Possible Methods of Animation

So far, I seem to have only come across stop motion animation using photographs that have inspired me, before I become to closed minded and focus down this particular route I would like to have a look at some other techniques and methods that I could use, such as a flip book, white board style animation, computerised methods and so on.

Below are a few examples of these methods, particularly ones that inspired me and that I could see being used for my storyboard concept, once I have finished my storyboard I intend to try several methods in order to chose my final method...

Flip book

I really like the concept of this, and think it could possibly work for the animation of my character, however it is a very common and maybe over used form of animation and I feel I would like to use something I am less familiar with.

Clay:

This method would lend itself to all different shapes and sizes of characters, it would also mean the use of a variety of colours and means I could create any props that I wanted. It would also be a lot easier to create the bird swooping in etc than using photographs as it would be impossible to get an actual bird to carry out these actions.

Drawing:

I really really like this concept, so far I have been using a stick man to represent my character, as I am unsure what end form he will take, however this idea looks interesting, and could easily have some colour applied in the background and foreground too. I would like to develop this method further during the next stages after I have completed my story board and narrative to experiment and discover whether or not it could be an end solution.