion from his wife, Ruth (née Parkander), that Gumby be based on the Gingerbread Man. The color green was then chosen because Clokey saw it as both racially neutral and a symbol of life. Gumby's legs and feet were made wide for pragmatic reasons; they ensured that the character would stand up during stop-motion filming. Gumby's famous slanted head was based on the hairstyle of Clokey's father, Charles Farrington, in an old photograph. Clokey's pilot episode was"
"early 1950s, animator and future ""Gumby"" creator Art Clokey produced stop motion commercials for Pea Soup Andersen's. In 1965, the restaurant was sold to Vince Evans. He developed a miniature train, aviary, and even a small wild animal park on the property, but they were demolished in 1970 to make room for a Danish-themed motel. In 1976, the company established a second location in Santa Nella, California, in Merced County near Interstate 5. The property included a restaurant, gift shop, hotel, and gas station, all branded with the Andersen's name. A distinctive feature was a working windmill, attached to the"
"teacher Ray Alf, who took students on expeditions digging for fossils and learning about the world around them. Clokey later studied geology at Pomona College, before leaving Pomona in 1943 to join the military during World War II. He graduated from his father's alma mater, Miami University, in 1948. Art Clokey also made a few highly experimental and visually inventive short clay animation films for adults, including his first student film ""Gumbasia"" (produced in 1953 and released in 1955), the visually rich ""Mandala"" (1977) — described by Clokey as a metaphor for evolving human consciousness — and the equally bizarre"
"Dallas McKennon Dallas Raymond McKennon (July 19, 1919 – July 14, 2009), sometimes credited as Dal McKennon, was an American actor and voice actor, in a career lasting over 50 years. Born near La Grande, Oregon, McKennon's best-known voice roles were that of Gumby for Art Clokey, Archie Andrews in several different ""Archie"" series for Filmation, and the primary voice of Buzz Buzzard in the ""Woody Woodpecker"" cartoons. In the early 1950s, McKennon created and hosted his own daily kids TV wraparound show, ""Space Funnies""/""Capt. Jet"", which was seen weekday mornings on KNXT (KCBS) TV Ch. 2 in Hollywood, California."
"Gumbasia Gumbasia, a 3-minute, 10-second short film released on September 2, 1955, was the first clay animation produced by Art Clokey, who went on to create the classic series, ""Gumby"" and ""Davey and Goliath"", using the same technique. Clokey created ""Gumbasia"" while studying at the University of Southern California under the direction of Slavko Vorkapić. He used a ping-pong table in his father's garage as the surface upon which to work the clay. The film was a surreal short of pulsating shapes and lumps of clay set to music in a parody of Walt Disney's ""Fantasia"". ""Gumbasia"" was created in"
"uses of clay animation in a theatrical short from the 1920s. Pioneering the clay-painting technique was one-time Vinton animator Joan Gratz, first in her Oscar-nominated film ""The Creation"" (1980), and then in her Oscar-winning ""Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase"", filmed in 1992. In 1972, at Marc Chinoy's Cineplast Films Studio in Munich, Germany, André Roche created a set of clay-animated German-language-instruction films (for non-German-speaking children) called ""Kli-Kla-Klawitter"" for the Second German TV-Channel; and another one for a traffic education series, ""Herr Daniel paßt auf"" (""Mr. Daniel Pays Attention""). A variation of clay animation was developed by another Vinton animator, Craig"
"Bud Luckey William Everett ""Bud"" Luckey (July 28, 1934 – February 24, 2018) was an American animator, cartoonist, singer, musician, designer, composer, artist and voice actor. He is best known for his work at Pixar, where he worked as a character designer on a number of films, including ""Toy Story"", ""Boundin'"", ""Toy Story 2"", ""A Bug's Life"", ""Monsters, Inc."", ""Finding Nemo"", ""Cars"" and ""Ratatouille"". Luckey was also known as the voice of Rick Dicker in ""The Incredibles"", Chuckles the Clown in ""Toy Story 3"" and as Eeyore in the 2011 ""Winnie the Pooh"" film. In 2004, Luckey directed and wrote"
"Earl Hurd Earl Hurd (September 14, 1880 – September 28, 1940) was a pioneering American animator and film director. He is noted for creating and producing the silent ""Bobby Bumps"" animated short subject series for early animation producer J.R. Bray's Bray Productions. Hurd and Bray are jointly responsible for developing the processes involved in cel animation, and were granted patents for their processes in 1914. American Animator Andy Luckey (1965- ) is a maternal cousin, twice removed, of Hurd's. Hurd, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, later worked for Paul Terry's Terrytoons studio before starting his own Earl Hurd Productions"
"Clayography The portmanteau term clayography is a term created by Academy Award-winning animator Adam Elliot. Adam struggled with ways of describing his unique animation technique and so created this word to aptly express his artistic style. A combination of the words clay and biography, the term is similar to another portmanteau term ""Claymation"" which is a registered trademark in the United States, registered by Will Vinton in 1978 to describe his clay-animated films. Clay is often used as a general term for plasticine in the stop motion animation community. As Adam's films explore the details of real people's lives and"
"Helena Smith Dayton Helena Smith Dayton (1883–1960) was an American film maker, painter and sculptor working in New York City who used fledgling stop motion and clay animation techniques in the 1910s and 1920s, one of the earliest animators (and the first American woman) to experiment with clay animation. Her ""clay cartoons"" were humorous in nature, and Dayton was featured in the ""Humorist Salons"" in New York City. She spent World War I in Paris working with the YMCA as a canteen director. She was a published author, ranging in genre from journalism to plays to a guide to New"
"""Gary & Mike"", for UPN in 2001. Another individual who found fame in clay animation is Nick Park, who created the characters Wallace and Gromit. In addition to a series of award-winning shorts and featurettes, he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the feature-length outing """". ""Chicken Run"", to date, is the highest grossing stop motion animated movie ever grossing nearly $225 million worldwide. The BBC commissioned thirteen episodes of stop frame animated ""Summerton Mill"" in 2004 as inserts into their flagship pre-school program, ""Tikkabilla"". Created and produced by Pete Bryden and Ed Cookson, the series was"
"with clay, which had been developed by Vinton and his technical teams as far as it could go. Vinton soon coined a new term for this process, ""Foamation"". In the 1990s, a variety of Vinton's 400 + animators and technicians helped with new creations and films of their own using the Vinton facilities called the ""Walkabout Program"". Craig Bartlett created his ""Arnold Escapes From Church"" short film (1988) which later spawned ""Hey Arnold!"", a cel-animated series for Nickelodeon and generated two more clay-animated short films, ""The Arnold Waltz"" (1990) and ""Arnold Rides a Chair"" (1991). The animated series produced for"
"Arthur Melbourne-Cooper Arthur Melbourne Cooper (15 April 1874 – 28 November 1961) was a British photographer and early filmmaker best known for his pioneering work in stop-motion animation. He produced over three hundred films between 1896 and 1915, of which an estimated 36 were all or in part animated. These include ""Dreams of Toyland"" (1908) and according to some sources ""Dolly’s Toys"" (1901), as well as ""Matches: An Appeal"" (date disputed), which Dutch independent researcher Tjitte de Vries has claimed may have been the first animated film to be shown in public. Since his death, Cooper has become a controversial"
"Donald Wallace Gordon Donald Wallace (Wally) Gordon (4 February 1932 – 11 April 2016) was an American gymnast and Inventor who is notable for inventing the first landing mats, incline mats, octagons and all the other foam shapes that currently fill gymnastic schools. Gordon also invented the foam landing pits for pole-vaulters and high jumpers used in all Track and Field competitions including the 1968 Olympics, where they made their first Olympic debut. He created the first constant flow ""Moon Bounce"" air units and developed closed air recreation products for water and land. He has worked as a consultant for"
"a dozen films from the collection. The collection encompasses the work of John and James Whitney, as well as John's sons Mark, John, and Michael. John Whitney (animator) John Whitney, Sr. (April 8, 1917 – September 22, 1995) was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation. Whitney was born in Pasadena, California and attended Pomona College. His first works in film were 8 mm movies of a lunar eclipse which he made using a home-made telescope. In 1937-38 he spent a year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under Rene Leibowitz."
"stand) after each small adjustment of the clay images. The clay-painting process has also been used as a background, photographically combined with other forms of animation, and even live action. Pioneering this technique was one-time Vinton animator Joan Gratz, first in her Oscar-nominated film ""The Creation"" (1980) and then in her Oscar-winning ""Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase"" filmed in 1992. A variation of this technique was developed by another Vinton animator, Craig Bartlett, for his series of ""Arnold"" short films, also made during the late-80s/early-90s, in which he not only used clay painting, but sometimes built up clay images that"
"at a number of festivals, including SxSW and the Independent Film Festival of Boston, and garnered the Special Jury Award for Artistic Portrait at the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival and Best Documentary Feature at the Indie Memphis Film Festival. The film has also been shown on the Sundance Channel. Tom Luckey Thomas W. (""Tom"") Luckey (January 6, 1940 – August 19, 2012) was an American architect and sculptor, best known for inventing abstract playgrounds called Luckey Climbers. Luckey also created furniture, merry-go-rounds, and interiors. After graduating from the Yale School of Architecture in the late 1960s, Luckey began remodeling friends'"
"stop-animation and is cited by Wallace and Gromit creators, Peter Lord and David Sproxton as a large influence on their work. Noyes is also noted for his creation of the Sand Alphabet for ""Sesame Street"" and the Nickelodeon children's television series, ""Eureeka's Castle"". In 2003, Noyes cofounded the animation production studio Alligator Planet with Ralph Guggenheim and Alan Buder. Noyes directed animation sequences for two films which were shortlisted for the 2009 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, ""Under Our Skin"" and ""The Most Dangerous Man in America"", a final nominee. Eli Noyes Eli Noyes (born October 18, 1942 in"