Will Vinton, an Academy Award-winning filmmaker who coined the term Claymation to describe the three-dimensional animated clay figures he used in his work, including the wildly popular California Raisins advertising campaign of the 1980s, died Oct. 4 in Portland, Ore. He was 70.

His children announced his death on Facebook. The cause was multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.

While studying architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, Mr. Vinton often used modeling clay in his designs and, inevitably, to sculpt more irregular and irreverent designs with his buddies in his dorm room.

“Sometimes, we made some pretty obscene things out of it,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1987, “but no matter what we did, the clay always came to life.”

After college, Mr. Vinton worked in advertising, then moved to Portland and “started experimenting in my basement with clay animation.”

The painstaking style requires hundreds of changes in the clay figures — which are photographed and spliced together — to create an animated “stop-motion” film. The use of clay figures in film dates at least to the 1930s; the animated character of Gumby was created as a stop-motion clay figure in the 1950s.

“Clay is a natural material for animation,” Mr. Vinton said in 1992. “Clay characters can show a wide range of emotions, and they’re able to transform easily from one shape to another.”

With Bob Gardiner, Mr. Vinton made a seven-minute animated film, “Closed Mondays,” in 1974, about the hallucinatory visions of a drunken man who wanders into an art museum at night. Everything in the film, from the museum walls to the artworks, the central character and the fantasy scenes, was made of clay. “Closed Mondays” won an Oscar for best animated short film.

“Things that we now take for granted with computer graphics, he was doing it with clay 30 years ago,” film historian Jerry Beck told the Oregonian newspaper in 2005.

Mr. Vinton set up a studio in Portland and copyrighted the name Claymation to describe his art form. In 1985, he released a full-length animated feature film, “The Adventures of Mark Twain,” which did poorly in theaters, and he found little success until the California Raisin Advisory Board decided to launch a new advertising campaign.

An advertising agency came up with the idea of having animated raisins dance to a version of the Motown hit “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and hired Mr. Vinton to create the commercials. He and the artists in his studio designed more 25 clay raisins — no two of which looked exactly alike — and spent months animating the first commercial, which aired in 1986. The raisins marched out of a box, singing and dancing in unison along a tabletop like a miniaturized soul group from the ’60s. Other snack foods fainted and collapsed, unable to match the raisins’ slick moves and ineffable sense of cool.