Stop-Motion Animation Good Enough to Eat

Becca Clason combines handcrafted lettering with a hungry eye for detail.

Becca Clason makes food talk.

That’s one way to describe her job. As a stop-motion lettering artist, she crafts words that snake and wiggle and dance out of edibles like sesame seeds, lentils, or licorice. She and her filmmaker husband, Josh, create these mini animated masterpieces in a guesthouse-turned-studio behind their Salt Lake City home, often sharing behind-the-scenes peeks to her 38,000 Instagram followers.

Clason took a circuitous route to her dream job. She got her start working in advertising in New York, was a graphic designer in Utah (where she discovered lettering through designers such as Jessica Hische and Friends of Type), got a taste for the freelance life while traveling around the country in an Airstream one summer, and began lettering with food, flowers, and other objects while living in L.A. “I started experimenting not even thinking it was something I could do as a full-time career,” she says. “Then I realized if I keep doing this and posting about it and trying to introduce products into my design, I could catch the eye of some potential clients.”

In late 2014, she gave herself the goal of posting something creative to Instagram every day, whether it was food lettering or a sketch, and that led to a new portfolio, which landed her an agent. Now her diverse client roster includes Starbucks, Denny’s, and Hidden Valley Ranch.

Clason also recently held a retreat for lettering artists who want to improve their craft. “In a small way I’m hoping to help people in their careers and find inspiration if they’re looking for something more,” she says. She often offers advice to aspiring creatives on Instagram.

Here, she discusses snacking on the job, achieving balance as a freelancer, and creating one’s own opportunities. Oh, and here’s a little culinary tip, straight from someone who spends all day making food look beautiful: “If you’re going to a dinner party and need your fresh-cut fruit to look nice, sprinkle on some Fruit Fresh,” she says. Very good to know.

Setting a schedule

We work regular hours Monday through Thursday each week, with some projects requiring that I work late into the night to finish them after my 18-month-old son, Ira, has gone to bed. My sister and sister-in-law take turns watching him during the week. We do our best not to work on Fridays, so we can spend more time with him. But recently, our schedule has felt much more like a full-time job rather than a freeform, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants freelancing schedule.

Finding influences

Much of my inspiration comes from music, mixed-media art, and the desire to make something beautiful with layers and flow. Since I frequently work with food, a lot of my inspiration comes from taste. If there’s a food that I love to eat, I want to create something cool with it and work with that brand. Color also plays a big role. Sometimes I use bright, multicolored materials like candy, because bright colors of the rainbow never fail to make people happy. I’ve also created color-study designs based on one color alone. I want my tactile designs to be a piece of art as well as advertising, so I always visualize how the colors and textures of the lettering materials, backgrounds, and props will look together as a finished piece. In my work, I love to create a certain feeling and set a scene, and I want to try to do more of that moving forward, especially by incorporating more music and sound design into my work.

Tweezing your lentils

I recently worked on a project for Sprout Organic Foods using navy beans, red lentils, and garbanzo beans. Red lentils are so tiny, and the letters were small — maybe three lentils across and 15 lentils high. I placed each one with tweezers, because I wanted the letters to be tidy and neat. I bent over for several hours creating those lentil letters, so my back was super sore, and I was counting down the letters until I was finished. Other times, I get in a comfortable zone where creating my lettering is a therapeutic exercise. It all depends on the physical position I need to be in for a particular project and how detailed and painstaking it is. Whatever the process may be, seeing the video come together in the end is always worth it.

A serendipitous beginning

One project I did was with American Express in 2015 for an art series. The ad agency I worked with on this project hired various artists with different styles who each interpreted the card in their own way. At the last minute, the creatives at the agency asked if I could shoot mine as a stop-motion animation. I had experimented with stop-motion on my own a tiny bit, but I’d never done it before for a client, so I had to teach myself. That project was a pivotal point for me, because it set me on a path to being a professional stop-motion artist.

Prepping a project

I was just winging it for a lot of my first projects, especially my personal projects. Now I’m much more thorough and detail-oriented: I always send a pre-production deck, including sketches, background surfaces, and props, so there are no surprises for the client. Working in an analog format means that big changes during post-production are much more difficult than if I created my work in Adobe Illustrator. My stop-motion videos have hundreds of frames, so I can’t simply Photoshop something out or change the background color. I’ve learned some great tricks in Adobe After Effects that make some post-production edits much more manageable, but it’s so much easier to make changes during pre-production and get it right the first time, rather than trying to make big changes in post.

Hazards of the job

I often end up eating — a lot. I recently worked on a shoot for Danone Yogurísimo, a yogurt brand in Argentina, where I used boxes and boxes of granola cereal. I didn’t eat lunch that day, because I’d been snacking on so much granola and couldn’t stop. I did a project for Red Vines a year or so ago, and they shipped me literally 60 pounds of licorice. I used maybe 10 or 12 pounds for the project and had a bunch left over, so I gave a lot of it away to family and friends. I get a lot of product from time to time, and try to share the love.

Just do it

When I moved back to Salt Lake from Los Angeles, I created Salt Lake Lettering Club and planned events and monthly workshops. I wanted it to exist, so I created it myself, and it’s grown into something great for the community. No one’s stopping you from creating your own lettering club or starting a meetup or whatever you want to do in your community. No one gave me permission to create my own mini-lettering conference, but I did it. Why not? There are no rules.

Make it personal

It’s always a risk when you’re running your own business full time and you have to rely on client work coming in. I’m really grateful and feel really blessed that I’m in the situation that I’m in now. If I ever don’t have client work to do, instead of complaining or worrying about it, I try to be proactive. I reach out to potential clients, I create personal work that I’ve been wanting to try, and I keep putting myself out there and putting out new work. My mindset is this: If there’s a particular kind of work you want to be hired to do, make it a personal project. Try it on your own and put it in your portfolio.

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