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...one animator may produce three seconds of finished work per day. However, you can fit a lot into three seconds; a character can do and say a lot in just one second.
they’ve asked me…” Actually, I was the only one working in stop-frame animation. So I worked here for two summers, on Morph. Aardman was in its early day, at the top of St. Michaels Hill, with only about three people in the studio. We were also working on Animated Conversations [a series of shorts for BBC4]. Eventually, they invited me to come here and finish my own film; they gave me a corner of their new studios in Wetherell Place in Clifton where I worked until we took temporary accommodation in the old Fyffe’s banana warehouse on the docks. And from there we moved into this place. Stop animation is a slow process; one animator may produce three seconds of finished work per day. However, you can fit a lot into three seconds; a character can do and say a lot in just one second. I did A Grand Day Out [1989: 22m 40s] pretty much on my own, so it’s rather solitary work. A Matter of Loaf and Death [2008: 30m] would have had twenty animators on it, each doing their three seconds a day so at the end of a week you have completed around five minutes of film. At present our team of over 500 people are working on two feature films, including a film using CGI, which I now embrace
as being ‘in the toolbox’. All our main animation is still done in the traditional method; you’re physically in touch with it. But as an example, in A Matter of Loaf and Death, there’s flour dust in every shot; we wouldn’t have been able to do that but now we put it in digitally. And with commercials, we’ve had to go that way. In a feature film, it’s far cheaper to use stopframe animation; with CGI, the processes involved are much bigger, far more people involved, less immediate, with many more stages to go through. Although the crew here has got bigger and bigger, I try to stay ‘hands on’; I still design my own characters and make a maquette of them first. I find it hard to hire a character designer because I want to give it ‘The Look’. I like to think that all the work I put in back in the shed, the bedroom, the attic has spawned an entire generation of stop-animators, who make very good CGI animators. The problem with CGI is that if you are not constantly in control of it – whipping it into shape – the computer can simply work out movement mathematically, in a completely soulless way. Although I have come a long way from my early ‘studios’ it’s a delight to be working here in this modern complex, part of what is in effect, a cottage industry. art
Autumn 2011
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