South African Video Creator Delights Viewers with Entertaining Stop Motion Animation

An English teacher by profession, Clifford Beddy not only taught in his home country but also travelled abroad on working holiday visas for teaching assignments. It was the creative bug that bit him and prompted him to master stop motion animation, and turn professional. And it was just two years ago.

Beddy started making creative content that was not only innovative but entertaining too. When his work started getting noticed, he gave up teaching and devoted full time to stop motion animation. Today, he has made many clients from around the globe that include a producer in Los Angeles, USA, a book writer in Malaysia, a light company in the USA, and many small businesses in South Africa. He has also made a nationwide Claymation TV advert with Vetro Media Cotlands.

Just sample his video of sperm and ovum. For this, he took photos from his decade old DSLR camera and used them to animate the scene frame by frame with the help of Dragonframe software, using stop motion animation. For the baby, he used felting wool, making each part and component of the body with it, that included chest, leg, foot, arm, hand and nappy, and then joined them up together, except the head. He put a pin in the body to hold the head to enable it to move easily.

For making the tears of the baby fly, he used wires and then masked out the wires while editing the video. The sounds of crying and explosion were sourced from freesound.org. He created other sounds with a tennis ball on polystyrene and the sound of splashing water with his finger. However, by his own admission, many people simply hated the splashing water sound!

What is surprising is that Beddy is completely self-taught in this art and has not taken any training from anywhere. It is by trial and error that he managed to master stop motion animation. Besides making such videos, he also makes creative wedding videos and takes in-person classes in stop motion animation.

Beddy enjoys a viewership of over 146,000 on Instagram alone.