The Daily App: ClayFrames For Android

Clay animation videos have never been so easy. Wait – correction – they have never been less difficult than they are now with ClayFrames, an Android-based app that takes time-lapse videos to create animation.

Clay animation videos can take quite a bit of patience. For example, for a 10-second video, at 15 frames per second, you’d need to take a 150 photos of an object that moves a fraction of a centimeter at a time. You’d then string those photos together to make the animated video. In Claymation, the animated objects objects are made out of clay.

The basic concept of ClayFrames is uncomplicated: take still photos, at 15 or more frames per second, of an image and then combine those still photos into a video. To help guide you, the app will keep an opaque image, on screen, of the most recent still photo. Make no mistake: this free app is not exactly production-quality if you’re pitching a Hollywood movie studio. But for simple animations – for a multimedia PowerPoint, for example – it’s an app that can do a quick-and-dirty animation right from your Android device. And it can do it for free.

Using ClayFrames, it took about five minutes for us to make a two-second video clip of a tiny little plastic robot walking around a desk.

ClayFrames, for $2.03 from the Android Market, shoots frames and puts together a video in as high as 1080p resolution on a Motorola Droid X phone.