Italian director and animator Gianluca Maruotti delivers quirky, fabled characters to the stop-motion video for the track “Free to Roam” from Massimo Giangrande’s new album “Beauty at Closing Time.” “Usually I use either paper or clay depending on the project,” Maruotti told us. “’Free to Roam’ is a claymation, I used only plasticine. But creating settings and characters with plasticine is a bit time consuming, you would have to mix the colors and stuff…so to speed up the work I decided to animate laying everything on the table.

“So everything you see is not exactly three dimensional but more flat like a bas relief, resting on the background, easier than fighting gravity. I also didn’t need to use rigging of any kinds so that I reduced the post production. In the end I learned to love the mood that this choice gave the animation. It was like animating flat illustrations.”

For more on the process, see the behind the scenes video below. To catch Maruotti’s next project, look for a paper cut stop motion music video called “Black Smoke,” out imminently.