Interview with

interview withderspici

helen argo

elen Argo is head of commercials and short form fiction at Aardman Animations. She joined in 1998, initially starting in the features department before moving into series work on Creature Comforts. Over the past 15 years she has worked in commercials, creating short form animated and interactive content for advertising agencies and third party brands. Recently, she has produced the half hour Christmas special Robin Robin for Netflix.

Robin Robin is a stop-frame musical animation, directed by its creators Dan Ojari and Mikey Please. When her egg fortuitously rolls into a rubbish dump, Robin is raised by a loving family of mice. But as she grows up, her differences become more apparent. So Robin sets off on the heist to end all heists to prove to her family that she can be a really good mouse – but ends up discovering who she really is.

MakERS

Tell us how the project came about – and Netflix came on board?

HElEn aRGO

Sarah Cox, our executive producer, was at the Annecy Film Festival and Dan and Mikey were there, and pitched the film to her and sang her a song from it. Sarah fell in love with it. She felt it was a real perfect fit for Aardman, with new characters and a classic story. We were also on the lookout to do specials and shorter form storytelling, which is something we used to do a lot. She loved the fact that it is a musical as well. She worked with Dan and Mikey on a pitch package, getting a really good treatment together and also built a maquette of Robin. Then they invited Alexi Wheeler [director of kids and family content EMEA] at Netflix to come to Aardman. They pitched it to him and he loved it. The rest is history.

MakERS

What was it like creating a new character from scratch?

HElEn aRGO

The biggest challenge was that it was completely new IP for Aardman. You can’t underestimate how much time it takes to establish new IP, especially when you’ve been used to working in a familiar world, like Sean the Sheep. Dan and Mikey very much knew that felted puppets was the look they wanted to go for, and the whole environment has a stylized look, with more of graphic feel. There was a lot of R&D with different materials. At one point, we were testing using nappy liners for leaves.

MakERS

What was the shoot like?

HElEn aRGO

It was probably one of the most complex shoots I’ve worked on. If you made Robin in real life bird scale, then the beak would be too small [for talking]. So we had to make Robin bigger, but in a real environment the sets end up being huge. The kitchen set was something like 175% of normal size – it was a huge, oversized kitchen. Across the whole production, it's not sustainable to build sets on that scale – so we had four scales of sets, and three scales of puppets. We ended up with about 55 to 60 sets. Towards the end of the shoot, we were averaging about 10 seconds a week per animator. We also did a lot of in camera effects – it was lovely to go back to almost that old school way of filming where everything's in camera.

MakERS

Who is Robin Robin aimed at?

HElEn aRGO

Aardman pitch their films very much at family audiences. For me, this is a real family film –it is for parents with children, young children. It is also a musical [a new departure for Aardman].

MakERS

How did Covid-19 impact the production?

HElEn aRGO

We started pre-production in May 2019, and shooting in February 2020. [The plan was] for quite an intense shoot up until July and then to deliver to Netflix at the beginning of September for a Christmas 2020 airdate. It was a really tight timeline. Then of course lockdown hit [and so the airdate was moved forward to 2021]. Stopping meant we could have a reset so the directors could really concentrate on the story and the animatic. When we did go back at the end of June / beginning of July, it was a much easier shoot because the directors could focus on the studio floor. When we stopped production we were around 85 crew. Planning for the return to work, with social distancing, we had to be really mindful of numbers. So we decided to reduce the crew and to shoot for longer. So we ended up shooting from July until December 2020.

MakERS

What is the animation market like at the moment?

HElEn aRGO

There’s a real demand for content. I don’t think Aardman has ever been busier. We're doing series, features, specials and short form as well as commercials still. It's really busy, to the point where we struggle to get crew and talent. If there are big stop-frame projects happening in the US, that impact us as well because the talent –whether that's riggers, animators or camera – will move where the big features are.

On the commercial side of our business, we’re getting a lot of scripts that were meant to be live action coming to us because they couldn't shoot it in live action, and asking if we can do it in, say, three weeks. We need a little bit longer! The timelines are so different with animation.

NETFLIX STOp-FRAME

ANIMATION