From director Gianluca Maruotti comes another music video for the artist, Giangrande. This time it is a clay stop motion piece for the single, Morning Dew. The song is a guitar-heavy, poignant, tune of a folksy nature. “It’s all made with plasticine and animated in stop motion using Dragonframe,” Maruotti told us. “The main idea was to follow the pace and the mood of the song, with no plot and no storyline, simply plasticine changing shapes.

“I made my job easier by creating a few loops and playing some clips in reverse. I wanted to have a ‘crescendo’ so I decided to use colors towards the end, but all the rest is white clay on a white background. This was to give a sense of lightness, even though plasticine is usually chunky and heavy.” The effect is one of total flow with the music as the clay builds up into shapes and dissolves back down along with the rise and fall of the tune and lyrics.

“Working on this animation has been rather enjoyable and relaxing, which is pretty unusual, as stop motion is an extremely stressful process for me,” Maruotti said. “Inspired by the music, I created a few sculptures, some of them abstract, and then I played around with them without planning too much and following the morphing shapes.

“The only big challenge was to fight gravity, as usual. I also wanted to have a smooth animation. But at the same time, not too smooth, because I like to show fingerprints and imperfections which are the strengths of stop motion.” This he does nicely, and it dovetails with the marks in clay that show its imperfections and the places the artist has worked with it, intrinsically part of the art form.

For more behind the scenes, check out this making of video: