Claymation so far

so far I have animated about ten seconds of footage of the 30 second advert for sign language what you can see is the opening wave and 45 shown in sign. The animating has been difficult due to the rounded bottoms of the clay hands, I cant flatten them out as the hands will look funny. The solution I had toyed with two possibilities either using extra clay for support or a wire frame to hold them up.

from my first attempt of creating my claymation, I found that their wasn't enough structor in the clay to stay up and support some of the movements with out cracking or breaking apart.

I fabricated some simple wire mesh hand designs to give the clay more support when moulding into different shapes. 

I have found it to be useful in keeping the structor of the hands but when changing the shape it requires more pressure than i expected deforming the hand in certain places resulting in finger and thumb prints in the clay, slowing the process down