The Clay’s The Thing

While we have all become familiar with shortages of things ranging from toilet paper to semiconductors, for one segment of the film industry there is a potential shortage with similar repercussions: clay.

That’s right, that gooey material that is the stuff of kindergarten projects and exquisite pottery alike. But the issue is not just any clay—Play-Doh still lines the shelves—but a special material that Aardman Animations Ltd., the producer of remarkable movies, uses. The 500-gram bars of material crafted by Aaardman into an array of characters is not just in short supply, but no supply.

While Wallace and Gromit made their stop-action film debuts in a short—A Grand Day Out—in 1989, the cheese-loving inventor and his beagle really came into their own in the Academy Award-winning The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005.

However, Aardman Animations Ltd., which brought those pliable performers to the screen, had already come into its own with 2000’s Chicken Run—the highest-grossing stop-action film of all time.

Rather than using B-splines and other digital tools to create its characters, Aardman uses a special material, a clay named “Lewis Newplast.”

Newclay Products, the producer of the material—the only producer of the material—stopped making it earlier this year in its factory in Devon, England, a stoppage that has given rise to concerns about the future of Wallace, Gromit and the array of other clay-based characters.

Reportedly, however, Aardman bought all of the remaining stock of Newplast, and is working to develop an alternative.

Consequently, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, which debuts on Netflix December 15, will not be the final run of the clay creatures. Yes, there will be another Wallace and Gromit film next year—and presumably for years to come.

But what is it?

Lewis Newplast’s inventor was an English art teacher named Lewis who, in 1897, decided he wanted something that would allow his sculpture students to model sculptures without the material drying out. It’s a type of plasticine with ideal characteristics for stop-motion animation, a process that shoots one frame at a time: click, move the object(s), click, and so on and on.

The Newplast’s real advantage is that it doesn’t dry: you can model objects and they retain their pliability, even under the hot lights necessary for filming. But in addition to being pliable, the material needs to be sufficiently firm to hold its shape for as long as necessary. And it must be sufficiently malleable to allow adjustment of the model.

While plasticine is a type of clay, a difference between it and the clay that we use, say, to create vases and bowls, is that the calcium carbonate particles in plasticine bond with an oily material (like petroleum jelly) while the minerals in air-drying clay used in potting suspend in water (which evaporates in a way that petroleum jelly doesn’t).

Plasticine has had a long history in movie modeling, and gave rise to a type of film making called “Claymation.”

One of the most famous pre-Aardman use of the models came in films featuring the special-effects work of Ray Harryhausen, who developed a method of movie-making he called “Dynamation.”

Dynamation combines stop-action animation and footage of actors and scenery filmed in the ordinary manner. So, for example, in “The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958), a “50-foot” cyclops attacks Sinbad and his crew. What made making scenes like that tricky is the fact that the actors saw nothing when they were attacking the beast. Arguably, the methods that Harryhausen created in clay led to much of what we see today in Marvel movies and their kin.

Yet clay characters still have a charm that no amount of digital effects will achieve. And Aardman has put out a statement telling its fans not to worry: they have plenty of their special clay in storage, which they saved in case this worst-case scenario ever arrived.