This book made available by the Internet Archive.

•m

foreword

Nick Park
Gromit reacts in terror at his first sighting of the mysterious Techno
Trousers in The Wrong Trousers (1993), directed by Nick Park.

I wish this book had been written in the Seventies when I was a
teenager and started experimenting with animation and making my
first movies. I did not meet another animator or even anyone with a
vague knowledge of the technique, for years. My early experience in
animation was therefore a solitary one; a case of guesswork and trial
and error. I felt that everyone else must be 'doing it right', and there
must be something very obvious that everyone else knew about that I
was not doing. I scoured old library books and movie magazines for
any scraps of information, but found very little.

Later I met Peter Lord and David Sproxton whose work I had long
admired.Through them and Aardman Animations I met more of our
species, and was surprised to find that they had all felt similarly
isolated and had worked through experimentation either at college or
on the kitchen table.

This book is an inspiration that provides insights into a world that can
seem mysterious and out of reach for the aspiring animator. It is also a
thoroughly good nose-around ihe processes of traditional 3-D
animation for those enthusiasts who like to know about these
things.This is the book that I always wanted to read but could not ...
because it had not been written.

!■

«*!

y
3

introduction

introduction

Peter Lord

Peter Lord with his character Adam. Released in 1991, Adam won
Aardman an Oscar nomination.

I began animating as a hobby, when I was a teenager, almost thirty

years ago. And though it has now become my career, it has never
stopped being a hobby. Other boys of my age were spending their
leisure time building model aircraft, or recording train numbers, or
sitting on river banks awaiting the appearance of fish. But Fate led me
to animation. Fate in the shape of my best friend's Dad, who owned a
cine camera.

I met Dave Sproxton, my partner at Aardman, when we were both

twelve. We sat at adjoining desks at Woking Grammar School for Boys.
His father worked for the BBC as a producer of religious programmes
and was also a keen photographer. Like many a producer in those
days, and probably to the despair of the Film Union, Vernon Sproxton
was not averse to shooting some of his own material if he could get
away with it. So he owned a cine camera, a clockwork 16mm Bolex,
which was the key factor in our decision to become animators. Along
with access to the camera, Dave picked up his father's enthusiasm for
photography and an understanding of how films are made. It is
significant that Nick Park grew up in a similar environment. His father
was a professional photographer who had also dabbled in film-
making. He had even done a little bit of animation. So in Nick's family
too there was always a cine camera about the place. In both
households, film-making was made to seem possible and accessible,
even normal.

So we had access to the camera; and one rainy day, probably

encouraged by his father, Dave and I experimented with animation. In
the great tradition of British amateurism our first film was made on
the kitchen table. Only later, after we had served our apprenticeship,
did we advance to the spare room.The camera was mounted on a
developing stand pointing straight downwards at the table, and our
first piece of animation was achieved by drawing a chalk figure on a
blackboard, shooting a frame, then rubbing out part of the figure,
redrawing it in a new position and shooting another frame. And so on.
At the time it seemed painstaking, but compared to some of our
subsequent experiences in animation, that first film was a high-speed,
spontaneous affair.

We did not launch into animation entirely unprepared. We had seen

documentaries about the world of cartoons, and heard how Disney and
Hanna Barbera made films with thousands of separate drawings on
acetate sheets, but we had no access to the techniques or the materials
to shoot this sort of 'traditional' animation. We made up the chalk
technique quite independently, to suit our circumstances, though I
now know that like so much else in the world of animation it had all
been done before - much of it ninety years ago or more!

J-

introduction

The original Aardman, a eel sequence featuring an inept figure with a

costume based on Superman.
In a matter of hours we became bored with chalk animation, and tried
a different technique: cut-outs. We cut pictures out of magazines,
crudely cutting off their limbs so they could be animated as separate
elements. We had discovered one of the quicker and simpler forms of
animation. Our first 'film' consisted of several experiments like this. It
was simply a string of animated events, lasting for a couple of minutes.
We had no story to tell, no ideas to convey, it was strictly stream of
consciousness. We called it Trash - not knowing that Andy Warhol had
already used the name. It took only a couple of days to complete -
although at the time that seemed a pretty mammoth effort - and for
the first but not the last time we observed that animation was a slow
process. When the developed film came back from the laboratory, we
showed it in the living room to our assembled families, with a record
on the hi-fi as an accompaniment. And we loved it. We thought it was
great. We experienced that sense of magic which happily you never
lose, and which I believe is unique to animation.The day-to-day
business of animation is usually slow, repetitive and painstaking - and
seldom particularly funny. But when it is all over, when the
performance is finished, and the hard work mostly forgotten, then you
see the result and bingo! - it's alive!

We followed Trash with a film called Godzilla. Naturally it had no

giant lizards in

it. It was a similar mix of techniques: cut-outs, chalky, swirly

transformations

which used the properties of chalk to blur and soften and drag out a
line, and

a couple of 3-D objects, like toy cars, thrown in for

good measure.Though I have not seen either film

for twenty years, I assume it was an improvement

on Trash. When you are just starting out in

animation, you learn really fast. Every new

completed piece is a revelation. Only when your

film is returned from the lab can you see what you

have done, for better or worse. Only then can you

find out how bad your timing is, how clumsily your

drawings move, how insignificant one-twelfth of a

second can be.

Shortly after this, Dave's Dad arranged for us to show our work to a
producer at the BBC. Patrick Dowling produced the 'Vision On' series,
which was

The studio during the early years - when the entire modelmaking
department was confined to a single table.

introduction

'Cracking toast, Gromit!' Wallace and Gromit at the breakfast table in

A Grand Doy Out (1989).
specifically designed for deaf children. It was a great programme -
imaginative, brave, technically innovative and stimulating for those
with hearing as well as the deaf because it presented visual
information in an intelligent and surprising way. The outcome of our
first meeting was that PD, as we called him - everyone knew that TV
execs were known by their initials - gave us a 100ft roll of film to
experiment with. In the late 1960s this precious roll of unexposed
negative probably represented the BBC's total investment in new
animation talent.

We filled that roll with tests and experiments - some chalk animation,
a eel sequence (the original Aardman film), some pixillation (where
human beings are treated as animation puppets), and a couple of
sequences where we experimented with Plasticine (modelling clay). In
one of these, we made a low-relief Plasticine model of a cottage - a
crude, childlike thing, I recall. As before, the camera was directly
above, looking down on to the model. Under the camera it
metamorphosed, as only Plasticine can, into a low-relief model of an
elephant. Not the world's greatest storyline, I agree.The BBC showed
no inclination to buy this piece, or to commission more, but for me a
seea was sown. I had tried this new malleable medium and found it
strangely attractive. It took another couple of years for the technique
and the storylines to evolve, but our animation future was going to be
in three dimensions.

In fact what the BBC did buy was the Aardman sequence. It was a
piece of conventional eel animation, and I remember it as the most
'professional' piece on the roll. Aardman is a character that I originally
drew in a strip cartoon. He

II

introduction

Today the Aardman studio plays host to a growing number of talented

filmmakers. Here Jeff Newitt acts out the facial expressions of his
character while animating him for Loves Me ... Loves Me Not (1992).

was based on Superman - in costume, at any rate -with a jutting chin, a

cape and a large letter 'A' on his chest. He became the star of our first
eel animation, though we left the letter 'A' off his chest, because it took
too long to draw.

In his first animated appearance Aardman is walking past, as I recall, a

background of brown wrapping paper. He has a goofy walk: legs bent,
leaning well back, his arms not swinging but hanging straight by his
sides. As he walks, he approaches a cartoon 'hole' - the classic black
ellipse on the ground. He stops, sticks out a foot and taps the ellipse. It
seems solid. He walks on, right over the 'hole', quite unharmed. One
step later, he falls through the ground, down an invisible hole. After a
pause, his hand emerges from the ground, feels around, finds the
ellipse and pulls it over himself.Then he climbs out and walks off.

That may not be a gripping read, but it was good enough to get bought
- and for £ 15 or so. This was the moment when, faced with a
'purchased programme' agreement and a cheque from the BBC, we
opened a bank account in the name of Aardman Animations. I
remember discussing the merits of'Dave and Pete Productions' and
numerous other possibilities, but Aardman it was.

Two schoolboys picked a name, little dreaming that it would hang

around so long. Now, all those years later the name no longer stands
for a couple of enthusiastic schoolboy filmmakers; now we are a
company running our own film studio. But the impulse that drives us
is still the same. We want to make films, though the reasons why have
evolved over the years. Initially, it was terribly simple: two young men
making short animated films to amuse themselves, for the pleasure of
creation, for the pleasure of communication, to show off, to do
something a little different, to get a laugh, to affect people we had
never met. Later, as Aardman got bigger and more established, we
discovered that we were not just individuals whistling in the dark but
part of a scattered and formless community of film-makers in Britain
and worldwide.

Then the approval of our peers became important. Suddenly a film was
more

introduction

than just a story told for a few friends, or broadcast

to a large unresponsive audience. It became like a

public statement, or a brick in the wall of something

much larger and oddly noble: The World of

Animation'. Later on the game changed again as we

started to employ people, who made their own

films which did not come from Dave and me but

were Aardman films. Nick Park is the most famous

of the film-makers who have joined us in this way.

Then the source of pleasure changed slightly. From

being entirely selfish, it became broader: from look-

at-me to look-at-us. It was rather like becoming a

parent. Before you become a parent, life is more or

less selfish.Then, when you have kids, you start to

live through them to some extent - for good or ill - enjoying their
triumphs

and sharing their defeats.

When we were just a two-man partnership life, or at any rate business,

was simple. But now we are a company and companies operate to a
different logic and end up with a different agenda, viz to make money.
Of course, it is a good idea for companies to be profitable, but if that is
the reason you are in the business of animation, I do not believe you
will ever make the best films. Aardman does make money, happily, but
it is not what interests or motivates us. It is certainly not why we make
films.

The big pleasure for me at this stage in Aardman's evolution is the

feeling I sometimes get - not every day, it is true - of being in a
community of artists. I love being among dozens of creative people,
under one roof, generating ideas. discussing them, interacting, being
influenced and affected by each other.The studios too are an exciting
place, the product of twenty years of growth and change. Ever since
the old days of the kitchen table, we have steadily invested in people
and equipment; and as we have met other specialists in our tiny field
we have learnt new techniques, tricks and practices which have
changed our way of working. Some of the ways we work are standard
film-industry practice, some we have learned from other animation
studios, some are derived from the theatre and many have simply
evolved on site.Technology, culture and working practice have slowly
accumulated like a coral reef, or like a junk pile, if you prefer. All that
knowledge has been built up by trial and error and by word of mouth
over the last twenty years. How often we wished in the early days that
some predecessor of ours had written a book like this, to pass on the
precious information.

Scene from Peter Lord's medieval fantasy Wat's Pig (1996).

k
~ >!!

the medium

the medium

Srian Sibley

Steve Box animates the fleeing Penguin in the staircase sequence of

The Wrong Trousers (1993).

My aim in this section is to provide an independent view of the history

of animated films, covering both drawn (2-D) and model (3-D)
animation, and to set the work of Aardman Animations in the broader
context of a way of making films that began in the 1890s. One of the
earliest films that Peter Lord and Dave Sproxton created for'Vision
On', the BBC television series for deaf children, shows a human hand
flattening and shaping a ball of clay that then takes on animated life.
First a tiny hand and then an arm reach up out of the clay, then
another hand and arm emerge, followed by the head and torso of a
man, who presses down on the edges of his clay prison, trying to haul
himself up and pull himself free.Then the human hand appears again,
seizes the man and wrenches him - fully formed - from the clay.This
little being, made from the very stuff of the earth itself, looks towards
his creator, sits down and assumes the position of The Thinker ...

The creation myth is very old and is found, with variations, in many
different cultures and faiths. As a symbolic picture, explaining not just
the origin of man but also the source of man's creativity, it has
provided a recurrent image for artists down the centuries and, in
particular, for the work of the three-dimensional animator. Peter Lord,
for example, returned to the idea in his 1991 Oscar-nominated film
Adam, in which the relationship between an animator and his clay
became an amusing analogy for the relationship between God and
Man.

But first things first: what is 3-D animation? Most forms of animated
film-making achieve their effect through essentially flat images either
drawn on eels (transparent sheets which can be overlaid on
background paintings and then photographed), or possibly painted on
glass or directly on to the film. A three-dimensional animator,
however; works with articulated puppets or with models built around
a metal, moveable 'skeleton' called an armature, and made of
Plasticine (modelling clay), fabric or latex. Occasionally, the 3-D
animator will work with cut-outs, and he often uses his skills to give
animated life to a bizarre range of inanimate objects from a bra to a
burger.

All film, of course, is essentially an optical illusion, a trick of the eye,

known as 'persistence of vision'.The human eye retains an image for a
fraction of a second after seeing it. Therefore, if in that small time-
space - an image can be substituted by another, slightly different,
image then movement appears to occur What you are really seeing
when you look at a cinema screen is not a moving picture but a series
of still pictures shown in such rapid succession - at 24 frames every
second - that your eye is deceived.

&

Capturing the dynamics of action: a Greek image of chariot racing

from the 6th century BC.

The essential difference between live-action and animated film-

making is that the live-action camera captures a scene moving in real
time, automatically 'freezing' it into separate still pictures, which can
then be projected on to a screen. For the animated film-maker;
however, nothing exists to be filmed until it is created and put in front
of the camera. Using drawings, models or, increasingly nowadays,
computer imagery, the animator creates every single frame of film
from scratch. In a live-action film, there is nothing hidden between
one frame and the next, whereas the space between every frame of an
animated film represents a complex series of creative actions which, if
the film is well made, will be undetectable to the audience.

Not only must characters and settings be designed, but decisions must
also be taken about what movement will be involved in a scene and the
kind of shot -perhaps a close-up or a long-shot - that will be used. So,
whilst animation is a highly creative medium, it is weighed down by
time-consuming processes which require the successful animator to
have vision, vast quantities of patience and a sustained belief in the
film that is being made.

There is also a major difference between drawn and model animation,

as Peter Lord explains:'Drawn animation is a process that develops in
a very controlled, measurable way. When your character is walking (or
jumping or flying) from A to B, you start by drawing position A and
position B, the key positions, and then you systematically draw all the
positions in between - the animation. But in puppet animation, when
you set off from position A you do not know where B is, because you
have not got there yet (like real life, come to think of it). So

the medium

every single stage of a movement is an experiment, or even an

adventure. You have this idea of where you are heading, but no
certainty of getting there ..."

The desire to animate is as old as art itself.The early

man who drew pictures on his cave wall depicting

spear-waving hunters in pursuit of a wild boar

attempted to convey the illusion of movement by

showing the beast with multiple legs.The vases of ancient Greece with
their

gods and heroes, and the friezes of Rome with their battling warriors
and

galloping steeds, also sought to capture, in static images, the dynamics

of action.

Stories of pictures that came to life can be found in folklore and fairy-
tale, but

it was not until the 19th century - in the years leading up to the
invention of

the motion picture - that animated pictures became a real possibility

Among the many pioneers in Europe and America who explored ways
of capturing images of real life, and attempted to analyse and replicate
movement, were Britain's William Henry Fox Talbot, who devised a
photographic method for recording the images of the 'camera obscura',
and English-born American, Eadweard Muybridge, who, in 1872,
began producing a series of studies of human and animal life,
photographed in front of a plain, calibrated backdrop. The
photographs, shot every few seconds, revealed what the human eye
cannot register: the true complexity involved in the mechanics of
physical locomotion.
Muybridge's baseball hitter, who served as a model for the animated
sequence shown on pages 138-139.

A photographic sequence by Eadweard Muybridge, whose 19th-

century experiments have been of priceless help to later generations of
animators.

2rs

The Phenakistiscope, invented in 1832 by Joseph Plateau. When the

picture disc is spun, a viewer looking through the slots sees continuous
movement. In other versions the slots and pictures are combined on a
single disc, and viewed in conjunction with a mirror.

In I 880, Muybndge conducted one of his most sophisticated

experiments when he photographed a running horse using 24 still
cameras set up alongside a race track and triggered by a series of trip-
wires. Muybndge's photographs of horses, dogs and the naked human
form would become an indispensable aid to later generations of
animators. Indeed, while Peter Lord was working on some of the
models shown in this book, such as the baseball player on pages I 38-1
39, Muybndge's book was a constant source of reference.

Experimentation with photographic and optical techniques led to

various devices such as the Stereoscope, which used two slightly
different photographic images to create the illusion of 3-D pictures,
and sophisticated magic-lantern slides on which parts of the picture
could be made to move: a ship tossing on a stormy sea, a rat running
into the open mouth of a sleeping man.

There were also a number of popular optical toys, designed to recreate

the illusion of life.The earliest, and simplest, devised in 1825 by Dr
John Ayrton Paris, was theThaumatrope: a disc of card with a picture
of a bird on one side and a bird-cage on the other. Strings attached to
either side of the disc were twisted tight and held taut; then, when the
tension on the strings was released, the disc spun so fast that the bird
appeared to be inside the bird-cage.

Seven years later, Joseph Plateau, a physicist from Belgium, invented

the Phenakistiscope, a disc fixed to a handle (rather like a child's
windmill toy) so that it could spin freely. Around its perimeter the disc
had a series of drawn figures in various stages of movement, separated
by slots.The disc was held up to a mirror and spun, while the viewer
looked through the slots and saw -reflected in the mirror - a running
horse, a leaping acrobat or some other moving miracle.

William George Horner of Britain was the first to attempt to create

moving images for more than one viewer. He devised the Zoetrope, in
which spectators looked through slots in a fast-moving drum at a
continuous strip of drawings arranged around the inside.The speed
with which the drum revolved blurred the slots into a 'window' and
gave life to the static pictures. For variety, the strips of drawings could
be changed, but the sequences were limited and repetitious - a dog
jumping through a hoop, or a clown's nose endlessly growing and
shrinking.

The Praxinoscope, a drum viewer.The images on the perimeter of the

drum are reflected in a mirror as they flash past the viewer's eyes.
the medium

It was due to a visionary Frenchman, Emile Reynaud, that the

evolution of the animated film took two major steps forward.The first
of these, invented in 1877, was the Praxmoscope, a sophisticated
development of the Zoetrope, which enabled viewers to watch the
moving pictures as they turned past the eye on a rotating drum.

Reynaud, who was a painter of lantern-slides, spent the next fifteen

years improving his device until he found a method of combining the
illusion created by the Zoetrope with the

projected images seen at the magic-lantern show.The Theatre

Praxinoscope, as it was called, used light and mirrors to show a limited
cycle of moving figures against a projected background on what looked
like the stage of a toy theatre. Reynaud then further refined his device
into the Theatre Optique, first demonstrated at the Musee Grevin,
Pans, in I 892.This elaborate machine simultaneously projected
'moving pictures' and backgrounds on to the same screen.The shows,
entitled 'Pantomimes Lumineuses', were not limited to the short cycles
of action seen on a Praxinoscope but lasted up to fifteen minutes and
comprised some 500 pictures on a transparent strip of gelatin.
Although the mechanism had to be turned by hand (a laborious
process for the operator), Reynaud's equipment anticipated various
cinematic devices including the film-spool and sprocket-holes for
moving the pictures on while, at the same time, keeping them in focus.
Interestingly, Reynaud used drawings rather than photographic
images, and every subsequent animated film using line animation -
from Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse to the Rugrats and the Simpsons
- is a successor to the moving pictures that he created.

Reynaud's 'films' were simple - sometimes mildly saucy - tales mainly

concerned with love and rivalry: a young lady at a seaside resort goes
into a beach hut to change into her bathing costume, unaware that a
peeping torn is watching her through the door.The cad is eventually
given the boot by a young man vvho is then rewarded for his gallantry
by being allowed to accompany the young lady on a swim. Audiences
were amazed and delighted by these moving drawings, but rapid
developments quickly provided new entertainments that were to
upstage Reynaud's Theatre Optique.

Experiments by Etienne-Jules Marey in France,Thomas Edison in

America and William Friese-Greene and Mortimer Evans in Britain
resulted in coin-in-the-slot 'box-projectors' showing acrobatics, ballet
and boxing matches, slapstick

Emile Reynaud and his Theatre Optique, which projected 'moving

pictures' and backgrounds on to the same screen.

3P\

t: .

SB
The rocket lands on the eye of the Moon, from Georges Melies's
fantasy film Voyoge to the Moon (l902).Many of the visual tricks
employed in this film were achieved by stopping the film, altering the
image and photographing the new scene.This later became one of the
basic techniques of 3-D animation films.

comedy routines or saucy fan dancers.The popularity of such

entertainments was eventually eclipsed by the invention of a device
that was to change the culture of the world for ever - the
Cinematographe.

It was in I 895, just three years after Emile Reynaud showed his
Theatre Optique, that two French brothers, Auguste and Louis
Lumiere, presented the first authentic demonstration of what we now
think of as cinema.There was nothing particularly sophisticated about
the Lumieres' first films - workers leaving a factory, a baby being
spoon-fed, a tram entering a station - but to those early audiences they
were nothing short of miraculous. Indeed, when the railway engine
rushed towards the camera, billowing clouds of smoke and steam,
some patrons were so startled by the realism that they fled the theatre
before the engine could run them down!

Emile Reynaud's presentations of moving drawings had been

superseded.The Lumiere brothers were offering audiences not
characters from a toy-theatre, but images of real people. However
since the appeal of mere novelty tends to be short-lived, the time soon
came when audiences ceased to be astonished at the moving picture's
ability to hold a mirror up to life and began to demand

the medium

stones.The fledgling film-makers responded not just with dramas,

comedies and romances but also with fantasies. And there was one
fantasy film-maker in particular who made a discovery of vital
importance to the technique of film animation.

The films of Georges Melies grew out of his childhood love of

marionettes and toy theatres combined with an adult fascination with
conjuring. Describing himself as 'a great amateur of the magical art',
Melies was an accomplished stage-illusionist who saw the new
medium of cinema as a natural extension of his magical arts with their
transformations, metamorphoses and mysterious appearances and
disappearances.The sources for his fantastical films were fairy stories,
popular tales and the science-fiction sagas of fellow-Frenchman Jules
Verne. He also recreated various classics of magic in which the
conventional skills of the magician were replaced by trick
photography.

Curiously, the technique enabling Melies to transform a girl into a

butterfly, or make a woman vanish and replace her with a skeleton,
was discovered by accident: The camera I was using in the beginning
(a rudimentary affair in which the film would tear or would often
refuse to move) produced an unexpected effect one day [in I 896]
when I was photographing very prosaically the Place de I'Opera. It
took a minute to release the film and get the camera going again.
During this minute, the people, buses and vehicles had, of course,
moved. Projecting the film, having joined the break, I suddenly saw a
Madeleine-Bastille omnibus changed into a hearse and men into
women.The trick of substitution, called stop action, was discovered,
and two days later I made the first metamorphoses of men into women
and the first sudden disappearances which had a big success ...'

Although this camera trick had first been used a year earlier in
America to create a compelling illusion in the Edison Kinetoscope
film, The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (in which, just before the
executioner's axe fell, a dummy was substituted for the actress playing
the Queen), Melies was unquestionably the first European film-maker
to discover this technique independently. He then use it to great effect.

Stop action (or stop motion) enabled Melies to create astonishing

visua, illusions in such trick-film masterpieces as Voyage to the Moon
(1902), and it subsequently became the standard technique by which,
over the decades, many cinema special effects were achieved. 1 do not
hesitate to say' wrote Melies in 1907,'that in cinematography it is today
possible to realise the most impossible and the most improbable
things'Whilst the basic film technique of animation is universal - film
an image, stop the camera, alter the image, film it, stop the camera
and alter the image again - the animated film has employed a diversity

&\

the medium

of media with which to create its illusions of life. The most popular has
been drawn animation, probably because of the important link
between storytelling and illustration, the heritage of cartoonists and
caricaturists and the visual impact of graphic design in advertising.

The history of line animation is fascinating but, in this book, must be

briefly told. In 1906, J Stuart

Blackton, a Briton who settled in America and who was to make trick-
films with various media (including, as we shall see, puppets and clay
models), produced a film entitled Humorous Phases of Funny Faces,
inspired by a then-popular stage entertainment. One of the speciality
acts seen at tum-of-the-century vaudeville shows was the 'Lightning
Sketch' artist who created rapid pictures and portraits, sometimes
undergoing a comic metamorphosis. Blackton recreated this effect on
film with faces drawn on a chalkboard which were then brought to life
with amusing results, as when smoke from a gentleman's cigar billows
across the smiling face of a lady and leaves her scowling. Blackton's
process of drawing a picture, photographing it, rubbing part of it out
and then redrawing it was the most basic use of the stop-motion
technique.

A similar process was used, in 1908, by the Parisian caricaturist and

film-maker Emile Cohl in Fantasmagorie.Tbe adventures of a little
clown, drawn as a rudimentary stick figure, used some two thousand
drawings and ran for under two minutes. What made Fantasmagorie
memorable was the bizarre, dreamlike transformations: a champagne
bottle changing into a pineapple which then becomes a tree, while an
elephant turns into a house.There were many artists who advanced
animation such as the brilliant American cartoonist, Winsor McCay,
whose comic newspaper strip 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' (which
frequently had the appearance of being a series of film frames) became
an animated picture in 1911 and was followed, three years later, by
Gertie the Trained Dinosaur. This interactive entertainment allowed
the real Winsor McCay to 'converse' with the on-screen Gertie. At the
end of the show, McCay would walk off-stage and reappear as a
diminutive animated figure in his own cartoon.

Raoul Barre, whose film series 'The Animated Grouch Chasers'

featured a caricature album that came to life, was responsible for
several significant technical developments such as registration holes in
animation paper, to stop the drawings from wobbling when filmed.
Barre also devised a simple method for cutting down the time-
consuming process in which not just the characters but also the
backgrounds had to be redrawn for every single frame of film. Barre's
solution was to draw a single background picture and then animate on

Chalk animation by J Stuart Blackton in Humorous Phases of Funny

Faces (1906). Blackton drew his image on a blackboard, photographed
it, then erased it, or at least took out the 'moving' part, then drew in
the next phase.

the medium

Scene from Gertie the Trained Dinosaur (1914) by Winsor McCay, an

interactive show in which the artist appeared live on stage and as an
animated character in the film.

pieces of paper that had been carefully cut so as not to obscure the
setting.

It was JR Bray (creator of the comic character Colonel Heeza Liar)

who came up with the idea of drawing the backgrounds on sheets of
celluloid and placing them on top of the animation drawings.This
served until Earl Hurd refined the process by animating his characters
on sheets of celluloid that were positioned over painted
backgrounds.This technique, pioneered in Hurd's 'Bobby Bump'
series, remained (until the recent introduction of computer
technology) the standard procedure throughout the industry.

The scene was now set for the emerging talents of a group of artists
who would dominate tne early years of film animation.They included
Pat Sullivan (creator of Felix the Cat) and his collaborator Otto
Mesmer; Dave Fleischer (responsible for the 'Out of the Inkwell'
series); Paul Terry ('Aesop's Fabies'); Walter Lantz (Dinky Doodle and,
later Woody Woodpecker), and the man who created Mickey Mouse,
introduced sound and then colour to the animated film, pioneered
feature animation and whose name eventually became a synonym for
the cartoon film - Walt Disney.

The development of three-dimensional animation is less easily charted

since it employed two distinct techniques - one using puppets, the
other clay models -each of which went through a particular
evolutionary process. In outlining the history of these two traditions, it
should be understood that many of the animators whose films will be
discussed worked in more than one medium.

One such was J Stuart Blackton who, with his partner Albert E Smith,
had used stop-motion photography to create startling effects in his
1907 live-action film The Haunted Hotel and, the following year,
produced what is claimed as the first stop-motion puppet film, The
Humpty Dumpty Circus. This film, now lost, used jointed wood toys of
animals and circus performers belonging to Smith's daughter, which
were posed and then photographed. Looking back, years later, on the
making of this film, Smith recalled: 'It was a tedious process in as
much as the movement could be achieved only by photographing
separately each position. I suggested we obtain a patent on the
process. Blackton felt it wasn't important enough. However, others
quickly borrowed the technique. improving upon it greatly'

A rival claimant for having-made the first puppet animated film is the
British film-maker Arthur

23

1*

A child' Dreams Arthur

s toys come to life in ofToy/ond(l908)by Melbourne Cooper.

Melbourne Cooper. Among Cooper's earliest experiments with stop-

motion photography was Matches: An Appeal, a film of'moving
matchsticks' made in 1899 for the match manufacturer Bryant & May
and probably the world's first animated commercial. For his
entertainment films, Arthur Cooper looked for inspiration to the
nursery toy cupboard, producing such titles as Noah's Ark (1906) and
Dreams ofToyland (1908), in which a child is given various toys,
including a teddy bear and a little wooden horse, and then falls asleep
and dreams that the toys come to life. Although Cooper's method of
filming outdoors with sunlight had its drawbacks - the combination of
the stop-motion process and the earth's rotation produced strange,
flickering shadows - he went on to make other successful films on
similar themes, including Cinderella and Wooden Athletes (both 1912)
and The Toymaker's Dream (1913).

The 'toys come to life' was a recurrent scenario with early animators
partly because toys (particularly ones with jointed limbs) made good
actors and because the idea connected with a strong European literary
tradition of stories about living toys. A typical example - which also
incorporated the popular dream device - is Italian film-maker
Giovanni Pastrone's film The War and the Dream of Momi (19 I 3), in
which an old man tells his young grandson, Momi, tales of war Falling
asleep, Momi dreams of a dramatic battle between puppets, during
which he gets spiked by one of the soldier's bayonets.The boy wakes to
discover that the weapon was in fact only a rose-thorn.

Children's dreams and animated toys figure prominently in the films

of the pioneering puppet animator, Ladislaw Starewich. In The Magic
C/ock(l928), automata figures of kings, princesses, knights and
dragons, decorating a fantastical clock, come alive and embark on an
adventure which is not controlled by clockwork. Another Love in Black
and White (1927), concerns an accident-prone travelling showman
whose puppet BHHHKP^HMHDB performers include likenesses of
Hollywood stars Tj& Tom Mix, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin.

Born to a Polish-Lithuanian family in 1882, Starewich had a passion

for drawing and sculpture and was interested in photography, magic
lanterns and early Jig attempts at film animation such as Emile Cohl's
1908 film The Animated Matches, which he saw when it was screened
in Russia. Starewich was also fascinated by entomology and it was
while studying (and attempting to photograph) insect life that he
decided to adopt the stop-motion technique used in Emil Cohl's
film:'In the mating season, beetles

the medium

Charlie Chaplin is one of several Hollywood-inspired performers in

Love in Black and White (1927) by Ladislaw Starewich, the pioneering
puppet animator.

fight.Their jaws remind one of deers' horns. I wished to film them but,
since their fighting is nocturnal, the light I used would freeze them
into total immobility. By using embalmed beetles, I reconstructed the
different phases of that tight, frame by frame, with progressive
changes; more than five hundred frames for thirty seconds of
projection.The results surpassed my hopes: Luconus Cervus (1910, 10
metres long), the first three-dimensional animated film ...'

Within a year, Starewich had produced a more ambitious film.

Entitled The Beautiful Leukanida, it was 250 metres long and told how
the beautiful beetle, Elena, became the subject of a duel between two
rival insect suitors.The film was widely acclaimed and audiences were
astonished, and mystified, by Starewich's photography. Many people
found the film totally inexplicable, and journalists in London
confidently revealed that Starewich had filmed living insects that had
been carefully trained by a Russian scientist! It is small wonder that
such theories were put forward, since Starewich's animation of his
spindly-limbed characters was extraordinarily accomplished.

Starewich's cast of insect characters appeared in a series of modern

fables, among them The Cameraman's Revenge (191 I) which featured
such tiny miracles as a grasshopper on a bicycle and a dragonfly ballet
dancer. Perhaps because they take the viewer into a secret world, these
films are as amusing and ingenious as when they were made eighty
years ago. In 1919, Starewich moved to Paris, adopted a French
spelling of his name - Ladislas Starevitch -and, for a time, occupied a
studio formerly used by Georges Melies.

25

!h

the medium

The country lad and the sophisticated urbanite in one of Ladislaw

Starewich's animal fables, Town Rot, Country Rat (1926).

Recognising that the characters in his insect films were limited by

their lack of facial expressions, Starewich began making puppets of
mammal characters for such films as Town Rat, Country Rat (1926)
and his elaborate feature-length film, The Tale of the Fox, which he
began working on in 1925 and completed five years later but which
was not released until 1938.

The Tale of the Fox, an episodic story based on the fables of La

Fontaine, features the exploits of a cunning Fox who is forever tricking
the other animals - particularly a slow-witted Wolf.There is also a Lion
King and his Lioness Queen as well as a wily Badger who acts as
defence counsel when charges are brought against the Fox by assorted
chickens, ravens, and rabbits. Although the animals in Starewich's
films wear human clothes, in the style of a thousand book illustrations,
they seem more like human characters in animal masks. Starewich
crams every scene with characters and activity: frogs sing, mice dance
and birds flutter among the trees.The physical animation is
exceptional: when the fox schemes, his eyes narrow and his lip curls in
a sinister sneer, and when a feline troubadour serenades the Queen,
Her Majesty closes her eyes in ecstasy and we see the royal breast
heaving with emotion.

In The Mascot (1934), Starewich returned to toys with a live-action

story about

a poor toy-maker whose daughter is feverish and asking for the

impossible - a

cool, juicy orange. Duffy, a toy puppy-dog, hears and notes her
request.The

following day, the toys stage an escape from the van that is taking
them to

market and Duffy sets off to find an orange. Duffy

succeeds in his mission, but among his adventures

in the real world - represented by intercutting with

live-action - is a nightmarish episode in which he

finds himself in a sinister backstreet underworld

ruled by a Devil doll and inhabited by goblins,

insects and reptiles, anthropomorphic turnips,

carrots and hair-brushes, a motheaten stuffed

monkey, a gruesome mummified character with

trailing bandages and the animated skeletons of

chickens and fish. At the conclusion of this scary HSh^^JP **

sequence, the Devil bursts open and collapses into

a heap of sawdust.

An eccentric restaging of Lewis Carroll's mad tea-party in Jan

Svankmajer's Alice (1987).

the medium

In its more bizarre and beastly moments, The Mascot foreshadows the
films, three decades later of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer. In his
film Alice (1987), a skeletal fish and a small animal skull with doll's
eyes and tiny human legs travel m a coach pulled by white cockerels
with skulls instead of heads.

From his first film, The LastTrick (1964), Svankmajer brought to the
cinema the theatrical skills of masks and puppets, combining them
with film animation techniques using clay, models, cut-outs and
inanimate objects conjured into life with a sharply focused surreal
imagination that is endlessly startling. Svankmajer's films play on
universal phobias: dark cellars and empty houses; dead things - such
as an ox's tongue - that look uncomfortably human; and dangerous
things such as nails, scissors and broken glass. His subject matter flies
in the face of social taboos, linking food, death and sex, pain and
pleasure in shocking, unforgettable imagery

Film titles such as J 'abberwocky (1971), The Fall of the House of

Usher (1981) and

27

Homunculus figure in Jan Svankmajer's treatment of Faust (1994).

Svankmajer achieves haunting effects in his films with his mixtures of
live action and animation.

J*

the medium

The Brothers Quay, Stephen and Timothy, on the set of Street of

Crocodiles (1986). The original films of these two Americans bear the
influence of both Jan Svankmajer and the Eastern European puppet
tradition.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1983) reveal two of the major influences on
Svankmajer - Lewis Carroll and_ Edgar Allan Poe - and reflect his
fascination with dream states: those uncertain regions where reality
and unreality are excitingly - and often frighteningly - blurred; states
of mind where a pile of old shoes, their soles coming adrift from the
uppers, become a pack of snapping dogs, or where a stuffed rabbit can
sew up a gaping seam to prevent the sawdust from spilling out.

Svankmajer's films often combine animation with live action, as in

Alice and his other feature Foust (1994), but whether pixillating live
actors or manipulating china dolls, joints of uncooked meat or, in
Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), two lumps of deathly-grey clay which
form themselves into heads and then eat and regurgitate one another,
Svankmajer is an undaunted renegade of animation art.

A compelling animated documentary on Svankmajer's work, The

Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer: Prague's Alchemist of Film, was made in
1984 by Stephen and Timothy Quay, twin brothers born in
Philadelphia, USA, but working primarily in Britain. The Brothers
Quay, as they are known, owe much to Svankmajer's inspiration and
their films, which include Nocturna artificialia (1979) and Street of
Crocodiles (1986), present a complex vision of a dusty, decaying world
where the overpowering feeling is one of claustrophobia and
Kafkaesque confusion. For all their originality, the Quay brothers'
films acknowledge the Eastern European heritage of puppet film-
making, a tradition which itself springs from the long and
distinguished heritage of the puppet theatre.

That heritage was the motivating force behind many of the earliest
puppet films which - although now virtually unknown or seldom seen -
were hailed in their day as being innovative cinema. The New Gulliver
(1935) by the Russian animator, Alexander Ptushko, features another
dream story in which a boy falls asleep over a copy of Gulliver's
Travels. Ptushko's film includes scenes filmed in the camera (as
opposed to being created through optical techniques in processing),
incorporating a live actor and some 3000 puppets. Ptushko went on to
produce a number of feature-length films combining animation and
live-action including The

Soldiers parade next to the bound body of their captive, from The New
Gulliver (1935) by Alexander Ptushko.

the medium

George Pal's musical fantasy Tubby the Tuba (I 947), using techniques
developed in his short puppet films which he called 'Puppetoons'

Fisherman and the Little Fish (1937) and The Little Golden Key
(1939), based on a Russian version of Pinocchio by Alexander Tolstoi
in which an organ-grinder, Papa Karlo, transforms an amazing talking
log into a little wooden boy named Buratino.

In 1935, the same year that Ptushko released The

New Gulliver, the Hungarian-born animator George

Pal produced an exquisite film, The Ship of the

Ether, featuring the voyage of a ship made from

blown glass. Pal's earliest films were made in

Germany, where he used stop-motion photography

to produce an animated commercial for a cigarette

company in Cologne:'They liked it so much that

they ordered other films where the cigarettes spoke. So we put little
mouths

on them - no faces yet, just mouths. And then we put faces on them,
and

put hats on them, and put arms and legs on them - wire legs with
buttons

for feet...'

With the rise of Nazism in 1933, Pal moved to Eindhoven in Holland

where he produced a series of fairy-tale subjects such as The Magic
Lamp and Sinbad the Sailor. At what was soon the biggest puppet-
animation studio in Europe, Pal was making short entertainment films
for commercial sponsors such as Phillips Radio, Unilever and
Horlicks.Then, in 1939, George Pal moved to America and set up
studio in Hollywood where, assisted by some of the finest puppet
animators from Europe, he began producing a series of theatrical
shorts which he called 'Puppetoons'.

Pal's early puppets were very basic: heads and hands tended to be
wooden balls, bodies were blocks of wood and limbs were made of
bendy covered wire. Although they would become more sophisticated,
they remained highly stylised with movements that have an almost
mechanical precision producing a look not unlike that ach eved,
decades later, with early computer animat : films required the use of a
great many models or part-models: for a Puppetoon to walk through a
scene might require the use of as many as 24 sets of legs, while up to
100 replacement heads could be used for a character in.one of his
more elaborate films such as Tubby the Tuba (1947).

29

A ship made from blown glass in George Pal's exquisite film The Ship
of the Ether (1935).

Jt

the medium

George Pal surrounded by some of tne army of puppets he used to film

by the substitution method (see also pages 86-87).

Based on a story by Paul Trip and music by George Kleinsinger, Tubby

the Tubo was a tale about a tuba in an orchestra who (much to the
amusement of the other instruments) wanted to play a 'tune' as
opposed to just oompah-mg away in the background. With the help of
a genial bull-frog,Tubby learns a tune and, in turn, teaches it to the
rest of the orchestra.This simple fable about accepting others for what
they are (and, indeed, learning to accept yourself) is a good example of
Pal's film-making: funny, touching and deftly animated.

Pal was, however, capable of darker visions such as Tulips Shall Grow
(1942), a powerful anti-Nazi film in which an idyllic picture-book
portrayal of Holland -tulips, windmills and a pair of cute, clog-wearing
lovers - is suddenly overrun by a marauding army of goose-stepping
mechanical men. Made from nuts, bolts and washers, the robotic
soldiers carry banners declaring themselves to be the 'Screwballs'.
Bombs rain down from metal, bat-shaped planes until the windmills
are broken skeletons against a blood-red sky. Only when it rams do the
armies finally grind to a halt in a sea of rust.

the medium

Laurence Harvey as the Shoemaker with George Pal's elves in The

Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962).
One of the most popular of Pal's characters was a little black boy
named Jasper who appeared in almost twenty films with such titles as
Jasper Goes Fishing (1943), Jasper and the Beanstalk (1945) and
Jasper in a Jam (1946). Also in 1946 Pal made John Henry and the
Inky Poo (I 946), a powerful little film based on the American folk tale
of the black railroad ganger who competed with a track-laying
machine called the Inky Poo. John Henry, depicted in a naturalistic
style that is far removed from that of the Jasper films, wins his spike-
driving contest and, though he dies in the effort, proves that 'there
ain't a machine made that can beat a man once a man's got a mind he
can beat that machine'.

George Pal's Puppetoons won an affectionate audience in America and

a number of model animators who worked on the films went on to
successful careers of their own, including Joop Geesink who produced
his own series of puppet films under the generic title 'Dollywood', and
Ray Harryhausen who, in

1945, began producing a short series of films with

fairy-tale subjects.

The first of these films, Mother Goose Stories, featured highly detailed
sets and charming 'cartoon-style' puppets of Humpty Dumpty, Little
Miss Muffet, Old Mother Hubbard and others. Harryhausen then
made Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, The Story
ofRapunzel and The Story of King Midas before concentrating on stop-
motion special effects. Harryhausen's fairy-tale films show the skill of
an exceptional puppet-maker. His slavering wolves, bald-headed
demons and warty-nosed hags foreshadow the fiends and monsters
which he was later to create for the live-action cinema.

As for George Pal, he went on to produce and direct a memorable

string of science-fiction and fantasy films such as Destination Moon
(1950), When Worlds Collide (1951) and his unforgettable versions of
HG Wells's The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine
(1960). Many of these films
Scene from Ray Harryhausen's puppet version of the Hansel and
Gretel story.

>

The hand of dictatorship in JiriTrnka's last film The Hand (1965).

included brilliant special effects using model work and stop-motion

photography, and some of them - Tom Thumb (1958) and The
Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1963) - featured superbly
crafted puppet sequences with animated toys, elves and dragons.

Pal's doll-like puppets have a strong affinity with those of another

significant animator, JiriTrnka, who was born in the former
Czechoslovakia, worked with various puppet theatres and went into
film-making after the Second World War when he set up the
animation division of the nationalised Czech cinema and became its
first head of production.Trnka was also an illustrator, working with an
assured and elegant line and delicate palette of pastel colours with
which he decorated various books of legends and fairy-stories
including those by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.
It was natural, therefore, forTrnka to turn to an illustrative form and
work in conventional eel animation, creating what critics described as
'Disneyfied' characters in such filmed folk-tales as Grandpa Planted a
Beet (1945) and, the following year, The Animals and the Brigands.
Also in 1946 he made a biting satire, The Devil on Springs (also known

the medium

as The Chimney Sweep), reflecting on the German occupation of his

country and the role of the SS collaborator.

Eventual lyTrnka tired of eel animation, feeling that too many

processes intervened between the concept and the finished film and
that this way of working required the talents of too many other artists
to bring his ideas to life. He turned instead to the puppet film, drawing
on his years of experience as a maker and operator of marionettes. His
earliest experiments were made with the help of the Czech animator
Bretislav Pojan'We animated one of my oldest wooden puppets, a
ballerina. It moved well, but gave an abstract impression. The effect
was nice, but did not mean anything.Thus we understood that a
puppet film needs concrete situations, or a "story".'

Trnka's later films varied in subject matter - a Hans Andersen fairy-

tale, The Emperor's Nightingale (1948); a Western parody Song of the
Prairie (1949) and a three-part serialisation of Jarolev Hasek's comic
novel, The Good Soldier Schweik (1954-5) - but his style remained
virtually unchanged for almost a decade, his films peopled with squat,
chunky characters who lacked the gracefulness found in his book
illustrations. However in two films, Old Czech Legends (1953) and A
Midsummer Night's Dream (l955),Trnka showed himself capable of
evoking moods of mystery and rare beauty, demonstrating the truth of
his philosophy of film-making:'Puppet films stand on their own feet
only when they are outside the scope of live-action films - when the
stylisation of the scenery, the artificially heroic look of the human
actors and the lyrical content of the theme might easily produce an
effect both unconvincing and ludicrous or even painful ...'

in Jin Trnka's last film, The Hand (1965), the central character has a
typical impassive face, and although he is presented to us as a
sculptor, he is dressed and has the look of a pierrot. With an outsized
head, a beaky nose and two large, soulful eyes, he is clearly the comic
tragedian. A gigantic Hand (symbolising dictatorship) demands that
this innocent little artist carve a likeness of him for a monument.
When the sculptor refuses, the Hand imprisons him in a cage and
forces him to carry out the commission. Having reluctantly completed
the work, the sculptor- escapes, butTrnka concludes his allegory on
the freedom of art with the Hand pursuing and destroying the sculptor
and then celebrating his work with a grand funeral.

Following Trnka's retirement, Bretislav Pojar continued the puppet

film tradition with films such as The Gingerbread Cottage (195 I), One
Too Many (1953), a piece of anti-drink propaganda in which a
motorcyclist takes the fatal decision to have 'one more for the road',
and The Lion and the Song (1958), in which a lion encounters a
musician singing in the desert and shows his bestial taste in music by
eating the singer.

33

_>

the medium

Floating, Chagall-like image of Ariel with Prospero in Stanislav

Sokolov's The Tempest (1992).This was one of a series of films called
'Shakespeare, the Animated Tales' made as a co-production by
S4C/BBC/Christmas Films, Moscow.
Another of Trnka's creative heirs is the Japanese puppet animator
Kihachiro Kawamoto. Born in Sedagaya in 1925, Kawamoto saw Jiri
Trnka's The Emperor's Nightingale and travelled to Europe to study
with the Czech film-maker before working in Hungary, Poland,
Rumania and Russia and then returning to Japan. Kawamoto's films,
which include Demon (1972), A Poet's Life (1974), Dojoji (1976) and
House of Flame (1979), unite the European approach to puppet film-
making with the long tradition of puppetry in Japan which dates back
to the Bunraku puppet plays first presented in the 17th century.

Drawing his inspiration from the masks of the Noh drama,

Kawamoto's puppets are not only animated with precision, they are
also painstakingly made: The creation of a single puppet takes ten
days.The head requires particular care. First I prepare a plaster mould
with which I fashion the head from an agglomerate of Japanese paper,
which is then covered with a fine, supple leather and subsequently
painted; thus it is light but solid. Eyes, mouth and eyebrows are
moveable, and the ears, in plastic, are made from moulds ...Teeth are
fishioned from a type of paraffin, the chests from rigid paper; the
hands, in supple rubber, are easily moved. For ten minutes of
animation, one year of preparation is required.'

the medium
Scene from Galina Beda's Ruth (1996), one of the 'Testament' series
made by S4C/BBC/Christmas Films, Moscow.

Where some puppet-film animators have followed the aesthetic

principles of JiriTrnka, including Polish-born Yoram Gross, whose
Joseph the Dreamer (1961) was the first such film to be animated in
Israel, others, such as Norway's Ivo Caprino, have returned to the
realistic style of Ladislaw Starewich. Caprino's masterpiece, The
Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (1975), is a fast-paced action-comedy about a
remarkable car called 'II Tempo Gigante', and contains scenes that are
literally crowded to overflowing with charming and eccentric
characters.

Some of the finest puppet animation in recent years has emerged from
a collaboration between the British television company S4C,the BBC
and the Moscow-based group of animators, Christmas Films.Three
series (using a variety of animation media) have been made:
'Shakespeare,The Animated Tales','Operavox' and 'Testament'
including, among many fine pieces of animation, Stanislav Sokolov's
elemental visualisation of The Tempest (1992); Maria Muat's Twelfth
Night (1992) which captures the romance, confusion and buffoonery of
Shakespeare's comedy, and Galina Beda's Ruth (1996) which retells
the moving Old Testament story of love and loyalty with a precision
and delicacy that recalls the work of Trnka.

These films received great acclaim in Britain and America, two

countries which - whilst slow to embrace the puppet film - have had a
long fascination with automata, marionettes, glove-puppets and
ventriloquists' dolls. Unlikely though it may seem, two of the greatest
stars in the early days of American radio were ventriloquist Edgar
Bergen's dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer- Snerd. Similarly,
in Britain, Peter Brough and his cheeky companion, Archie Andrews,
were hugely successful on both radio and television.

One of the top-rated TV shows in America in the 1950s was that

featuring the string-puppet Howdy Doody, while, for a later
generation, Jim Henson's glove-puppets achieved national, and then
international stardom with 'Sesame Street' and The Muppet Show'. In
Britain, where puppet plays featuring the characters Punch and Judy
have been a centuries-long part of the nation's popular culture, many
of the earliest television shows for children featured marionettes.
Rather than use expensive and time-consuming stop-motion
photography, the puppets were manipulated 'live' before the camera
and appeared, strings and all! Nevertheless, characters such as Andy
Pandy, Muffin the Mule,The Woodentops

35

*
the medium

Puppeteers on the set for Bob Smith's 'Howdy Doody' show, which had
a great success on American TV in the 1950s.

Right: Bob Smith with his puppet characters Howdy Doody and Heidi
Doody.
and Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men (all between 1950 and 1955)
quickly established themselves as children's favourites.

By the end of the 1950s, puppet shows on television were becoming

more elaborate with Gerry Anderson's 'The Adventures ofTwizzle' and
'Torchy the Battery Boy', both of which featured fantastic child
heroes:Twizzle, with endlessly extending arms and legs, and Torchy, a
human battery with a light in his hat that had magical properties.
Anderson also made a puppet Western series,'Four Feather Falls',
featuring Sheriff Tex Tucker, Rocky his horse and Dusty his dog.This
was a revolutionary series which aimed at satisfying the expectations
of an increasingly sophisticated audience. New techniques enabled
Anderson to manipulate his puppets with extra fine wires that, at
I/5000th of an inch thick, were scarcely visible. A further
development, electronically sychronising lip-movements, added a
realism not usually associated with puppet characters.

Anderson's pioneering television puppet films continued with

'Supercar' (1961), 'Fireball XL5' (1963),'Stingray' (1964), and the
phenomenally successful 'Thunderbirds' (1965), filmed in what
Anderson called 'Supermarionation'. But, despite strong characters,
dramatic plots and the endlessly fascinating sci-fi gadgets and gizmos
with which the cars, boats and planes were fitted, Anderson's puppets
still had strings attached.

37
_»

the medium

Scene from Serge Danot's series 'The Magic Roundabout' which

enjoyed a long career on BBC Television from 1965.

One film-maker who found the confidence to cut the strings and turn
to stop-motion photography was Gordon Murray who, at the
beginning of the Sixties, was producing elaborate puppet plays about
the bewigged inhabitants of a Rurttanian principality named Rubovia,
but who within only a few years was producing stop-motion films
about the smalltown dramas in idealised rural communities
(represented by model-village settings and characters in 1930s
costumes) called 'Camberwick Green' (1966) and Trumpton' (1967) .

In 1964, modelmaker Oliver Postgate and writer Peter Firman created

one of the earliest stop-motion puppet series on British television with
their forest fantasies about the lives of the folk in 'Pogles'Wood'.
Postgate and Firman's company - modestly named Smallfilms - went
on to produce such series as The Clangers' (1969), about a race of
small pink knitted creatures (vaguely resembling aardvarks) who lived
in holes - covered by dustbin-lids - on a small blue planet and
'Pingwings'. about a race of black-and-white knitted creatures
(something like penguins) who lived in a barn on Berrydown Farm.

In France. Serge Danot created The Magic Roundabout' (from 1965)

with its cast of memorable eccentrics, including a dog that looked like
an animated floor mop, a pink cow and a moustachioed character on a
spring.This series was greatly loved in France and - thanks to a free-
wheeling translation - in Britain, and later inspired a feature-length
film, Dougal and the Blue Cat (1970). One of Danot's animators was
British-born Ivor Wood, who later joined Filmfair. a stop-motion
animation studio founded by Graham Clutterbuck and responsible for
such series as The Wombles' (1973), about a race of shaggy-haired,
long-nosed litter-gatherers who live on Wimbledon Common. Ivor
Wood went on to create his own enchanting series, 'Postman Pat'
(1981), about the daily exploits - and occasional daring adventures - of
a genial, bespectacled country postman and Jess, his black-and-white
cat.

All these series - regardless of whether their characters were made out
of wood, fabric or knitting-wool - had aTrnka-like simplicity of shape
and fixed expressions. In contrast many of the films produced by
Cosgrove Hall (a partnership of two British artists. Brian Cosgrove and
Mark Hall) have preferred the detailed realism and moving features
pioneered by Ladislaw Starewich.

Cosgrove Hall's full-length film of The Wind in the Willows (1983),

and the series

the medium

The characters' mobile features and subtle eye and lip movements
were widely praised in the Cosgrove Hall film of The Wind in the
Willows (1983).

Lou Bunin with a character from his Alice in Wonderland (1948),

which included live and puppet players.
which followed it, featured finely crafted puppets meticulously
brought to life with movements which suggest a combination of
animal behaviour and human nature ideally suited to Kenneth
Grahame's original characters, who sometimes seem to be animals in
human clothes and at other times appear more like humans wearing
animal masks.

Working with rubber moulded heads, Cosgrove Hall have shown that
it is possible to achieve the most subtle eye and lip movements.
However, because latex always has a rubbery look, it is far more suited
to modelling animals with skin, such as Toad, than furry creatures like
Mole and Rat. Additionally all moulded rubber puppets run the risk of
showing tell-tale traces of the joins on the plaster moulds from which
they are made.

Despite these drawbacks, Cosgrove Hall's numerous films - in various

animation medu !i ave been extremely successful.Their later puppet
film series include a superb three-dimensional recreation
oftheToyland home of Enid Blyton's Noddy (1992) and Oakie Doke
(1995) which introduced the title-character - an engaging tree-sprite
with an acorn head'and oak-leaf'ears' - who helps the woodland
creatures to solve their various

39

.*

the medium

In Tim Burton's Vincent, the eponymous hero is a seven-year-old boy

who models his life on the movie career of horror star Vincent Price,
whose voice is heard on the soundtrack.

problems. In 199 I, Cosgrove Hall also made a feature-length puppet

film, based on Truckers,Terry Pratchett's novel about a diminutive -
and fast-diminishing -race of 'Nomes' who survive by travelling the
motorways of Britain in 'borrowed'trucks. And, most recently, their
sensitivity in creating small, utterly convincing imaginary worlds has
been demonstrated in the film versions of Jill Barklem's stories about
brambley Hedge. In America, Lou Bunin made a version of Alice tn
Wonderland (1948) which used live and puppet players, and Jules
Bass produced a series of Christmas specials, such as Rudolph the Red
Nosed Reindeer (1964), and a feature-length film, Mad Monster Party
(1968), in which Dr Frankenstein summons a convention of movie
monsters. Apart from these films, however, and the work of George
Pal, American puppet animated films have been a rarity. Even the
powerful Disney studio only ever flirted with the medium a couple of
times with Noah's Ark (1959) and A Symposium on Popular Songs
(1962). Both films were nominated for Academy Awards and featured
animated characters made from fabric and assorted household objects
including an Arkload of kitchen-utensil animals.Then, in 1982, a
young artist at the Disney studio came up with a bizarre idea for a
short puppet horror film aimed at children!

Tim Burton's Vincent told the story of a strange little boy who
modelled his life on the movie career of his idol, the horror star
Vincent Price. Burton's stylised
the medium

The mischievous Lock, Shock and Barrel in Tim Burton's A Nightmare

Before Christmas (1993).

puppets - uncomfortably sharp and angular - were animated by

Stephen Chiodo and shot in black and white with a lot of atmospheric
shadow.The hero's unnatural preferences for the dark, for reading
books by Edgar Allan Poe and conducting Frankenstein-like
experiments on his dog, were wittily presented and perfectly
complemented by the voice of the real Vincent Price on the
soundtrack. But, at the time, the film was decidedly not a Disney
picture.

Burton made one more attempt to exercise his macabre imagination at

the Disney studio with Frankenweenie (1984), a live-action pastiche of
Universale Frankenstein, after which he left to become a Hollywood
legend in his own right with such grotesque films as Beetlejuice,
Edward Scissorhands and the first two of the new dark breed of
Batman movies.

While pursuing his live-action film-making career,Tim Burton still had

in mind a scenario which he had developed while he was with Disney,
but which had never been put into production. Eventually, at what was
by now a very different Disney studio, work began on A Nightmare
Before Christmas. Directed b/ a talented animator, Henry Selick,
Burton's Nightmare told the saga of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin
King, who rules the darkly sinister world of Halloween but who would
much rather have the job of being Father Christmas.The elaborate film
featured 227 puppets - vampires, werewolves, ghosts, gargoyles,
mummies and freaks - many of which could be fitted with an extensive
range of heads or faces in an animation process that, though superbly
executed, was merely a sophisticated version of the methods used,
years before, by George Pal.

A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) was the first stop-motion

feature film to receive worldwide distribution. Some of the finest
model animators in the world brought the creepy characters eerily to
life on elaborate sets with grotesque anthropomorphic buildings,
crumbling masonry, rusting railings and dank cobbled streets, all of
which were textured to have the look of the

scratchy, cross-hatched penwork found in Tim

Bur + on's original drawings.

Many of the figures were a triumph of modelmaking and animation,

for example the cadaverous Jack - a black-suited figure, all skui' and
bones - whose arms and legs had no more thickness than a pipe-
cleaner yet who moved with an elegant gracefulness without a hint of a
shimmer or a shake.

The popular and critical success of Nightmare prompted the Disney

studio to make, again under

.%

the medium

the direction of Henry Selick, a puppet animated film, based on Roald

Dahl's best-selling children's book James and the Giant Peach (1996).
Despite a strong narrative and original characters - including a cigar-
chomping Centipede from Brooklyn, an aristocratic, violin-playing
Grasshopper with a monocle, and a seductive French Spider -James
and the Giant Peach was weighed down by musical numbers and, for
all its charms, failed to capture the imagination as Burton's darkly
disturbing Nightmare had done.

Puppet film-makers have, over the years, used all manner of materials:
wood, metal, rubber fabric, leather paper and plastic.Then there is a
material called Plasticine, invented as long ago as the 1890s, which
offers a different kind of potential to the animator Film-makers began
using clay-like substances to create animated effects from the earliest
days of the movies and, as with line animation, their efforts owed a
debt to the theatre.

An early experimenter with clay animation was an American teenager

named Willis O'Brien, who in 1915 was working in a small decorator's
shop in San Francisco. O'Brien was keen on boxing and one day, when
work was slack, he modelled a small boxer out of a piece of clay. When
a colleague did the same, the two lads staged a mock boxing-match by
posing and reposing the little figures. For O'Brien, it was the beginning
of a thought process that carried him to the idea of making motion-
picture cartoons with clay instead of drawings. He made a one-minute
film featuring a miniature caveman and a model dinosaur made with
clay built around a wooden skeleton. On the strength of this
experiment, a San Francisco producer advanced the money for a five-
minute comedy entitled The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915).
For this film, O'Brien refined his animation process by constructing
prehistoric creatures from jointed metal skeletons covered in sheet
rubber.

O'Brien continued making short prehistoric comedies such as Curious

Pets of our Ancestors and The Birth of a Flivver (both 1917) in which
two early inventors create a dinosaur-pulled form of transport that
ends in disaster. In 1919, he made a two-reel dinosaur drama, The
Ghost of Slumber Mountain, that led to a full-length film version of
Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1925).The animation, by
today's standards, was crude but to an audience in the mid-Twenties it
appeared so authentic that when Conan Doyle showed advance footage
from the film to the Society of American Magicians (without declaring
its origin) many observers were convinced they were looking at
authentic film of prehistoric life.

The success of Willis O'Brien's early animations and a public

fascination with dinosaurs in the 1920s - spurred on by several notable
fossil finds - inspired other model animators. Buster Keaton's film,
The Three Ages (1923), opened

the medium

Tim Burton's elaborate film A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

which used 227 puppets and was the first stop-motion feature film to
receive worldwide distribution.

43

the medium
A PERSONALLY DIRECTED

MERiAM C

COOPER

ERNEST B

$€HOEDSAC

PRODUCTION

BY MERIANC COOfd.,WEOOA! "iVWiuKirtMifw

the medium
with a model of the deadpan comic riding on the back of a clay
dinosaur. Later, in 1928, animator Virginia May made Monsters of the
Past which featured a battle between those ever-popular prehistoric
combatants, the Triceratops and theTyrannosaurus Rex.

Eight years after The Lost World (and having failed to complete
another prehistoric project, Creation), Willis O'Brien created the
special effects for Merian C Cooper's classic fantasy, King Kong: a film
which so powerfully created its illusions that, more than fifty years on,
it still haunts the imagination. King Kong is full of stunning animation
sequences, many of which incorporate footage of the film's live-action
stars. Among its most memorable scenes are those in which Kong
battles with various prehistoric creatures, including a Tyrannosaurus
Rex and a Pteranodon, and the unforgettable climax on the top of the
Empire State Building when Kong attempts to fight off the attacking
aircraft.

O'Brien's animation, in which he was assisted by long-time associates

EB Gibson and Marcel Delgardo, was exceptional and even minor
imperfections - the fluttering effect on Kong's fur caused by the
animator's handling of the puppet -cannot detract from its towering
achievement.The success of King Kong led to a sequel, Son of Kong
(1933), and several other monster and fantasy films to which O'Brien
contributed effects. His work has been the inspiration for many,
including his protege, Ray Harryhausen, whose animation techniques
were to surpass even those of the Master.

Left: Poster for Merian C Cooper's classic fantasy King Kong, with
special effects by Willis O'Brien.

Kong and the Pteranodon battle over Fay Wray, one of the film's many
animation sequences incorporating live action.
45

the medium

Harryhausen worked as O'Brien's assistant on a further ape picture,

Mighty Joe Young (1949), and was responsible for the greater part of
the film's animation effects. He also animated O'Brien's dinosaur
models in the prehistoric sequences of The Animal World (1956) and,
in his own right, went on to create some of the most memorable stop-
motion monsters in the history of the cinema: The Beast from 20,000
Fathoms (1953); the giant octopus in It Came from Beneath the Sea
(l955);theYmir, duelling with an elephant in the Colosseum in 20
Million Miles to Earth (1957), and yet more dinosaurs in One Million
Years BC (1966) and The Valley ofGwangi (1969).

In fantasy films that range from The 7th Voyage ofSinbad (1958) to
The Clash of the Titans (1981), Ray Harryhausen brought to life a
troupe of terrifying mythological creatures - sirens, dragons, centaurs,
griffins, a two-headed roc and a one-eyed Cyclops. Ray Bradbury once
referred to these alarming and alluring creatures of Harryhausen's
genius as 'the delicious monsters that moved in his head and out of his
fingers and into our eternal dreams'. In what is probably Ray
Harryhausen's finest film, Jason and the Argonauts (1963), there is a
stunning episode in which live-action star Todd Armstrong fights a
skeletal army, born from the scattered teeth of a Hydra. It is a
breathtaking sequence of screen magic which has inspired many
animators, including Aardman's Peter Lord and Dave Sproxton.

Although, in the earliest days of cinema, clay animation had featured

prominently, its use declined as a reaction to the increasing
sophistication in eel-animation techniques. A curiosity from this
transitional period is Modeling (1921), a film in the Out of the Inkwell'
series in which live-action footage showed animator Max Fleischer
drawing his cartoon character Ko Ko the clown, who would then
embark on some escapade both on, and off, the drawing-board. In one
episode, Max's fellow animator, Roland Crandall, is seen sculpting a
bust of a gentleman with a -^m^^

grotesquely large nose. The sitter arrives and is not best pleased with
the likeness. Meanwhile, on paper, Ko Ko is having fun in a winter
landscape, building a snowman who also has a huge nose.To stop Ko
Ko's antics, Max throws a lump of real clay on to the line-animated
image.The clown throws the clay back, escapes from the drawing and
runs amok in the studio. Before being returned to the inkwell, Ko Ko
climbs on to the sculpture of the large-nosed gentleman and hides in
one of the cavernous nostrils.

Drawing by Ray Harryhausen for one of the animation sequences in

yoson and the Argonauts (1963).

the medium
The on-screen realisation of the battle between Jason (Todd
Armstrong) and his skeletal opponents in jason and the Argonauts.

Following the release, in 1927, of Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie, the

first cartoon with synchronised sound, the public appetite for eel
animation left little room for any other medium. Apart from one or
two highly stylised experimental films, such as Leonard Tregillus's and
Ralph Luce's No Credit (1948) and Proem (1949), clay animation had
all but been abandoned.

The medium was not revived until 1955, when Art Clokey created a
character who has been described as 'almost irritating in his utter
cuteness', but who became an American institution - Gumby. Art
Clokey produced 127 six-minute films featuring Gumby and his little
horse, Pokey, each of which was a combination of ingenious animation
effects (frequently achieved on a shoestring budget) and scenarios that
reflected their creator's strongly held beliefs in fairness, tolerance and
goodness.The innocence in Gumby's personality is reflected in his
look: an arrangement of geometric shapes making the character easy
to construct and animate. Gumby is essentially a flat, upended
rectangle of greenish-blue clay, divided at the bottom into two splayed,
footless legs.

Art Clokey's character Gumby, with his faithful steed Pokey, whose
success in the mid-1950s revived interest in clay animation films.

Gumby's tubular arms end in mitten-shaped hands and his facial

features are limited to those simple circles and semi-circles that you
find on the face of a gingerbread man. His most sophisticated feature
is a 'bump' on the left side of his head, intended to suggest (though it is
not entirely obvious) a quiff of combed-back hair.

The Gumby look' has a child-like naivete, although most children

would probably be more likely to model a man using conventional
round and sausage shapes, closer in appearance to Peter Lord's
Morph. Although Gumby could scarcely be described as cuddly, his
characteristic kindheartedness and upbeat attitude to life endeared
him to a generation and, following the revival of interest in clay
animation in the 1980s, gave him the chance of a comeback.The new
Gumby series, which began in 1987, had greater sophistication than
had been possible with the earlier series, which had been made with
great economy and had used doll's house furniture as props along with
occasional toy cars and space-rockets.The mix of clay people with
objects that are

the medium

recognisably from the 'real' world never bothered Art Clokey, but other
animators have adopted the purist attitude that stories told in clay
should not include anything that is not made of clay. One such artist is
the man who did much to revive an interest in clay animation, Will
Vinton.

It was in 1974 that Will Vinton and his then-partner, Bob Gardiner
came to prominence with Closed Mondays, a film about a drunk who
gets into an art gallery where - to his inebriated gaze - the pictures
appear to come to life. Closed Mondays won an Academy Award in the
category which had previously been 'Best Short Subject - Cartoon' but
which had now been renamed 'Best Short Subject - Animated Film'.
Although Vinton's early models were relatively unsophisticated, his
technical aims were ambitious with painstaking attempts to achieve lip
sync by studying the film footage of actors reading the lines of
dialogue.Vinton's films also involved complex camera moves including
pans, zooms and tracks - all of which had to be created frame by
frame.

Vinton eventually coined the term Claymation to describe his work

and, like many animators before him, turned to folk- and fairy-tales
for his inspiration. A film version of Leo Tolstoy's Martin the Cobbler
(1976) was followed by Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle (1978)
and Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince (1979), which
included innovative sequences by Joan Gatz, an animator who 'paints'
on glass using a palette-knife and a mix of clay and oil. Gatz, whose
work with Vinton includes Creation (1981) and A Claymation
Christmas Celebration (1987), went on to win the 1992 Academy
Award for her film Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase.
Vinton's films show a meticulous attention to detail in creating worlds
in which everything, being made of clay, has a uniformity of
vision.There are, however limitations to the Claymation technique:
some objects and aspects of the settings have a soft, squashy, chunky
look that draws undue attention to incidental background detail, while
the predominantly human characters tend to have a heavy leaden look
that is a world away from the fluid human animation created on eel by
Disney and others.

Short films such as Dinosaur and A Christmas Gift (both 1980) and
The Great Cognito (1982) led to Vinton making the first clay animated
feature, The Adventures ofMarkTwain (1985).Also known as Comet
Quest,this is an ingenious but episodic tale in which the great
American writer and wit sets out on a wild journey to meet Halley's
comet on a vessel that is an amalgam of hot-air balloon and
Mississippi paddle-steamer.Twain is joined by three of his fictional
characters -Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher - for whom
some of the author's less well-known stories are inventively brought to
life.The film contains exceptional animation, especially in the creation
and manipulation

49

the medium
Characters in one ofWill Vinton's adventurous advertising films made
for the California Raisin Advisory Board.

The weird and wonderful vessel in Will Vinton's The Adventures of

Mark Twain (1985), also known as Comet Quest, the first clay
animated feature film.

of the title character with his mane of white hair; walrus moustache,
twinkling eyes and ever-present cigar. Will Vinton's Twain is an
incomparable example of human animation in a style that subtly
combines naturalism with caricature.The film also contains numerous
stunning special effects as when one of the books in Mark Twain's
airborne library snaps open and a river of multi-coloured clay flows
and splashes out. The Adventures of MarkTwain received a limited
critical success as did the Disney live-action feature film, Return to Oz
(1985), to which Will Vinton contributed amazing animated
effects.This sombre, songless sequel to the happy-go-lucky MGM
classic returns Dorothy to a now ruined Emerald City and, among
various scary encounters, she visits the underworld domain of the
Nome King who, in an ingenious Claymation sequence, is gradually

transformed from an animated rockface into the

actor Nicol Williamson.

In America, Will Vinton's pioneering work has since been

overshadowed by the phenomenal success of his clever series of
advertising films for the California Raisin Advisory Board. Designed to
make raisins appealing to a young audience, Vinton created a group of
anthropomorphic raisins who sing and play rock-and-roll music.
Beginning with Marvin Gaye's song,'I Heard It through the Grapevine',
the series went on to feature the music of Michael Jackson and Ray
Charles, performed by raisin caricatures of those musicians. Although
Will

the medium

Morph, with his friend and alter-ego Chas, was an early creation of
Peter Lord and Dave Sproxton, and first appeared in the BBC 'Vision
On' series in 1976.

Vinton took the art of clay animation to new heights of invention and
sophistication, the medium failed successfully to challenge the
supremacy of eel animation, particularly with the revival of animation
talent at the Disney studio, beginning in 1989 with The Little
Mermaid.

The present renaissance in clay animation had its origins in 1960s

Britain with the work of Peter Lord and Dave Sproxton. Whilst still at
school, and then university, Lord and Sproxton began contributing
short animated films to a BBC television programme for deaf children
called 'Vision On'.They were influenced in their ambition to animate
by the films of Ray Harryhausen (especially jason and the Argonauts)
and by Terry Gilliam's work for the avant-garde television comedy
series,'Monty Python's Flying Circus'.They also aspired to equal the
quality of animation seen in some of the puppet-film series then being
shown on British TV, such as The Wombles' and The Magic
Roundabout'. The fact that Serge Danot's 'Roundabout' had also
established a large adult following suggested to them that the appeal of
animation might not simply be limited to 'kid's stuff.

Lord and Sproxton eventually focused on developing their skills with

Plasticine/clay animation, mainly because nobody else in Britain
appeared to be working in the medium (which gave it a saleable
uniqueness) and because it offered a flexibility denied to the most
sophisticated puppet. An early example of a clay film sequence
for'Vision On' featured a real table with a real plate on which clay food
- sausages, peas and potatoes - moved around before merging into
what Peter Lord describes as 'a muddy brown quadruped like a bear or
a wombat', which then walked off the plate.

The success of these short pieces led to the creation, in 1976, of Morph,
the small terracotta man who interacted with the programme's artist
Tony Han, and who had a propensity for 'morphing' into animals,
objects or sometimes just a ball of the raw material of which he was
made. Viewers responded to Morph's simple shape, friendly features
and warm colour; he quickly became a star of the small screen and
secured Lord and Sproxton's reputation. His regular appearances on
'Vision On' were followed by a series, The Adventures of Morph' (1981
-3), in which he was joined by an ever-expanding family of delightful
and quirky characters.

<*

the medium
A scene from On Probation, one of five ground-breaking films in the
Aardman series 'Conversation Pieces' (1982-3). For these films, Peter
Lord and Dave Sproxton built their stories around real-life taped
interviews, but they themselves nev»r met the people involved.

In 1978, Aardman Animations' work took a quantum leap when they

were commissioned to make two short films, called Animated
Conversations', for late-night screening by BBC Bristol.Taking the
skills mastered in animating Morph, Lord and Sproxton applied them
to realistic human figures acting out small, intimate dramas based on
true-life situations.

The soundtracks for Animated Conversations' used voices of'real

people', recorded in various day-today situations. For example, in the
first film, Confessions of a Foyer Girl, two usherettes in a cinema foyer
talk about boys and boredom and what they are going to do when they
get home from work.The concept of Animated Conversations' was
developed into a series of five 'Conversation Pieces' (1982-3) for
Channel 4, using increasingly sophisticated animation to depict ways
in which people succeed - but more often fail - at communication. On
Probation depicts a group meeting where a tortuous exchange takes
place between a young man who needs to visit a member of his family
and a probation officer who is trying to negotiate the terms of the visit
- with various unhelpful interjections from the other members of the
group.The resulting drama is filled with brilliant observation -people
tapping pencils, taking off their spectacles, looking edgily at one
another - and is ultimately funnier, sadder and far more memorable
than if the same small scenario had been presented in live action.

With their overlapping dialogue, false starts and unfinished sentences,

these films have all the hallmarks of fly-on-the-wall TV reportage.This,
however, is quite misleading: they are, as Peter Lord puts it, 'almost a
documentary but complete fiction!'

There has long been a difference of opinion between animators about

what can and cannot be achieved in the medium.There are those who
share the view expressed by Halas and Manvell in The Technique of
Film Animation: 'In all animation, there should never be any doubt
that what is being achieved on the screen could only be achieved by
this means.' Others hold that any subject matter can be dealt with in
animation and, indeed, the Disney studio's move

the medium

towards making animated films of live-action stories, such as

Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, suggests that
audiences are not worried by the distinction. Kihachiro Kawamoto
probably spoke for many in the animation business when he
remarked:'What interests me most in the production of animated film
is that the person who creates it is the only one who can express what
he feels, like a painter'

That is certainly what Lord and Sproxton achieved

in 'Animated Conversations' and 'Conversation

Pieces'. Although the audio-track suggests that the

characters on screen have been accurately drawn

from life, the truth is more complex since the

animation is, in fact, an imaginative interpretation of

what is heard. By hearing the dialogue 'performed'

by a realistic puppet - who may not bear any

resemblance to the real owner of the voice - the

words seems more sharply focused and the passing banalities of life
take on

a new significance.

For example, in Sales Pitch, an ever-hopeful door-to-door salesman

gets into conversation with an elderly couple who are quite happy to
chat, but who have clearly no intention of buying his mops and
brushes.The desperation of the salesman - covered though it is by his
easy, laughing manner - is painful to watch, and when he packs up his
case and turns to go there is a moment where the audience glimpses
the unnamed burdens that are weighing on his shoulders. At the same
time, Sales Pitch is full of delightful comic character animation: the
wife, saying little, deferring to the husband who abstractedly cleans
out his pipe while the salesman relentlessly continues his pitch; the
neighbour in an adjacent house, eavesdropping on the conversation,
then accidentally banging her head on the open window; or the dog,
seer, at the end of the film chewing a sample brush.

One of the other films in this series was a significant departure. Palmy
Day* animated a rambling over-the-tea-cups conversation between
several elderly people repeating oft-told tales and laughing politely at
unfunny anecdotes. Peter Lord and Dave Sproxton could not, at first,
see any value in this material, until they took a leap of the imagination,
dressed the old folks in tattered clothes and palm-leaf skirts and
placed them in a hut on a tropical island with a crashed plane in the
background. By juxtaposing the surreal with the

53
The quiet desperation of the door-to-door salesman in the Lord and
Sproxton film Sales Pitch, another in the 'Conversation Pieces' series.

the medium

Below: A sketch of Gromit for the chase sequence in The Wrong

Trousers (1993).

commonplace, Palmy Days gained a disturbing subtext that is not a

part of the original recording.

The success of these series began to generate

commercial work which, in turn, required the

employment of more animators. Among those who

joined the studio were Barry Purves, who came

from Cosgrove Hall where he had been a director

and the character animator forToad in The Wind in

the Willows; graphic artist Richard Goleszowski, who

joined the studio in 1983, and Nick Park, who was

invited to join Aardman in 1985 in order to

complete A Grand Day Out, a film he had started

whiie a student at the National Film and Television

School. Nominated for an Academy Award, A Grand

Day Out (1989) introduced the world to Wallace, the eccentric, cheese-
loving

inventor and his faithful dog, Gromit.The story was pure comic-book
adventure

- building a space rocket and blasting-off to the moon in search of

cheese.The

characters, however, were strongly delineated: the naive, somewhat

inept

Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) and the real brains behind the
partnership,

Gromit, whose facial expressions - wide, slightly mournful eyes -

quickly register

his despair, frustration or total incredulity.

The success of A Grand Day Out demanded a sequel, and in 1993

Wallace and Gromit returned in The Wrong Trousers, followed two
years later by A Glose Shave, all three films having been commissioned
by Colin Rose of the BBC.The later films, both of which won Oscars,
have tightly constructed plots involving a villainous penguin disguised
as a chicken and a psychopathic mechanical dog. They are packed with
visual jokes (Gromit reading a paper carrying the headline 'Dog Reads
Paper') and verbal puns (Gromit's collection of records by 'Bach'), and
there is a proliferation of wacky gadgetry ranging from the ex-NASA
Techno-Trousers to Wallace's Knit-O-Matic machine via a porridge
gun and a device that catapults dollops of jam on to a piece of toast as
it springs

out of a pop-up toaster. Park's films work on many levels. Children

respond to the broad character comedy, adults to the more
sophisticated elements including the affectionate spoofing of movie
genres such as horror films, thrillers, heist pictures, action movies and
the deep shadows and crazy camera angles of film noir. This richness
of character and relentlessly paced animation (the model tram chase
in The Wrong Trousers and the motorbike pursuit in

Wallace tastes Moon cheese in A Grand Day Out (1989), the first
Wallace and Gromit film which Nick Park completed after joining the
Aardman studio.

the medium
Compilation of images from Barry Purves's films Next, Screen Play,
Rigoletto and Achilles

A Close Shave) have carried clay animation to unprecedented heights.

Between completing A Grand Day Out and beginning work on The

Wrong Trousers, Park contributed to a series of five diverse animated
films, produced in 1989-90 under the title 'Lip Synch'.The project was
devised to give Peter Lord and three of Aardman's growing staff of
animators an opportunity to experiment with the idea of imaginatively
animating real conversations.'Lip Synch' was a wry choice of title
since, although the dialogue would be synchronised to the characters'
lip movements, the accompanying images would not necessarily be 'in
sync' with the personalities, moods or settings in the recordings. It was
complicated by the fact that two of the directors took a slightly
divergent view and produced films where 'lip syncing' turned out to be
of minimal importance!

A soundtrack of grunts and guttural gabblings accompanied Richard

Goleszowski's Ident As the title suggests, the film is about identity: a
grotesque, phallus-shaped character - pink, bald and naked - is
attempting to escape ;iom a claustrophobic maze where he is
constantly expected to conform and wear a mask. Eventually he finds a
way into another world only to discover that, once more, people
attempt to reshape his identity.

Equally idiosyncratic was Barry Purves's film, Next, made with

puppets (as opposed to clay) and containing hardly any dialogue apart
from the word 'Next!', bellowed from the stalls of a theatre by a bored
director who is holding

55

the medium

Grotesques converse in (dent, the contribution of Richard Goleszowski

to the Aardman series 'Lip Synch'.

auditions.The hopeful player who enters the spotlight is William

Shakespeare who, in a tour de force of animation, mimes the Complete
Works and proves that 'one man in his time plays many parts'. From a
wicker prop-basket, the Bard produces masks, crowns, swords, bits of
costuming and a stuffed dummy which he manipulates as a supporting
cast of lovers and corpses. At the conclusion of the performance, the
director (a caricature of Sir Peter Hall) looks up from a book - having
missed the entire audition - and shouts 'Next!'.

Full of surprises, this witty film established Barry Purves's elegant

style, seen in the puppet film which he has made since leaving
Aardman Animations: Screen Play (1992), an Oscar-nominated
presentation of a Japanese Kabuki-style drama, performed by ornately
clothed puppet-actors on a stage-set which is constantly being
transformed by a complex arrangement of sliding and revolving
screens.

Purves went on to produce a darkly sinister visualisation of Rigoletto

(1993) for the S4C/BBC series'Operavox', and in 1995 a homoerotic
retelling of the legend of Achilles, a powerful and passionate film with
a cast of characters modelled to look like sculpted figures and enacted
in a highly stylised dramatic form evoking the theatrical conventions
of Ancient Greece.

The remaining films in the 'Lip Synch' series followed the convention
of the earlier Animated Conversations' and 'Conversation Pieces'.
From Peter Lord

the medium

came two vastly different films: a charmingly dotty

piece of humorous storytelling, War Story, and

Going Equipped, an intensely focused monologue on

a sombre theme.The fifth film in the series was

Nick Park's Creature Comforts, in which zoo animals

confess to feelings of depression and boredom.This

film won Nick Park his first Academy Award.The

following year saw the start of a series of Heat

Electric commercials featuring Frank the Tortoise

and Carol the Cat, who became cult figures with

British television audiences.The commercials were

later released on video, and Frank, Carol and other

animal characters also appeared on various items

of merchandise. In 1996, the format was adapted

for a series of American TV commercials for

Chevron. Featuring talking cars, moaning about

being tired, having dents in their doors and hearing

strange knocking and pinging sounds, these commercials are crammed

with

visual gags and funny incidental detail.

Aardman Animations began making TV commercials in 1984 with an

advertising film for Enterprise Computers, in which various competing
computers were depicted as clattering fossils given rickety life. More
bony animation followed with the Scotch Videotape Skeleton, a jokey
character who recalls the skeletal warriors in Ray Harryhausen's jason
and the Argonauts. Over the years, Aardman's commercials have given
animated life to all manner of inanimate objects from a bottle of
Domestos bleach guarding a bathroom to a bottle of Perrier with a pair
of dancing straws.

The studio has also specialised in giving human form to a variety of

edible products: a singing sausage-man for Bowyers; a pas de deux
danced by two figures made from Jordan's Crunch) and Chewy bars; a
fruit-and-vegetable man for a healthy-eating campaign and - perhaps
most memorably - the Lurpak Butterman. Emerging, Morph-like,
from a block of butter'Douglas' (as he was eventually named) has
various adventures -such as snorkeling, rowing, hang-gliding and
motorcycling - on a food-laden table. Other ingenious metamorphoses
include the bulbous-nosed, porridge-coloured man advertising

57

gfUDENTl QDRNEROh

A talking car in aTV commercial for the American company Chevron,

as it was visualised in sketch form, above, and in the finished film,
below left.

the medium

Douglas the Butterman, who has become something of a star in his

own right in the commercials Aardman have made for Lurpak.

Readybrek, who in quick succession becomes a train, an alarm clock

and a pop-singer; and, in the commercials for Crunchie, chocolate bars
which undergo a rapid series of transformations into chocolate
submarines, dancing girls, performing seals, roller-coasters, rocket-
ships and rodeo cowboys.

Other innovative commercial work includes the wooden man

advocating the use of Cuprinol wood preservative; the Chewits
Monster, styled after the popular monstrous-beast-on-the-rampage-
movies of the 1940s (with a nod towards Harryhausen's various
behemoths); the Polo commercials with their spoof revelations of such
inside information as the way in which the mints get their
characteristic hole, and a series of stunning Lego advertisements in
which heaps of Lego bricks assemble themselves into a pirate and a
spaceman who then take on fully animated life.

All this commercial work has developed alongside the studio's

broadcast films in a creative harmony that has allowed each discipline
to benefit from the other.The lessons learned in making the 'Lip Synch'
series, for example, have been exploited in commercials for a variety of
products from Walkers Crisps to the Britannia Building Society. In an
expensive medium, it is the commercial work which often not only
funds less remunerative ventures but provides opportunities to
develop and experiment.

In 1986 Aardman completed work on Babylon, a chilling 15-minute

film for Channel 4, set in the sumptuous surroundings of a grand hotel
where a conference of arms-dealers is taking place. As a speaker refers
io the dark view the world has of their trade - seeing them as 'the
vultures of society' living'off the honest gains of the people' - the
dinner-suited guests become increasingly bestial and one grows to
gargantuan size before bursting in a torrent of blood and bullets.

In the same year - and in striking contrast - the studio produced a pop
video for Peter Gabriel's single, Sledgehammer, directed by Steve
Johnson. This tirelessly inventive film created a series of lip-synced
images using the singer's real head alternated with likenesses in clay,
ice and -courtesy of the Brothers Quay who contributed to the film -
bleached wood, rusting metal and assorted fruit and vegetables,
animated in the style of Jan Svankmajer

One of the benefits of having a seemingly inexplicable company name

like Aardman
the medium

Frames from the Aardman pop video made for Peter Gabriel's single
release, Sledgehammer (1986). The video was directed by Steve
Johnson.

Animations is that it provides more opportunities for individual

artistic expression and lessens the tendency to associate the studio
with one 'name' -such as Walt Disney or Will Vinton - which narrows
audience expectations and limits commercial and creative
commissions. In addition to Nick Park, several Aardman animators
have been encouraged to produce films which carry their own
individual stamp, such as Peter Peake who produced Pib and Pog
(1996), a spoof on a television programme for small children, featuring
the voice of an enthusiastic lady storyteller and two anarchic
characters who relentlessly attempt to destroy one another.

In 199 I, Richard Goleszowski took a flat Plasticine dog who had

appeared in his film Ident, called him Rex the Runt and made two
short films - Dinosaurs and Dreams. Joined by his doggy chums
Wendy, Bad Bob andVince, Rex has various adventures which sway
between the surreal and the banal. A bizarre new series of
Goleszowski's 'Rex the Runt', commissioned by Colin Rose of the BBC,
began with an escapade called A Holiday in Vince in which the gang
miniaturise a submarine and go on a fantastic journey through Vince's
brain.

Rex is part of a late-Nineties genre which includes such anarchic and

grotesque series as Sarah Ann Kennedy's 'Crapston Villas' (a spoof fly-
on-the-wall docu-drama about a group of repellent residents of what
has been called 'the happy house from Hell') and Deiniol Morris and
Michael Mort's BAFTA Award-winning Gogs, featuring an obnoxious
family of cave-dwellers struggling to coexist with the ubiquitous
dinosaur population.

Steve Box joined Aardman in 1992 and animated with Nick Park on
The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave before directing his first film,
Stage Fright, in 1997. A black comedy, set in a decaying theatre at a
time when music hall was giving way to cinema, the film tells howTiny
- a diminutive, dog-juggling freak - wreaks a terrible revenge on the
villainous Arnold Hugh who usesTmy's trained dogs to help establish
his own career as a film actor.The time-scale in Stage Fright shifts
constantly between the present and flash-back just as, visually, it
alternates between scratched and grainy black-and-white film images
and the world of the

the medium

A Burger King commercial, in which realistic-looking model versions

of the product were combined with customers from the fantasy world
of clay.
theatre, filmed in sombre colours and lit with, harsh stage lighting that
surrounds the actors with deep shadows.

In marked contrast to the theatricality of Stage Fright are Dave

Riddett's and Luis Cook's Knobs in Space (1994), made for the
Terrence Higgins Trust, and Sam Fell's Pop (1996), in which a quirky
little character hopes to relieve his boredom with a can of fizzy drink
which goes into orbit and finally blows his head off, leaving his vacated
neck to be occupied by a singing goldfish.

As the company has grown, David Sproxton has increasingly taken on

a supervisory role, overseeing much of the production work
undertaken, particularly the commercials, though this means he has
become less involved in a hands-on way with individual productions.
The rapid growth of the company has also required it to assume a
more formal structure, and a great deal of David's time is now spent in
managing its affairs on as he puts it,'trying to make order out of
chaos!'.

Meanwhile, Peter Lord continues directing his own films, such as

Wat's Pig (1996), commissioned by Clare Kitson of Channel 4, who
also took Stage Fright This is a medieval fable - told with hardly any
dialogue - about two brothers who are parted at birth. One brother
becomes a king, the other a pig-keeper and their contrasting fortunes
are shown in a unique split-screen format until a war with a
neighbouring country unites their lives and their stories. Wat's Pig was
nominated for an Academy Award, as was Lord's earlier film Adam
(1991), in which a human (but also God-like) hand creates and then
controls the existence of a little man whom Lord describes as being
'Morph with genitalia'. Having no dialogue, Adam works in the
universal language of mime, and the film shows the subtlety of acting
with clay which is Aardman's particular contribution to this form of
animation.

Peter Lord is now embarked on the studio's latest venture, its first
feature-length film. Jointly directed with Nick Park, the film - which is
still in the early stages of development - is provisionally entitled
Chicken Run, although, as with any film, that may change. All Peter
Lord and Nick Park will reveal about the picture is that it could be
described as The Great Escape - with chickens!

Thee is much public anticipation (and press speculation) about the

project. There are those who think the studio should have stuck with
the Oscar-winning formula of Wallace and Gromit. But that is not
surprising. Over sixty

the medium

years ago, when Walt Disney embarked on the cinema's first animated
feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there were those who
shook their heads and said that he should stick to his Oscar-winning
short cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse. Disney was undaunted and, as
a result, animated feature films are now an accepted - and
extraordinarily successful - part of today's film industry.

Nevertheless, whilst there have been hundreds of

feature-length films made in eel animation, there

have been relatively few three-dimensional

animated features. However; the basic techniques

remain the same, as does the sense of discovery -

exciting, gratifying, but scary - that is unique to puppet animation.

1 always describe puppet animation,' says Peter Lord,'as being

instinctive.You go through it as you go through life: reasonably well-
informed about what you've just done, with a plan for what you intend
to do, but prepared also for an unpleasant surprise at any moment.
You hold the puppet in your two hands, and maybe your left hand is
holding the shoulders while your thumb lies commandingly on the
spine. Your right hand is on the pelvis, ready to move either leg or
both at once. So you've got the whole figure under your hand, ready to
respond to your instruction. You can feel the movement in it, and the
logic as it twists and bends. Often the puppet leads you, you can feel its
inner life ...'

It is all very like those ancient creation myths in which some god or
demi-god takes up a fistful of mud and shapes it into a thing that can
hold, within its fragile form, all the passions, ambitions, dreams and
despairs that are the lot of humankind - though without any certainty
about how that creation will direct

its own destiny.

'Rex the Runt', Richard Goleszowski's I 3-part series, was launched on

BBC Television in 1998.
practical animation

basic needs

practical animation
Standard 8 cine camera, now more or less superseded by the Super 8

The Camera

When you watch a film, or a television programme, or a video, what

are you . actually looking at? Everyone knows the answer: freeze-frame
the video and you get a still picture.The moving pictures that we see on
our screens are basically made up of a series of still images in
sequence. When these still images are played back at sufficient speed -
normally at the rate of 25 frames per second (fps) on TV, or 24 in the
cinema - our brains stop seeing these images as separate and static,
and instead perceive movement.

This is because of a phenomenon known as persistence of vision which

was first properly identified in 1825, shortly before the invention of
photography. It means that we can retain the image of something on
the retina for about one-tenth of a second after it has been removed
from our view.This is enough, in film terms, for our eyes to jump
across the gap between the individual frames or still images, and see
the action as a continuous moving flow.

Compared with ordinary film-makers, who just point their camera at

something moving and shoot it, animators have made life extremely
difficult for themselves, inventing incredibly elaborate and tortuous
ways to create moving images. Instead of capturing something that is
already moving, we painstakingly create each one of the still pictures
needed to imitate movement in real life. Unless we go for a shortcut -
for example, by shooting in 'double-frame' (see page 65) - we have to
create 24-25 separate pictures for every second of finished film or
tape.

Whichever way the still pictures are generated, whether the animator's
way or the easy way, the same basic equipment is required: a camera
with a lens to trap the picture, a system to record and retain it, and a
steady tripod for the camera.

When they started out, most of our animators got themselves a

Standard 8 cine camera. Super 8 offers better quality and has more or
less superseded the Standard type. Super 8 film, too, is much more
widely available. You can, of course, buy new, or you can look for
cameras and projectors in car-boot sales or in the second-hand cabinet
of a camera shop. If you go down this route, make sure you get an
instruction booklet with the camera!

Check that the camera has the facility to take 'single frames' as well as
running at its normal speed or speeds. Some cameras have a single-
frame button; with others, you can only take single frames via a
manual cable-release trigger. Some cameras have both. A cable-release
mechanism saves you touching the camera and causing camera shake,
but is not essential. Check that your

:*or shows the same gauge of film as the camera (Standard or Super).
Using 8mm equipment will give you 18 or 24 fps. both of which are
fine for showing movement in a convincing way.

I 6mm cine camera

one basic needs

LENSES

It is not necessary to rush off and buy a set of lenses. Every type of
camera will have a lens of a standard length. If you have a lens of
medium to fairly long focal length, this will allow you to position the
camera far enough away from the model so that you can get in more
easily to animate it. For the same reason, a very wide-angle lens is best
avoided, because the wider the lens the closer the camera needs to be
to the model. After you have been filming for a while, a zoom lens is
worth considering. With a zoom you can easily put movement into
your films. All you have to do is adjust the barrel of the lens between
each frame as you move into, or out from, the subject.

When looking at lenses, check that they focus down to short distances,
typically I ft (0.3m), to enable models to be kept in focus. Cameras
fitted with a zoom lens normally have a 'macro' setting which allows
the lens to focus extremely close. Where lenses do not have a close-
focusing facility, you can buy a supplementary close-up lens which
clips to the front. These lenses are available in a series of strengths
called Dioptres.

Better still is a I 6mm camera.The cost will be in the region of £4-500,

and the costs of film and processing are also higher, but your film will
be of a quality that can be broadcast on television. Although we use
ours with electric motors, which give us a little more accuracy from
one frame to the next, you can film with the built-in clockwork motor
that comes with the camera.

Most of Aardman's work is done with 35mm Mitchell cine cameras,

equipped with electric motors.These provide the high quality needed
for films which will be shown in cinemas on the big screen.The cost,
however, is in the thousands, and not worth considering for most
amateur film-makers. In the professional environment, there are
various other aids to accuracy and consistency, but these too are
expensive and not at all essential in the early years of a filmmaking
career.There are many more basic skills to be mastered before a 35mm
camera has to go to the head of the shopping list.

Single-and double-frame Animating in single-frame means you have

to animate your model 24 times for one second of completed film. If
you do it well, the results are gorgeous. It is, however a pretty time-
consuming method. Fortunately, there is a standard and very
acceptable shortcut, which is to take two frames every time you rriove
the model.This is called double-frame, and means you only need to
create 12 different images for every second of film. Common sense
may tell you that double-frame must look jerkier than single-frame.
For now I will only say that we used double-frame for most of Wallace
and Gromit's adventures, and they don't look bad. In fact, I prefer to
use double-frame whenever possible. Also, you would be crazy to start
your animation career working in single-frame. Finally, some further
jargon. Single-frame animation is also called 'singles' and 'ones', and
double-frame (surprisingly) is called 'doubles' or'twos'. Work these
terms into your conversation, as in:'Blimey! You mean they shot the
whole thing on twos?'

FIXING THETRIPOD

Make sure your tripod is firmly fixed and does not move while the
camera is in use.You can weight a tripod by putting weights on the legs
and/or suspending a weight from the midpoint beneath the
camera.You can fix the legs to the floor or plant them in a triangular
spreader which has holes for the legs and stops them slipping
sideways.To help prevent the spreader from shifting if someone
accidentally knocks against it, weigh down each of its arms with
sandbags.

35mm camera with control box

practical animation

Video camera
'^ To calculate how far the camera should move during a pan or tilt, fix
a pointer to the back of the camera head which follows an arc on a
piece of cardboard. Basically, you divide the distance the camera has
to move by the number of frames the move runs for.The move needs to
accelerate to its full speed and then slow to a stop at the end. On the
arc, mark off gradually increasing and decreasing increments for the
first and last quarters of the move.

35mm camera with connection for video assist (see pages 70-71)
mounted on top of the camera body.

Video Cameras and Computer Animation

On the face of it, video has many advantages over cine film.These
include low -light exposure, auto exposure, reusable tape (making it
cheaper to run), good picture quality, no need for a projector (you just
watch it on TV), and instant replay.The big disadvantage is that the
types of video camera available in the high street do not take single
frames. Some boast an animation facility, but the best we know of take
a quarter of a second per shot - the equivalent of 4.5 or 6fps on cine
film.This is just not enough for smooth movement.You can certainly
do some animation on a video camera, but the results will be crude
compared with what you get using cine film.

Another approach would be to record your video images and store

them on a computer As computers become more popular, the ability to
do this has become easier. We use a rather more sophisticated
computer system at the studio to help the animators scrutinise their
animation as they shoot it (see pages 70-71), but there are simpler and
less expensive systems available which can run on home
computers.These will play a few minutes of animation at a time. If
longer lengths are needed, you would have to record the material in
sections on to a video recorder. For the time being, however most of
these home computer systems do not match the quality of 8mm film,
which remains the best system for learning about animation, as well as
being much cheaper to run.

A further option is to buy software forvideo manipulation which can be

used with a video or digital camera for stop-frame animation. For
example, with Adobe Premiere's Stop-Motion feature you can make
manual and time-lapse video captures. For stop-frame animation, you
point the camera at your scene and record frames as you animate the
sequence. You can then use the software to run your movie on the
computer

It is also possible to make animated films entirely on computers. At

Aardman we have a small computer animation department that uses
software called 'Softimage'.This very sophisticated package allows an
animator to construct virtual puppets, clothe them, animate them and
light them very much as we do for conventional filming.The technique
is completely different but the animation skills needed are the same.
Such systems are often used in special-effects movies, and entire films
such as Toy Story have been created using these techniques. As ever
with tools like these, you still have to have a good story to tell!

66

MOTION CONTROL

The most common camera moves are pans, where the camera scans
sideways, and tilts, where it pivots up and down.You can also track a
camera, moving the whole thing to one side, or forwards and
backwards.

Any movement of the camera must be done smoothly, and there are
various devices for controlling the camera as it moves. At the top end
of the motion-control field is the Milo, right, a massive rail-mounted
electrically driven computer-operated crane, with a boom arm that
swivels on a revolving pedestal.This super-versatile rig allows the
camera to be moved with optimum smoothness in just about any
conceivable direction, its operation controlled by computer. It also
repeats movements with extreme accuracy.

For Super 8 or 16mm cameras, buy a geared camera head which fits on
top of the tripod.The head is equipped with handles which you turn to
make a pan or tilt.

To track a camera sideways or on a curve, you only need some kind of

wheeled support on to which you can fix the camera. For straight line
movements, try a skateboard, guided along between planks. For
greater variety you could use a wagon from a model train set, which
you then push along a section of rail.

&W

practical animation

A Simple Studio

Our first studio was the kitchen in Dave's parents' house. Our stage
was the kitchen table and our tripod was an old enlarging stand. In
later years we moved up-market, first to the spare bedroom and later
to his sister's room in the attic (which, I hasten to add, she had
vacated). As this suggests, the basic requirements for a model-
animation studio are very simple. You need your camera - film or
video - and a computer (if that is your chosen method of storing the
images).You need a tripod, to support the camera, a flat surface to act
as a stage or set, and some lighting to ensure an unchanging level of
light while you are animating. And, of course, your character, puppet
or whatever.

There is one simple golden rule in the model-animation studio.

Nothing should
move unless you want it to. When most people start

experimenting with animation - and that certainly

includes us - the most common fault is that either

the set, the shadows from the lights, the camera or

the environment itself moves about almost as much

as the animated puppet. Any part of your studio

which is not firmly fixed down is liable to get

knocked or jogged during the hours that you are

animating, and every such movement becomes an

irritating distraction in your finished film.To avoid this

happening, everything possible needs to be fixed

down, or otherwise rendered idiot-proof.

Of course, you have to be careful too. No camera,

however sturdily fixed, is going to stay still if you

clout it with the full force of your body. I notice that

animators, even big clumsy ones, acquire in time

great spatial awareness.They become instinctively aware of all the

things they

must not bump into and manage to avoid them - often without looking
- with

balletic elegance. Even so, we have to make sure that everything is

fixed down.

You should be able to tighten your tripod so that the camera cannot
slip, even over days. If, as we have already said, you can tape or
otherwise fix the tripod legs to the floor, great. If not, try to weight it
down so that a glancing blow will not shift it. Sometimes at Aardman
we erect barriers - which could simply be ribbon or string - around the
tripod, just to keep the animator at a safe distance from it.

Similarly, you do not want your table to start shifting. A succession of

gentle nudges will appear like an earthquake in your finished film.The
answer is to use

Morph and his mate Chas, deep in some squabble of huge

unimportance. When Morph first appeared on BBC's 'Vision On', our
brief was to provide a small blob-like character who would change into
various shapes, charge around the table-top, and interact with
presenter Tony Hart.
Morph in colour, performing in a grey corner of our studios amid the
ghosts of his monochrome past. Essentials of the scene are: tripod legs
firmly secured in a spreader; camera set well back so the animator has
plenty of room; storyboard close by and other props ready to hand -so
no need to rummage around later.

the most solid base you can.The table-top is your stage, and the
surface should be appropriate. We will see later how models can be
fixed to the table to hold their position, and some of these methods are
fairly intrusive, involving pins or screws. It may be best not to use the
actuai table-top but to fix another surface to it. If you decide to do this,
thick fibreboard is a good choice. If you follow the Aardman career
path and start with clay models, you should be aware that oil and
sometimes pigment can seep out of the clay and stain unvarnished
wood. You may imagine that clay would stick well to a textured
surface, but I found with Morph that he actually stuck best to
something smooth and hard, like varnished wood, melamine or
formica. If your chosen surface is a board laid on top of an existing
table, make sure it is firmly clamped to the table.

practical animation

Right, top:To give a sense of place in Limoland, we built a big

panoramic view of a nonspecific American city, measuring about 40ft
x 30ft (12m x 9m), with the dwindling perspective you would get from
an aerial shot of a real city. Because the set was so large, we were able
to crane the camera down over the scene, though we did not have
space to track across it.

A Complex Studio

As you can see, we have moved off the kitchen table. I love the studios
at Aardman. I love the fact that they look, and sometimes feel, totally
chaotic, though actually they are spaces which have evolved to be the
way they are, and this includes being very efficient and businesslike.
Even so, I hesitate to show them off to aspiring animators, in case they
are discouraged by the complexity and technical sophistication.

In fact however, the heart of a studio, no matter how complex it may

seem, is the same as ever: model, set, camera and lights. We still use
35mm film cameras, though now we use them in conjunction with
sophisticated devices that give us precise motion control (see page 66),
allow us to plan a character's movements on-screen (video assist) and
mix between one frame and the next one before shooting (digital
frame store).

Video Assist When shooting on film, as we usually a e the only way to

see the camera's view of a scene is by looking through the camera
viewfinder. Video assist is a system for showing the same scene on a
TV monitor.The big advantage is that it simplifies the real 3-D world
into a two-dimensional world on the TV screen.To help ensure that
your puppet is moving smoothly and evenly through the shot, you can
draw on the screen with a water-soluble pen. If you trace, for example,
the line of the character's back you quickly find that after a few frames
you have a pattern of lines on the screen that should be evenly spaced.
Instead of guessing, or remembering how far your puppet has moved
each frame, you can clearly see it on the screen. In our studios, a video
camera is mounted to look through the film camera viewfinder, so that
we can see exactly the view that will appear on film.You can
approximate the same effect quite easily at home. Line up a video
camera as close as possible to your film camera, and connect it to the
TV. Clearly it helps if the video camera and film camera have the same
lens angle so that the TV sees almost exactly what the film camera
sees. At Aardman we go a step further. We use a computer-based video
recorder which records each image on to disc. In this way we can play
through the sequence of images already taken, and then add the one
we plan to take next. After checking it to

The main characters in Limoland are singers Tina Turner, above, and
Barry White, and because they appear in sets of different sizes we had
to make them in two different versions. One set was the ordinary size
for puppets, which is about 9in (23cm) high, and the other was double
that.
HTi . y —

•/*.

This street set for Limoland is built on a steel table at the right height
for animators to get in and out. We also left gaps for them between the
buildings (which cannot be seen from the camera's viewpoint).To
make things even more complex, we had to deal with a lot of 'practical'
lights in the form of street lights, lights from cars and others in the
buildings, all of which took a long time to set up.

see if it is OK, and adjusting the model if necessary, we record it on the

computer, adding it to the end of the sequence, and then shoot the
new image on the film camera. In fact, we are watching the animation
develop frame by frame as we do it.

Digital Frame Store This looks rather like a small video mixing desk.
We use it to store the image we have just taken, so that we can
compare it wit h the one we are preparing to shoot.The frame store
usually has a slider con ■ o that the animator can mix gently between
the two images, checking that every detail is correct. It is also
invaluable for checking that nothing in the picture has moved that the
animator did not want to move - on in the case of the animator's worst
disaster, when the puppet falls over during shot, it is possible to
replace it in exactly the right position.We are now in the process of
building the frame store into the video recorder so that everything is
housed in one container
practical animation

Lamps can be suspended from an overhead grid, right, or mounted, as

below, on floor-mounted lighting stands.

The outer lamps in this group are fitted with Fresnel lenses which
allow the beam angle to be adjusted.

Second and third from left are profile spots. Profile lamps give a more
controllable beam of light which can be focused to give a hard-edged
light or softened for a more subtle effect. Internal shutters can help to
control the spread of light. You can also insert a'gobo' -literally,
something which comes between the lamp and the set. We use these to
project a defined shape such as a window or a slatted venetian-blind
pattern.

The Power of Lighting

Today we use lighting in just the same way as a conventional film

studio, except that we work on a much smaller scale with relatively
tiny sets and characters. In order to achieve precise lighting control on
such small sets, we use lanterns designed for use in theatres, called
'profile' lamps.These are designed a little like slide projectors and can
project a very controlled beam from quite a distance. In this way lamps
positioned some distance from the set can illuminate very small areas
of it without 'spill light' falling on other areas.

The amount of light illuminating a set does not have to be huge as we

use long shutter speeds, typically between one quarter to a full second
exposure on moderately 'fast' film. It is possible to set a light quite
adequately with a couple of anglepoise lamps. Some cameras have
built-in light meters to help with exposure levels but, remember the
film is designed either for daylight use (which is a rather blue light) or
tungsten (electric lamps) which gives a rather orange light. If the film
type and light are mixed, a correction filter has to be used.This is
usually placed over the camera lens. If a filter is used, exposure
compensation needs to be made as the filter absorbs approximately
one stop of light. Film lighting very often uses a three-source formula:
The key light gives the characters their shape, making distinctive and
readable shadows.The lamp is often placed to one side of the camera
and a little higher than the character to give a 'normal' look. One side
of the face will be fully illuminated and the other will be in shadow,
which will show the character's features well. If there is a window in
the set, the key light will come from that direction to suggest that the
light is coming through the window.

The fill light fills in the shadow side of the subject, keeping a
reasonable difference between the two, typically one to two stops, to
prevent the shadow side going totally black.To avoid multiple
shadows, this light is often a'soft' light, diffused by tracing paper or
similar which is placed over the front of the lamp, or by 'bouncing' the
light off a white card to produce a diffused source.

Over the front of the bigger lamps are 'barn doors' which help to
control the spread of light and avoid unwanted spillage. Coloured gels
can be either clipped to the barn doors (far left) or mounted in a frame
that slots into the front of the lamp (third from right).

one basic needs

How lighting enhances the action. Clockwise from top left: Warm light
from the fire is contrasted with the cold blue moonlight flooding in
through the window; from Wat's Pig. Film noi'r suspense with deep
shadows and a shaft of bright light in The Wrong Trousers. Car lights
flash across the wall of the interview room in Going Equipped. Back
lighting rims the worm/phallus shape of the character in /dent and
makes him stand out from his background.
Bounced light is very useful, but the light 'falls off (diminishes in
power) very rapidly if the bounce board is too far from the subject.

The back light is used to 'rim' the subject with light, producing a
highlight along all the top edges and separating the subject from the
background.This is often called giving the subject'an edge'.This light is
placed quite high to the rear of the set pointing towards the camera.
Care has to be taken not to have the light shining directly into the
camera lens, so the lens may need to be shielded with a lens hood.

A very pleasing effect can be made using a 'three-quarter rear key'.This

combines the effect of the back light and key light in one lamp by
placing a lamp behind the subject and quite high, at about the 10
o'clock or 2 o'clock position.This gives strong shadows on the ground
running towards the camera, and provides the subject with an edge as
well as key-light modellmg.The shadow side (facing the camera) is
filled using soft light, and the exposure is made for the fill, with the
result that the three-quarter key light looks bright and crisp.
The lighting set-up for an outdoor shot in A Close Shave. For this shot
the key light (I) assumes the sun position.The shadows are filled
by'bouncing' a narrow-beamed lamp (4) off the large white fill board
(6). Three back lights (2,3,5) are used to give emphasis to certain parts
of the set, such as the cabin of the truck and details on the rooftop.
When positioning these, care is needed not to create secondary
shadows from the camera's viewpoint (7).

74

Preston at three times of day. For the daylight shot, left, the scene is
keyed from the left as if the main source of light is from a high sun.
The fill board to the right of the set bounces a soft light into the
shadow areas.
Wiring up the headlight with a wire through the wheel arch. An
important element in dressing and lighting night scenes is the use
of'practicals' such as these headlamps (actually torch or flashlight
bulbs) which are connected to a low-voltage power supply.

Once your basic lights are in position, you can adjust the amount of
light thrown on to the set by various means. First, think what kind of
an overall effect you want. Do you want a bright, high-key look with
little to no contrast -effectively shadowless - a style often used in
comedies or to replicate an outdoor light without sun? Or do you want
something more moody and low-key, with high contrast and plenty of
shadows, the kind that goes best with thrillers?

The direction of the key light is very important - it is the key. In

everyday life, people are usually seen illuminated from above - from
the sky - or from lights in the ceilings of buildings, so we read human
faces with shadows falling down the face or across it, as from a low sun
or as the light comes through a window. A light placed below the face
makes it look abnormal and even horrific, especially if the light is
coloured! Side lighting brings out the character in the face,
emphasising the contours, and side frontal lighting softens the
contours and produces a flattering look, as used in shots for glossy
magazines.

Soft back light can be produced by placing the lamp beside the Camera
and directing its beam over the top of the set to bounce off a white or
foil-covered board above and behind the set.This gives good rim-
iighting effects, but the lamp will need to be quite a bit stronger than
the key light to read adequately.

Another good effect is to throw shadows on the wall of a set to look like
sunlight pouring in through a window. Cut a window-frame shape out
of card and place this close to the set and some distance away from a
spotlight, positioning it so that it produces a slanting 'sun beam' across
the wall. Putting a light orange filter on the light source will make it
even more convincing.

Above left: It is dusk, and the scene is now keyed from the right using
a lower light source and an added orange gel (filter) to give the
impression of a setting sun. The advent of darkness is further
emphasised by having very little frontal fill light and by using
practicals such as the headlamps and lights in the building.

Above:The cold quality of night-time is achieved by using a blue gel on

the fill light contrasted with a warmer tungsten light source skimming
over the building as if emanating from practical light sources.

75

practical animation

simple techniques
Simple Clay Animation

Working with modelling clay (Plasticine) is the perfect way to get

started in

animation. As a material it is cheap, flexible and instantly ready to use.

Within
minutes of opening the pack, you can be animating (not necessarily
well, it

is true, but certainly animating). So where to start? You have a camera,

an empty table and a pack of clay.Take a piece of clay and roll it

round in your hands to warm it up. Now practise some moves

with it - let it stand up and flip over Divide it into two lumps.

Make them rotate around each other. Each time you move

one forward, say 0.5in (1.2cm), press down on it a little. As

it moves, it flattens itself. Let one piece grow taller. Before

you move it, mark its position on the table with a loop of

clay, lift it off the set, squeeze it out longer, then put it

back on its mark. Look through the camera and check

the new position.

78

two simple techniques

tl)/

*^±±
Top: A simple bar of clay, straight from the pack - and never mind the
finger-prints! Make it stand up, flip over and break into fragments.

Left: The raw material of clay animation. For filming we use English
clay, firmer than the American type which is softer and has brighter
colours. Clay is a simple tool, and you need no training to get
started.There is nothing to stand between you - the creator - and your
ideas.

Try to relax and not be too ambitious at first. Although you could go
directly to making a clay figure, a little person or animal, that would be
to risk becoming bogged down too soon in detail. Even at this first
stage in animation, there are rules and techniques which are simple to
follow and will enormously improve the finished result. Never forget
that the frame you are animating is one of a sequence. It is not an end
in itself. Never lose sight of how slow animation is. If you are working
in double-frame, 12 separate moves will only make one second of
animation.Time yourself going through a movement to get a sense of
how fast your puppet can or should move. How much can you do. how
far can you move in one second? If you have a stop-watch, use this to
time movements. If not, try saying Tick-tock' at a normal rate of
speaking; this takes about one second. If you need one second to
move, say 5 ft (1.5m), this means you can film your puppet travelling
an equivalent distance - perhaps a complete walk cycle - in 12 frames.
Divide up this space into 12 sections or frames to pinpoint each move.

79

Above: From a blob to a Morph in five moves.This is not so easy, and it

would be wise to practise first with the simple sequences on this and
the following pages. Have fun with what clay does so well. It is organic
and flexible. Each sequence gives you 8-1 0 phases of movement, or
nearly I second of film in double-frame (I2fps). Put in 3-4 still frames
at the beginning to announce your film, and 3-4 at the end to close it.

practical animation

•••
m^i

ttVi

Jt JV yv

Top: Make an elongated ball When this sequence is Above (both

pages): Make a ^^^" In between shots, clean

and squash it down.Thpn projected, it will appear that smooth sausage

shape and your hands with baby wipes

squeeze it out longer into a the ball has actually flown bend to make an
undulating and rub over the table

horn shape and let it spring trough the air. caterpillar. See how its
back surface to remove any bits

over in an arc and revert to arches up to power its of clay that would
shew up

its original form. movement forward. on your film.

simple techniques

.> AA A/I II A

**
OV JV Sir Jlr

Top: Squeeze out two shapes that rise up, cross over and land in each
other's places.Then they form columns, lean inward and intertwine.

Centre (both pages): Cartwheeling Morph.When a clay model is off-

balance, support it with fine (invisible) fishing wire suspended out of
shot from a rig.

^- Before you animate, use your own body to rehearse the movements
and secure a smooth flow from one phase to the next. We call this
'acting through the puppet'.

practical animation

Opposite: Room set ready for the opening shot. Objects such as the jug
and glasses, and the base of the anglepoise, will remain in a fixed
position throughout. Plan your own film with this in mind, allowing
later arrivals enough space to perform their moves. At the beginning of
your film, shoot 2-3 seconds of the same frame to establish the scene
before everything starts moving, and to freeze it at the end when the
action comes to a climactic halt.
mur ji

Simple Object Animation

Most of this book is concerned with animating models in miniature

sets. It is also perfectly possible to animate in the real world, using
full-sized objects as props and employing the human body - your own
or someone else's - as the puppet. When real people and locations are
used, the process is called 'pixillation', the word suggesting the idea of
figures jumping about as though bewitched. Because you do not have
to build either sets or models, it is a wonderful medium for fast,
improvised animation.

These techniques are not part of our mainstream work, but most of us
at Aardman have experimented with pixillation early on in our careers,
and most of us will jump at the opportunity to do it because it is great
fun. While conventional animation requires the animator to work
quietly and intensively on his or her own, pixillation is a process in
which several people can animate, or be animated, at the same time.

There are masses of things you could animate in a room.They include:

an anglepoise lamp; a clothes airer; a glass that fills and empties with
liquid; a chest of drawers opening and shutting; curtains and blinds
which open and close; a cupboard which opens and the contents jump
out; books which change places; toys; things with wheels;
counterweighted light fittings, and anything made in several sizes of
the same design - weights from scales, saucepans, plates, Russian
dolls.

When you lay out your set for object animation, think first of the end
point and how to work towards it. Not everything has to be in the
opening sequence. Bring some objects in later to create a surprise.
Examples from our shots overleaf are: the abacus next to the guitar;
the clothes airer; and the dominoes and Lego pieces which jump out of
the box.Try to create relationships between the pieces: the clothes
airer does not just yaw up and down, it also moves sideways towards
the chest, the drawers of which open to allow towels and a scarf to
slither out and on to the airer's rails. You need only a minimum of aids
to make a room scene work: use tacky putty to hold the rug in position,
and suspend the towels and scarf with cotton. As ever, when you move
something to animate it, like the jug or glasses, be sure to mark its
position with a loop of clay or tacky putty before you lift it. When
selecting your camera position, choose a viewpoint where everything
can be seen clearly and without distortion; in our example the lens is
approximately at the eye-level of someone standing.

^piiUliiy f *

Above: Frames from our Channel 4 Television logo sequence, made by

animating the chest of drawers and the number 4, which squeezes in
and out of various drawers.The beach location is an extra bit of surreal
fun which makes the chest look more interesting than it would in a
room setting.

• CI'E

L'

.NT
practical animation
Now the action starts. On the left, the baseball cap creeps up the wall
unit, the cupboard door opens, a poster starts to unravel and the first
tennis racquet comes into view.The clothes airer jumps across the
room, in the corner there is now an abacus next to the guitar, and
more and more cushions arrive on the sofa. In the foreground, the
lamp

comes on and focuses with rising astonishment on the box and its
contents.The dominoes dance off in one direction and the Lego pieces
turn themselves into tower blocks. Meanwhile, the glasses fill with
orange juice and the jug empties. In the background, the curtains part,
the blind slides up and flowers multiply like rabbits.

two simple techniques

See how many other animated objects you can find in the pictures. If
you make your own film, think about the story behind it all. Perhaps
this is what happens every day, when the humans are out of the house
and the things come out to play. Run the film backwards, and
everything goes back to normal.
simple techniques

Dancing spoons, arranged in a serpentine layout, as made for the

Golden Syrup commercial. A metal spoon, being inflexible, is typical of
the objects we animate by substitution, shooting a separate model, or
group of models, for each frame of film.

Other Animation Techniques

There is a very particular technique of puppet

animation called 'substitution'that I always associate

with the Dutch animator George Pal. Although I am

sure he did not invent the technique, he raised it to

a fine art. Substitution is utterly different from other

forms of puppet animation, and actually has more in

common with drawn animation. Instead of having

one puppet which is repositioned, you use a separate

model for each frame of film. Shooting in double-frame, you would

need 12

separate models Tor I second of film. We have used the technique only
a few

times, forTV commercials, and although it is absurdly labour-intensive

in the

modelmaking department, and expensive, the results can be very

satisfying.

Substitution has three main advantages. Firstly, it offers a way of

articulating materials that are otherwise very difficult to animate
because for some reason they will not bend. For example, a character
made out of shiny metal or glass is impossible to animate
conventionally (the normal solution today would be to create a
computer-generated character). However you can make a series of
models with a chrome finish and shoot them individually.

Secondly, the technique allows the sort of graphic exaggeration that is

common in 2-D animation. George Pal used this to great effect in his
films. A puppet's walk cycle can include extravagant stretching of the
limbs, as demonstrated by the marching figures in the illustrations.
With this kind of animation a puppet can change its mass from one
frame to the next. Finally, if an action is repeated, it can be quite
efficient to build an animation cycle.This is what we did for the Golden
Syrup commercial, where all the puppets were required to do was to
walk in a repeating cycle.

Substitution need not be the complicated and expensive process that I

have outlined. You can make simple and very effective substitution
cycles out of clay. This could be as simple as a bouncing-ball sequence,
where the clay model shows all the squash and stretch usually
associated with 2-D animation.To be a little more complicated, you
could make a series of walking figures to show the legs reaching out in
an exaggerated way. When you work with this technique, you can
emphasise the importance of bodyweight in motion, letting the
character almost sag into the ground and spring upward with each
step, like a human bouncing ball.

Marching figures animated by substitution, also for the Golden Syrup

commercial. The bread is from a giant loaf baked specially for us. The
baker cut it in slices and we put these in plywood formers to go stale,
so the slices would stay in the required shape during filming.
practical animation

models and modelmaking

practical animation
Armatures for Wallace and Gromit.These mechanical skeletons are
precisely designed and built from detailed drawings of the character
(see page 99). You can make them yourself, though most amateur
animators get theirs from specialist suppliers.

Basic Principles

You have got your storyboard, at least in outline, and perhaps a few
sketches of the character you want to make. Now is the time to think in
some detail about the nature of the model and what you want it to
do.Think about its size, shape, weight, and the kind of movements you
need it to perform.

How big should you build it? If it is too small, there

will not be room to accommodate the mechanical

skeleton, known as an armature, which allows the

model to be posed and to hold its position. The

advantage of a larger model is that you can give it plenty of

detail On the other hand, the larger the model the larger the set has to
be,

and that can present its own problems. For many of our films we make
the
human-shaped characters about 8-IOin (20-25cm) tall, and construct

everything else to fit round this scale.

Weight, too, can be a problem. Say you have a character with a big
head. Even if you use a hollow head, it will still need special support.
How much support? Will a simple wire skeleton be enough, or will it
need a tougher rod-and-joint armature? As ever, it is a balancing act
between the artistic requirements of how big the head must be, and
the practical question of how you can make that shape work.

Outwardly, Morph and Adam may look very similar. Both are human-
shaped figures made of clay. In construction, though, they are quite
different. While Morph is fairly earthbound, moving about over a
horizontal surface, Adam has to be far more athletic, able to stand on
one leg and bring off other balancing feats that Morph normally never
has to. Morph can thus be made of solid clay but Adam has to have
ball-and-socket joints in the legs so he can keep his balance.

In his quiet way, Morph also has his moments, as demonstrated in the
flick-through sequence at bottom right on pages 7-61.When a clay
model has to be tilted off-balance, there are lots of cunning ways to
stop him falling over - with a pin through the foot, magnets, a carefully
disguised blob of stickyback (wax), a rod in the back which the camera
cannot see, or very fine fishing wire suspended from a rig above the
model. For further tips, look at the sequences on pages 78-81, and see
also page 98.

One of the early traps is to think, 1 am a beginner, so I should use

basic, clay-only models.'That may be fine for the very early days,

but most people will then want to broaden out, and rightly so.

You need to test the other options. Quite soon you will also

90
Morph has always been handmade.To check that we always used the
same amount of clay, we weighed him on these old scales.

three models and modelmaking

Building a wire-based figure - one of the troupe of chihuahuas featured

in Stage Fright. Wire figures are easier to animate than clay models,
and cheaper to make than armatured characters, but tend to snap if
too much is demanded of them.

discover that unsupported clay is not all that easy to animate. It

smudges and gets dirty, and you have to clean it and resculpt every
two or three shots. Because of its weight, it is also relatively inflexible.

You might do better to go for a wire-based figure which has its rigid
parts, such as the head, made of balsa wood or fibreglass to cut down
on weight, and its skeleton covered with foam or cloth. A figure made
like this will last longer and let you do more with it. It will also, by
keeping its shape, retain the essentials of the character.This is
important. With clay, you can shave off so many bits between shots, or
unintentionally pull it so far out of shape, that you end up with a
different-looking character.This will not endear you to audiences, who
need to identify with a character that remains consistent and
recognisable.

Don't be afraid to experiment.The more you do, the more you will
build up an armoury of different solutions which you can apply in
different contexts. At Aardman, in the course of designing and
building a single character, we will look at dozens of different
materials. In modelmaking there is no neat set of perfect answers.
Every character calls for a different way of working.

Sometimes you do not need to build a whole character for a particular

sequence. For a head-and-shoulders shot, it can be enough to build the
top half of the body and put it on a central pole. As long as the
character is held stable for the shot, it does not need to have legs as
well.

Think also about the character's focus of interest. If a character has

expressive

hands, these will probably need a special armature. In Loves Me ...

Loves Me Not,

the character has to have long-fingered, extra-flexible hands so he can

perform

the delicate task of plucking individual petals off a

flower. Hands break easily, by the way, so with a

character like that you will need to make several

replacement hands which can then be pegged on to

the arm as required.To do this, you need to allow

for a hole at the end of the arm when you design

the basic figure.

As you can see, there is a lot of planning involved. It is a bit like
cooking, really.You have to put in all the ingredients to get the right
result. And in modelmaking, of course, you have to write the recipe as
well.

The compulsive petal-plucking hero of Loves Me ... Loves Me Not.

Because of the delicacy of his hand movements, and the amount of
times he repeats the action, special armatures were made for his
hands.

it t~f ~r^c= ;■ :'re:

: - — r - r i ■ : -:: '. ~ i

r • • zs t c 5 'ire

Making a Sheep

ee 1 : t : af sheep i - ~ ose Shave, which

~ ;~ee: -_ -

; eej she: "•= : 7 . : e: tt

e ■ :: ene eeded to she ent woolly

and ^VerxJolere are si : : : "ip.ds over

todies than the normal type

lerethe plunge tt :
I from the Knit-:-=="■■» d„ z e ."eep were really

t af options built into 1

:" ' : e : "

Right: Sketch of Shaun the Sheep as he swings to the rescue on board

the anvil. Drawings such as this help the animator to see the shot in
advance, and also give the modelmaker clues about how the model
should be constructed.
each corner so that the sheep's legs could either come

out vertically (for the normal standing position) or out at

the sides for the pyramid scene when the sheep are on

Wallace's motorbike. Again, there were special holes to allow the

neck to fit into the body at different points, depending on the shot.

When the sheep form a tower outside the prison (while Shaun saws
through

the bars and rescues Gromit), their heads are naturally forced
downwards by

the weight of the sheep on top, and so their necks had to be set lower
on the

body. In the usual standing position, the head was set higher up on the
body.

On the following pages we show the various construction stages for a

Normal Sheep.These involve a bewildering array of materials which we
have learned about through experience (also known as trial and error),
ranging from the K&S armature down to tiny details like the glass-
bead eyes with painted pupils.
►

practical animation
Left-hand column: Legs are made from lengths of twisted aluminium
wire.

The feet are steel discs with holes for the leg and for a pin in case the
leg needs extra support.

The leg is covered in mesh which is cut to size and squeezed round the
aluminium wire.

The head is made of fast-cast resin. Once out of the mould, the holes
and slots for eyes and ears are drilled to shape with an electric drill.
Right-hand column:The first stage completed, with pieces of K&S
square-section tubing added last to join the legs to the body.

The eyes are white glass beads with pupils painted on using a paint
brush and enamel paint. First, the glass bead is placed on a cocktail
stick, then put in a drill and clamped with a vice.The drill is turned on
to run slowly while the pupil is painted.

A covering of Plastazote - a hard, foam-like material - is put over the

metal armature and trimmed with a scalpel, leaving the various holes
clear for fitting the legs, neck and tail.

The ears are made of aluminium wire which is twisted to leave a loop
at one end. Over the loop goes a piece of mesh, and over this goes the
outer covering of maxi-plast rubber, which is sculpted and baked in an
oven to retain its shape.
three models and modelmaking
Left-hand column:The second stage completed, with Plastazote body
and legs made of maxi-plast rubber which has been sculpted and
baked.

Next, the body and tail are covered with a square of foam, which is
trimmed to shape with scissors.

Right-hand column: Fur fabric, the final covering, is starched to make

it lie down properly and avoid flickering on film. It is then trimmed
from its backing, top, and glued over the foam layer, as shown in the
next picture.

Eyelids are cast in coloured resin and then trimmed to shape. When
the head is finally assembled, the ears and neck are glued into the head
with epoxy-resin glue. The eyes, however, are bedded into a type of
sticky wax which holds them in place but allows movement.
Wear a mask when you handle epoxy-resin glue.

practical animation

Character sketches to work out the angles of head to body, the position
of the eyes for looking up, down or sideways, and how the paws change
from being conventional paw or hoof-like things, for walking on, to
human-style hands with four stubby fingers.

Gromit Construction
In their progress from A Grand Day Out to A Close Shave, the Wallace
and Gromit puppets have undergone a considerable evolution and are
now much more rounded and three-dimensional than they used to be.
Wallace had a much flatter face when he was building the rocket in the
cellar in A Grand Day Out. At first he did not speak much, but when he
did he suddenly developed cheeks and his brow got bigger. Now he is
much fuller in the face with quite rounded cheeks, and his mouth
expands quite enormously in a sideways direction when he speaks 'ee'
sounds, especially in words like 'cheese', mention of which tends to
make him grin as well. In the same way, Gromit's brow was much
smaller in the beginning, and is now quite big. His nose or muzzle has
meanwhile become shorter, and is less pear-shaped and more stubby.
At first he was to have been a talking dog, with a mouth, but this idea
was dropped when it became clear how expressive he could be just
through small movements of the eyes, ears and brow.

Not all Gromit figures are the same.The one shown here is a standard
Gromit standing on four legs. In other scenes where he is required to
sit down, say in an armchair or at the controls of the rocket, he has to
have a very different kind of ball-and-socket armature.This other type
is much more human-looking, simply because our joints are not in the
same places as those of dogs.

This Gromit consists basically of a ball-and-socket armature and a

body made of fast-cast resin. Plastazote could also be used for the core
of the body, which needs to be hard enough to be drilled for fixing the
puppet's limbs to it.The body is then built up with modelling clay. In
general it is a good idea to begin by adding clay to the armatured parts,
since these tend to give off black metallic flakes and oil which makes
the clay dirty. We block out the whole figure first, and then sculpt it to
its final form, working the surfaces until they get smoother and
smoother. Water is used to skim off clay, or lighter fluid, though this
eats away at surfaces and is best reserved for tiny detailed parts.
Gromit brings in the papers, ears raised on the alert.

tnree models and modelmaking

Starting with the armature and fast-cast resin parts for the head and
body, the Gromit shape is blocked out in clay and gradually smoothed
down with a modelling tool.Then the final details can be added - the
eyes, nose, ears and tail.

The eyes, like those of the sheep (see previous pages) are glass beads
with painted-on pupils.The noses were mass-produced for something
else, but when we saw they were just right for Gromit, we bought a
bagfu 1 . The ears and tail are made from a wire twist.This can be
coated with cotton, string or pipe-cleaners to help key on the clay,
which is then added and smoothed into shape.
practical animation

Making the armature is a delicate and specialist task. nothing less than
engineering in miniature.This picture shows the modelmaker
surrounded by the tools of his trade: in the foreground, vernier
calipers, alien keys, assorted pliers and a hacksaw.
Wat Construction

Wat and his brother in Wat's Pig are good examples

of the human-type everyman figure. When planning

the model, we knew that he would have to move

fluidry and often, and make a lot of emphatic

gestures.The solution was to keep his build fairly

spindly, as the drawing opposite shows. Basically, the head consists of

a solid

core covered with clay and sculpted, and the hands are also made of
clay.The

rest of the body is made of foam applied sparingly over a metal

armature.

Construction falls into several main stages. It begins with the

storyboard, where the film-maker can give real purpose to any
previous sketches he may have made of the character. Once the story is
working properly, the characters

design can be finalised and drawn up.The figure is then sculpted in I ■

c ' a y an< ^ a design drawing made for the armature.This shows in m
ta how the armature will be buirt and how it fits inside the

M character. When the armature is made, it is wrapped in plumbers

^H tape to make a better bond with the latex covering.The clay

sculpture is broken down into its component parts, such as the "X^^H
torso, and these are cast in plaster.This produces a plaster mould in

i"^^ which the armature is placed and coated with foam latex.The
"***"* mould is baked and the finished torso (or whatever) is removed
I -eady for colouring and assembly with the head, legs and hands.

A mobile model such as this needs good built-in stability to help it

stand up when its weight is not in the vertical plane.There are various
ways to achieve this, the best being to fit a three-part footplate to the
armature, as shown in the skeleton on the right These footplates
spread the weight of the model over a broad area and allow the
animator to move the foot in a convincing way when the model itself is
in motion. Other solutions to the stability problem are to hammer a
pin into the foot and hide it with a blob of clay, suitably coloured.
Alternatively, use a stickyback a small blob of wax. which you can mix
with clay to disguise it and then apply it to stick down the foot at the
appropriate point Another option is to use a pair of magnets: one is
fixed in the foot and the other is placed on the underside of the stage.
If these solutions are not enough, as when the model is standing on
one leg or leaning or holding something, you can put a piece of stout
wire in its back to act as a prop, and then anchor this in a blob of clay
behind the figure, where it will be out of sight of the camera e your
model tilt over, or fall or fly, put fine fishing wire around the waist :
nang the figure from a rig positioned out of shot Against a white
background the wire will probably be invisible. If not hide it by
spraying it in a colour t : ackground.

Wat and his brother, shown in split screen, essentially two characters
cast from the same mould.
• ee models and modelmaking

Co££

•
Sketch of how the armature fits inside the character's body.

practical animation

The original Wat figure is sculpted in Plasticine (modelling clay) on a

simple wire armature.This has brass square-section fittings so that all
the component parts can easily be taken apart.

The clay torso is laid up, ready to be cast in plaster.

three models and modelmaking

Left-hand column: Foam latex is brushed into the plaster mould, with
the ball-and-socket armature wrapped in tape.The mould is separated
after baking, the foam latex torso is removed and any excess foam is
trimmed off.

Right-hand column: Colouring the torso with a diluted latex

mixture.To colour figures, you can either spray the whole torso with
the main colour and then hand-paint details such as the belt, or you
can mask out the parts you do not want covered and spray the rest.
Assembling the puppet after painting.

Sculpting the hands in clay. A character such as Wat will use a lot of
hand gestures in the course of a film, which means the hands will need
replacing from time to time with new ones.

practical animation

Animating on glass.The characters are set up on the angled glass, often

with a suitable background placed behind it, then filmed from a
position over the animator's shoulder.

Rex Construction

Rex the Runt and the main characters in his series of adventures are
flattish, not unlike gingerbread men.Their shape, and the way they are
made, comes from the special way the series is filmed.This is the so-
called 2-D technique of shooting the characters on an angled sheet of
glass, often with a painted or photographic background positioned
behind the glass so that the two elements can be combined in a single
shot. Rex and the others - Wendy, Bad Bob and Vince - are not
completely two-dimensional (even a gingerbread man has a certain
minimal depth) but the way they can be used is very different from a
fully rounded, three-dimensional character

There are three main advantages to shooting on glass.

Firstly you do not need the complex armatures which have

to be built for most of our conventional 3-D characters,

such as Wallace and Gromit. Secondly the characters are not

bound by gravity and can be animated to jump or fly around the

scene, more like they do in eel animation.Thirdly, the animator

can sit in reasonable comfort at the sheet of glass, which is fixed at the
angle of

a drawing-board, with the camera shooting over the animator's

shoulder.

In the course of making a series, we get through several hundred main

characters. Obviously, it is important that each one should look the
same as its predecessors. At the same time, they have to be as simple
as possible to make.The solution for us is to use press-moulds.The
process begins, as ever, with a model drawing, which is then sculpted
in clay. We then cast the character in rubber.

When the clay is removed, it leaves an impression that gives us the

press mould.This is then surrounded by a plaster jacket to

stop the mould distortmg.The mould can be reused throughout the

production

to turn out new characters when they are needed.

Once the mould is ready for use, the first step is to dust it with talcum
powder to prevent the clay from sticking to it.Then a thin layer of clay
is rolled out and pressed into the mould.This is followed by more clay,
pushed in carefully to make sure it works its way into all the detailing
of the figure.The top surface is finally flattened out with a rolling
pin.To extract the completed character from the mould, the trick is to
bend it slowly and at just the right angle for it to pop out.The character
is then ready for the usual finishing work - adding the eyes, nose,
mouth and any other special features, such as Bad Bob's eye patch.

Rex and Vince, ready for the camera. Once the basic figure is sprung
from the press mould, the eyes, noses and clothing are added.The eyes
consist of simple white beads with small holes in the pupil so the eye
can be moved around expressively. Noses are made of solid resin, and
Rex's mouth is a loop of clay.

three models and modelmaking

;I//ChJ

Above: A complete impression of the figure lies in the rubber mould

after casting, while the modelmaker rolls out a thin layer of clay.

Centre left: Layers of clay are pressed into the mould and pushed into
all the details of the figure.

Centre right: When the mould is full, it is flattened with a rolling pin.

Below:The rubber mould is separated from its plaster jacket and then
gently bent to release the new figure.
practical animation

Preston

Preston is the evil dog in A Close Shave who first appears as the
thuggish sheep-rustler who rules the roost in Wendolene's blighted
household. At the film's climax, he is transformed into a metallic
monster, receives his just desserts and ends up as a crippled robotic
wreck. He is thus seen in three completely different versions - the
brutal but recognisably doggy dog, the gleaming robo-dog and the
trembling has-been.

John Wright, who specialises in 'engineered' models, made the

original armature for the basic Preston, which was then modelled in
clay and dressed with the character's special spiked collar and wrist
bands.The other, mechanical versions are much more elaborate and
were made in John Wright's workshop in Bristol. He recalls,'What was
interesting about the robot Preston was that his armature was on the
outside and became part of his villainous character'
The arms and legs are in fact part of a basic armature, with the visible
parts dressed with extra screws and piping to make them look more
mechanical and threatening.The body was machined in a chemical-
wood material called Modelling Board and painted with a steel-finish
paint.This was then dirtied up around the rivets to make it look as if it
had been knocked about. On the chest (see main picture, right) is a
miniature tape recorder also specially made.The other main feature of
this model is a hinge at the back of the head which allows the top of
the head to lift back and reveal a mouth horrifically full of cogs, gears
and piping.

Finally, after his disastrous experience in the Mutton-O-Matic, the

crippled Preston is a mere shadow of his former brute self.The body is
essentially the same, though tipped over into the horizontal, but in
place of his fierce armature-legs he now stands on four much more
spindly supports, made to look like wall units for a shelving system
and mounted on pram wheels. For added pathos he sports a bandage
wrapped round his forehead.

The three ages of Preston, in which the villainous bully dog is

transformed into a metal robot clad in spikes, pipes and rivets, and
later, after meeting a machine which is even bigger than he is, emerges
a beaten-up, bandaged wreck gliding about on pram wheels.

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practical animation

set design and making

VM

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The Jaguar mourns the lack of space in his simple brick enclosure;
from Creature Comforts.

Planning a Set

For about the first ten years of our career, Dave and I never had a set
with more than three walls in it.That really is all you need at first, just
something that neatly contains the miniature world you are filming.

Every set has to have a firm base which does not move. Even though
your basic stage or tabletop may be solid and flat, it is a good idea to
build each set with its own floor. It will then be completely
transportable and can be stored out of the way when you do not need
it, and brought back for use ir another film. Also, your basic stage will
soon get mucky and stop being very flat if it has to be host to a
succession of different sets. Use a sheet of hardboard or plywood as
the platform and colour it with emulsion paint.

As you design your set, think about where you will want to bring in the
camera. In relative scale, the camera is about as big as a double-decker
bus,

four set design and making

so you have to make plenty of allowance for it Think, too, about how
you will light your set and leave enough space to get in and animate
your characters, whether from the front, the side or by moving in over
the top.Try to avoid situations where you risk brushing against, and
moving, any part of the set. This is easier said than done, but if you
move something and do not put it back exactly where it was, the shift
will show up on your film.

Try to keep your first sets indoors, and confine everything within a
space of about 4ft x 4ft (1.2m x 1,2m). For a simple room set, build two
side walls and a back wall from foamboard or thick card. Cut out a
window in a side or rear wall to give yourself extra lighting and
shadow options. Hold the walls upright with supports glued on to the
back, and fix the walls to the floor with blobs of tacky putty. If you
need to take out a wall to shoot from a different angle, be sure to mark
its position before you lift it.

The furniture and other props need not be

elaborate. Add simple chairs and a table if this fits

the plot of your story. Look around local toy and

model shops for ready-made pieces, or make

everything yourself from simple materials such as

balsa wood. Glue the parts together and colour

them. Later you can move on to scenic artist's paints,

but for now any water-based paint will do. If you

want a tree to be visible outside the window, make

the trunk and branches from a frame of twisted

aluminium wire, cover it with masking tape and paint it. Cut leaves
from

coloured paper and glue them on to small frames of fine mesh, of the
kind

used to patch holes in the bodywork of cars.

Bear in mind that props should be more or less in scale with your
characters, and that most human-shaped puppets are 8-IOin (20-
25cm) tall. Remember, too, that nothing has to be spot-on realistic.
You are operating in a world populated by small clay creatures, and
the important thing is that their chairs, their TV sets, cars and other
worldly goods should look appropriate to them.

A Straightforward Set

From an entry-level set with just three walls, it is not such a big jump
to Wallace and Gromit's sitting-room.The basic structure is the same,
even though it is made with greater expertise and has more elaborate
furniture and decor.

Our conventional room sets are free-standing table units.The whole

structure has to be strong and solid enough not to move under
temperature and

Wallace in his sitting room, basically a simple three-walled set with a

window on one side, through which different lighting effects could be
used to suggest changes in the weather or time of day.

practical animation

atmospheric changes.The floors are usually made of perforated steel,

which is strong enough not to bend and thin enough for magnets
positioned underneath to hold and draw the puppets as they move
around the set.The actual room finish - in the form of floorboards,
carpet and so on - is fixed over the floor.The room walls are usually
made of plywood and fixed in position by means of dowels - like pack-
flat furniture - so they can be lifted out easily when shots need to be
taken through the space they are occupying.

Set drawing for Wat's Pig, with Wat outside his hove! and the ground
sloping up and away towards the castle. Opposite, a frame from the
film shows the same scene.

F=1

You can apply the same techniques to other more complicated sets
such as a staircase and landing. Here, it is important to leave sufficient
space under the stairs for the animators to get in and reposition the
magnets -and to do so many times during the course of a sequence.

"y-jjin Outdoor and Landscape Sets

uTr\ /x Outdoor sets are generally bigger and more difficult because

1 you have different layers from front to back, and this all takes p a lot
more space than a room set. In Wat's Pig, for

™r\A
four set design and making

Below is the same landscape seen from side-on. From the platform on
the far right, where the characters stand, the ground rolls away in
layers towards the horizon and painted sky.

example, we had a landscape set with three layers, and a trek running
through it. First was the foreground which sloped upwards from a flat
plain that the characters could stand on.This was about 8ft (2.4m)
deep.Then the land appeared to fall away - in fact it was a gap with
nothing at all there - and behind that we had the next layer of hills,
which was about 2ft (60cm) from front to back. However, the track
appeared much narrower so the audience would understand that it
was much farther away. Behind this was the third layer of hills with
the castle perched on top.
These hills were painted in paler colours to make them recede, and in
the far background was a painted sky. It was all very graphic rather
than realistic, but it suited the context of a fabled medieval world
inhabited by peasants, warriors, a power-mad baron and a kindly
smiling pig.

practical animation

Wide-eyed and expressive, with wiper eyebrows and radiator mouths:

two cars from the Chevron series.

Matching Sets to Products

When the function of a set is to help advertise a product, it will tend to

look more highly finished than usual.This is particularly true of scenes
where the product itself is presented in some form. Clients want their
product to look good, and sometimes the tone of a commercial is
worked out from that point.

This by no means applies to all commercials, many of which take place

in a complete fantasy land which is geared to promoting some idea
about the product or special quality that the advertising agency has
chosen to emphasise - its great taste, for example, or the fact that it is
made of real fruit. However, when the product appears in the story, it
will probably be handled straight, pretty much as you would see it in
real life or in a brochure. In our commercials for Burger King, we
peopled the set with a colourful mob of clay puppets, but the burgers,
buns, chips, etc were handled in a realistic manner.

To make such items is specialist work, and here the boundaries

become blurred between modelmaking and set-building. Whoever
does the work, the

important thing is to get the right blend between the animated models
and the backgrounds against which they move.This can be seen in the
Polo commercials, where the sturdy shape of the mints, with their
chunky embossed lettering, seems to express a sympathetic bond with
the shiny metal machines in the Factory of the Future (courtesy of
1930s Hollywood) which is obviously dedicated to production of the
ultimate mint, and where every surface is studded with Polo-like
rivets.

In our Chevron commercials, we were dealing with a product which is

virtually impossible to show - petrol.To resolve this, we created a
range of vehicles which run on Chevron (and others that do not) and
made them into central figures.They are strong characters with
expressive features: the headlights are eyes, which swivel this way and
that, their radiator grilles are mouths and their wipers act as highly
mobile eyebrows.The sets were then matched to the cars, right down
to the last

High-finish factory sets for the Polo commercials, crammed with glass
and metal surfaces held together by Polo-shaped rivets.
Drawing for a Polo factory set, which by featuring an impressive length
of conveyor belt, moving in a bold diagonal across the set and
surrounded by machines, goes far beyond the conventional three-
walled space of most 3-D animation sets.

petrol pump and telegraph pole, so that everything had the same
graphic 'cartoon' quality. In other words, we built a believable world
for those characters to inhabit.

Many advertisements finish by cutting to a pack shot of the product.

You may see the company name and logo as well as the product, or
just the product by itself. For this we often make a special larger
version, it being much easier to make something look good if you make
it bigger than life-size and build up its inherent textures.These packs
may even be more perfect than the ones \ e

in the supermarket. We can do this by taking off the bar code, for
example, or some tiny detail such as a copyright line.
Then the pack has to sit perfectly in its setting, on a velvet cushion or
surrounded by petals, each of which has to be exquisite and just right.
All this adds a sense of high quality, hence desirability, which the
client naturally wants people to associate with this particular product.

practical animation

A Complex Set

The film Stage Fright started off as the story of an entertainer who
passed through all the showbiz eras of this century. Beginning as a
dog-juggler in music hall, he went into silent movies, then he tried
talkies, and so on, and each time he failed in some dreadful way to
make a go of it. As the planning went on, we could see it would be
possible to make almost the entire film in a single music-hall setting,
and this encouraged us to invest heavily in building one big set.

The theatre is based on the Bristol Old Vic, and we show it in two
periods. One belongs to the cheerful past, when it was a proper music
hall, and the other to the present after it has become a virtual ruin.To
do this we built the theatre in its prime, decorated with shimmering
gilt ornament and gas lamps, and filmed all the sequences relating to
that period.Then we wrecked it, smashed the plasterwork and ripped
up the seats until we had the right air of ultimate mournful decay.

Right, top: the auditorium in its distressed state, after we had trashed
it to show the old music hall in its time of decay.

Right, below left:The theatre during construction, from which you can
get an idea of its relatively huge scale for an animation film. Below
right is the second proscenium arch where we filmed on-stage scenes
to save time while the main auditorium was in use.

Set drawing for Stage Fright, the stalls and galleries filled with 80-90
characters. In some shots every one of them had to be animated,
especially when they were applauding or jeering.

On the right is a plan view of the auditorium, showing the boxes near
the stage which swung open like doors so that between shots the
animators could move in and animate the characters.

It was a big set, measuring about I Oft (3m) from front to back, 6ft
(1.8m) high and 6ft (1.8m) wide, and consisted of about thirty separate
pieces. Fitting it all together was like doing a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. Along
the side walls of the auditorium we had little boxes for members of the
audience. We built these side parts as big doors which could be opened
out on hinges.The animators could then go in, animate the figures in
the audience, including those in the boxes, then close the door ready
for the next shot.The hinges were disguised under architectural
columns which looked like part of the theatre's design. We also built a
second proscenium arch and front-stage area so we could film on-
stage shots at the same time as the more complicated sequences were
being photographed in the mam theatre.
practical animation

Below:The hand next to this display of Wallace's tool-kit gives an idea

of how minute such props have to be.To compare the real-life scale of
the saw in this group with the saw as it actually appears in the film
frame, look at the picture on page 76.
Ingenuity and Props

Because we work in miniature, all our props are small. Some, however,
are very . small. Many of these are hand-held items - a toaster, a tea
set, a hair-drier a plate of burger and chips. All these things have to be
made in the same scale as the hands that will hold or carry them,
although that is not necessarily the same as the scale of the set. Hands
are often made disproportionately large to cope with all the work they
have to do, so if the same prop was held up to the character's head it
would look ridiculous.To get over this, you probably have to make a
smaller version of the prop. Close-ups, on the other hand, look better
with a larger version.These are just some of the complications that our
prop-makers have to bear in mind as they search for ingenious ways to
convey the essence of an object. Over the years they acquire an
extraordinary mental directory of solutions to cover anything from a
tiny submarine to an electric fire that actually glows.

As ever, there are no fixed rules about materials or methods of

construction. For fine or detailed work, prop-makers sometimes use
rather finer materials than basic modelling clay. Products such as
Fimo, Milliput and Sculpy are easier to model than standard
Plasticine; the sculpted object can then be baked in an oven and hand-
painted. Items of clothing are often sculpted in Plasticine, then a
plaster mould is made and filled with latex which has lengths of wire
inside it. If you want, for example, an apron or a coat that will flap in
the wind, the wire helps it to hold its position. When several versions
of the same prop are needed, such as shoes or hats, it may be best to
use fast-cast resin and a silicone mould.
Graphic items such as newspapers or Wallace's travel and cheese
magazines can usually be produced on the computer and reduced
down.The same goes for posters, wall-signs and notices on shop-
fronts. If a

character needs to hold a newspaper while reading it, you can back the
paper with heavy-duty foil to hold it firm while in shot. Household
decorations, such as the pictures on the wall, the wallpaper and
carpets in Wallace's living room are all hand-painted. You could make
these by photocopying, but usually directors prefer things to have a
home-made feel. We have also included a number of glass objects in
our films.These are made for us by a professional glassblower.

A Moon rocket no taller than a paint-brush, from A Grand Day Out,

and a flying toaster made for an episode of Morph.

Right: Gromit flies round on the end of a miniature power drill; from
A Grand Day Out.

practical animation
Prop-making for small worlds.

This page, from top: Making Wallace's favourite crackers, and the
packets too.

Mocking up newspapers and other paper items. These may be needed

for a character to hold and read, or for display in a newsagent's
window, is shown. Newspaper props are backed with heavy-duty foil
so they hold their position during shooting.
In the glassblower's workshop, where all manner of glass objects are
made, including the milk bottles which feature at the end of the chase
sequence in The Wrong Trousers.

Wallace's hair-drier with an action frame from The Wrong Trousers.

Opposite: A parade of objects to demonstrate the invention and

artistry of the prop-makers.They include the submarine that journeyed
through Vince's brain in the 'Rex the Runt' series, and the basket used
by Tiny, the dog-juggler in Stage Fright.

four set design and making

practical animation
Left to right: Ancient exhibits from the museum in The Wrong
Trousers; Contemporary table and lamp from Not Without My
Handbag; fantastic creatures from the Rex the Runt series,

an animated dustbin featured in Morph, and tiny instruments for

Rex's band. Though beautifully crafted, some of these props were only
seen for a fleeting second in the final film.
four set design and making

practical animation

Miniature engineering from John Wright's workshop. Wallace's

motor-bike is engineered like a real motorbike, with welded parts and
steel frames. Even the wheel spokes are individually stitched with wire
and drilled into the wheel frame.The tyres are rubber, like real ones.
Working parts such as the exhaust and engine are made of steel and
chrome and heated to make them look scorched.
Big machines, like the Mutton-O-Matic, are made using foundry-cast
brass parts. With such pieces, it is good to put everything on them, as
for an all-round view, with all the rivets showing. When you are
making the model, you never know which camera angle will finally be
chosen.
He's leaving home. For this rain scene in The Wrong Trousers, we
superimposed live-action rain.The water running down Gromifs cape
was actually tiny blobs of glycerine which were animated frame by
frame.

Right: Ghost effect in Stage Fright, basically achieved by double

exposure.

Special Effects

Some special effects are made principally with the camera. Others rely
on physical factors such as the use of glass to lend invisible support, or
artfully chosen props and materials which can be made to pass off as
something else. Usually, though, a successful effect is a blend of both.
How you light your scene is also important.

Double exposure For double exposures, or

superimpositions, which can be applied to produce

ghost effects, you need a camera with a windback

facility First, expose your mam scene, then wind back

the film by the number of frames in which you want your ghost to
appear. If

you then expose this figure against a black background, it will show
through on

four set design and making

Top:The secret of pouring tea is to use rolls of squashed-up brown

Cellophane.This catches the light and makes it look as if it is moving;
from Palmy Days.

Centre: Beads of sweat fly off the anxious Penguin's brow in The
Wrong Trousers. The sweat was made by animating tiny perspex drops
across the window in front of the character.

Bottom: Washing windows with a foam of white hair wax dotted with
different-sized glass beads; from A Close Shave. As with all new
solutions, once you have made the wonderful discovery that foam =
white hair wax + added glass beads, you can apply the formula to other
situations to make, say, shaving foam or bubble-bath.

the first exposure and be transparent, like a ghost. Black velvet is best
for the background, because it reflects less light than black paper. You
can extend this trick to other kinds of apparition, as the Victorian
photographers did with their scenes of The soldier's dream of his
loved-ones' and 'The fairies' dell', etc.
Mattes The simplest form is the split screen. Here you mask off one
side of the picture and shoot the action that fits into the unmasked
half.You rewind the film, swap the mask over and shoot the action for
the other side.This process can be further developed by using a sheet
of glass in front of the camera, on which an area of the image is
masked off with black paint - for example, the action to be seen inside
the windows of a miniature space-ship. The ship is shot with the
window areas painted out on the glass.Then the film is rewound, the
clear area painted black and the previously painted area scraped clear,
and finally the action for the window is set up in front of the camera
and shot.

Water and rain effects Water and other liquids are difficult to
simulate, and animators have tried out various ways to convey the
illusion. A classic method for flat water, say a lake or river, is to cut a
perspex sheet to size and spray it with the colours you want, adding
ripple effects and so on.

For the ram effect in The Wrong Trousers, we put little blobs of
glycerine on glass and animated them by blowing them, frame by
frame, down the glass. Then, every so often, we put in a random splash
effect, a tiny winged object that looked like a very small butterfly and
was made out of eel. We stuck this on Gromit's raincoat and on the
ground, just for one frame, then took it off. In another scene in The
Wrong Trousers, the Penguin is outside the museum window during
the robbery, and beads of sweat fly off him. Again, we animated small
perspex drops across the glass away from him. For the foam in the
window-washing sequence in A Close Shave, we came up with a
combination of white hair wax dotted with glass beads to represent the
bubbles.To suggest bubbles bursting and new ones forming, we took
beads out and put in new ones.
Advanced Special Effects

There are some special effects you cannot easily achieve with model
animation. For example, it is difficult to convey the illusion of high-
speed motion. If you animate objects moving fast across the screen,
you often get jerky,'strobing' movement because the distance between
the positions of the models from one frame to another is too great for
the brain to smooth out.The problem is exacerbated by the sharp
images created by photographing static objects.

When shot as live-action film, fast-moving objects create a blurred

image on e?ch frame of the film because they are moving during the
relatively long exposure made by the live-action camera.These blurred,
indistinct images are more easily smoothed over by the brain than the
hard-edged, sharp images

four set design and making

Left:The train chase scene in The Wrong Trousers. By moving the train
and the camera together during a two-second exposure, it and the
characters on board come out sharply defined, whereas the wallpaper
background is blurred.

created by stop-frame animation.To avoid the jerky effects of fast-

moving objects in animation, you have to create blurred images. In the
train chase in The WrongTrousers and the lorry chase in A Close
Shave, we blurred the background by using long exposures (one or two
seconds) and by physically moving the camera during the exposure.
To take the train example, the train on its track was attached to the
camera, which was mounted on a dolly. For each frame, we pushed the
dolly about 3-4in (8-1 Ocm) and this carried the tram along with it. At
the same time we pressed the button to expose the film.The characters
on the train come out sharply defined because they are moving with
the camera, but in the course of the two-second exposure the camera
moves fractionally past the wallpaper in the background, and this
comes out blurred.

Blue-screen This process is used a great deal in films today. It is a way

of putting difficult foreground action against a realistic background -
for example, to show people falling out of a building. We use the
technique frequently when we want to put animated characters into a
live-action background. First, the foreground action (the people
falling) is shot against a blue background.The blue is then
electronically replaced by the chosen background (the building) using
a sophisticated computer graphics system (it used to be done in the
film laboratories, but this is rare nowadays).This has the effect of
merging the two elements of the scene. Naturally, you have to be
careful to match the lighting, perspective and camera angles,
otherwise it can look like cut-out images stuck on another picture!

Douglas the Lurpak Butter man, filmed by the blue-screen process.

First he is shot against a blue background, then the blue is
electronically replaced by the table-top scene.We use blue as the
background colour because human faces do not usually have much
blue in them. Any strong colour will do, such as lime green, but it is
important to ensure that the colour does not appear in the
surrounding scene because it will also be removed in the process.
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animation and performance

practical animation
Nick Park, stopwatch in hand, uses his own body to work through the
jerky, exaggerated movements of the Wrong Trousers (seen right in
action). Once he knows exactly how long it takes to get from A to B in a
particular phase, he can plan how to animate the model within this
timespan.

Movement

Like actors, animators communicate through the language of

movement We create characters, convey emotions and make people
laugh through the movements, gestures and facial expressions of our
puppets.

People often say that our work is naturalistic, which I think is meant as
a compliment because the best model animation is regularly praised
for its

smooth and 'natural' movement But in fact our work is not realistic at
all. It is - and rt should be - exaggerated. All the animated movements
that we do, however understated or natural they may appear, are
bigger, bolder and simpler than 'real life'. Real movement the sort of
thing you would see if you analysed film of a live acton always looks
weak and bland when it is closely imitated in an animated version.
Some animators use previously shot live-action footage as reference
material, or even copy it slavishly frame by frame to create their own
animated performance. At Aardman we rarely do this. We prefer to act
out the animation ourselves. so that we really understand it then add
our own degree of caricature and stylisation.The important thing is
that the audience should be able to understand what the puppet
character is doing and thinking, no matter how broad or subtle the
style of animation. What we love doing is producing performances
with our puppets that feel 'natural' because in some way they feel true.
By simplifying and exaggerating gestures, we try to distil the essence
of a particular movement or sequence of movements.This is far more
important than copying from real life. When we get this right, it gives
the audience a great sense of recognition.They think'Yes, that's exactly
how people react or behave,' and they believe that what they have seen
is uncannily natural.

Posing the Character Obviously, animation is about movement

But few really expressive sequences are carried out through

continuous movement One of the classic symptoms of

our earliest work is that the characters shift about

constantly and restlesslessly, never daring to be still. Later

we realised that the time between movements, when

the puppet is still, often conveys far more character than the

same number of seconds of elaborate animation.

We talk of'poses' and 'holds'. A pose is pretty obvious - a still position

that conveys a lot of information about

five animation and performance

w^- In the animated

sequences on the following pages, we show key frames to illustrate the

essence of a movement. In a full sequence, there would be other,
intervening frames.

mood and emotion. A hold is the moment when the action stops -
though it seldom freezes completely - and it can last for anything from
a quarter of a second to half a minute. During these holds, the
audience can see and understand far more than when the character is
continually moving.The point to remember is that your puppet is
never just sitting or standing or leaning - it should always be
expressive in face and body.You should always know what your
character is thinking and feeling - if you don't, who does? - and in the
poses, you make it clear to the audience.

To be sure, I certainly do not mean that the pose has to be like some
magnificent melodramatic gesture from a Victorian painting.
Audiences are very sophisticated, and the pose can oe as subtle, or as
corny, as you can make it. If your puppet is frightened, he does not
have to be cringing and quaking in extravagant terror The fear can be
communicated in the angle of the head, the tension in the shoulders
and arms and the smallest obsessive gesture with one hand.

Remember that these holds should not be totally static. Watch

television with the sound off, or watch people in the street. You often
see people sit or stand for several minutes at a time, doing virtually
nothing. However, they are moving in slight ways, and they are alive.
If your puppet goes into a hold, keep it alive, don't let it freeze, and
look on this as an opportunity to let the audience see what he or she is
thinking and feeling.

Changing the Pace Of course, different actions happen at different

speeds. Building a house of cards is a slow and careful business,
whereas trying to extract a lighted cigarette from inside your clothing
is going to be pretty frenetic. But whatever the speed of the sequence,
try to vary the pace of individual parts of your animation.Try to avoid
falling into a too-regular rhythm of move-hold-move-hold. Remember
too that different parts of the body can move at different speeds. A
thief may creep carefully through an empty house, but his head and
eyes can move quickly and sharply.

practical animation

When a hand or a foot - or a bottom or a nose - comes into contact

with the ground, make it look as if it is firmly set. Make it lie flat and
contact the ground at all points, so that no line of light is visible
underneath. This makes the puppet feel larger and heavier.
Remember that your puppet has a centre of gravity, and needs to stay
well balanced. Standing with his weight equally on both feet, you want
him to step forward on to his right foot.To do this, he must first shift
his body weight over Ins supporting foot, the left. The best
demonstration is to try it yourself. Start with your

feet very close together, and step forward on to your right foot. As you
start, you move very slightly to the left. Starting with your feet a metre
apart, you are forced to move a long way to the left before you can go
forward. Now try moving off without shifting left and see how
unnatural it feels.

32

Right: Everything about this puppet is downcast. His feet barely leave
the ground, his head bounces slowly as if he has not got the strength to
hold it up, and his arms swing heavily in small arcs.

animation and performance

Every step we take starts at the hip joint.Your puppet should do the
same. When he prepares to move off, the supporting hip drops down
as the body's weight is transferred on to it.The pelvis swivels and the
stepping foot is released.
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Most of the principles that make up good animation have something to
do with the transference of weight and the animator's ability to make it
believable.

Characters in animation are not bound by the Laws of Gravity. If you

want to, you can make an elephant flit around as weightlessly as a
butterfly. However, in nearly all our animation, we work hard to create
the illusion that our puppets are earthbound. I often think that
Plasticine lends itself best to creating solid, heavy-looking characters.

Making Movement Believable

Anticipation Before an animated figure starts moving in one direction,

we usually anticipate the action by moving it the opposite way.This is
not so strange when you think about it. If you want to jump up in the
air, you first crouch down; if you want to throw a ball forward, the first
thing your arm does is go back. Anticipation is 'realistic', and it also
works well in film because the moment of anticipation prepares the
audience for the action which is going to follow.This is why, in cartoon
films, the anticipation is often stronger than the action itself.

Weight We make our characters more believable by making them look

heavy. The weightlifter, above, nicely demonstrates this as he struggles
to lift a barbell which only weighs a couple of ounces.The animator
plans and rehearses the movement, miming it to understand how it
works.Then he tries to make the puppet do the hard work. In stage 3
for example, he has just started to lift by pushing his legs and back
straight, and stretching his arms. At stage 4, he has hauled the barbell
as high as he can, it hangs in the air for a moment before it
Above:Think about the weightlifter's speed through the lift. Most of
the action is quite slow, but at stage 4 he suddenly snatches up the
weight, and at 5 he quickly gets his hands and arms below the barbell.

36

five animation and performance

Top: Wallace walks across the museum ceiling in The Wrong Trousers,
his leg movements controlled by Feathers McGraw from outside the
window.The way he moves reflects both the character and his
plight.The Penguin, mindful of the risks he is taking, moves the
Trousers with exaggerated care. The knees come up high and the feet
are planted with great caution, to make sure they stick. Inside the
Trousers, Wallace moves to a linked but different pattern.

falls, and in that time he quickly gets his hands and body underneath
it. When he finally holds the weight aloft in triumph, see how his arms
and legs are locked straight. If they were not, the audience would not
believe he could support a heavy weight.

Momentum Remember that, like the barbell, your head, body and
limbs are also heavy. Because of this, they should not stop moving too
quickly once they start.Try sprinting as fast as you can, then stopping.
When your fee. finally stop, thanks to friction, your head and body will
want to carry on, tipping you forward. In animation, we often
exaggerate this natural effect.

Acceleration and Deceleration Except in extreme cases, objects and

people do not suddenly start or stop moving at full speed.They
normally accelerate and decelerate.This is pretty obvious in the case of
a sprinter running from the starting blocks, but it applies equally to
small actions such as lifting your hand to scratch your ear Remember
that your hand and arm have weight, and have to be brought up to
speed.

37

See how his arms swing like a pendulum, but always behind the
movement of the feet. When a foot is forward, the arms swing
helplessly back, then swing forward again as the next stride begins.

practical animation

Very little human movement Putting it all together

happens in straight lines. It can usually be broken down into a series

of arcs. If you trace the path of the batter's foot, hand or hip, you
should see a pattern of overlapping curves.

The sequences here show a mix of all the animation principles

mentioned in the previous pages. Swinging a baseball bat is a good
example because the whole process is about storing up and using
energy.

Stage I shows the batter poised to receive the ball. In 2 and 3 he moves
back, anticipating the main action which will be forward. His
shoulders rotate, storing energy, and his weight is entirely on the back
foot, allowing him to raise the left

All the sequences on these pages demonstrate how movement flows

through a gesture. I think of it as a wave that runs through the body
from the first thing that moves to the last. Swinging the bat starts
when the foot steps forward, followed by the knee, hip, chest,
shoulder, elbow, hand and finally the bat.

Right:The force of the flying ball catches the man's hand and pulls him
along in a sequence that runs from his hand down to his feet.

foot. He steps forward on to his front foot, and by 5 has started to

unwind

his shoulders. As he accelerates, the bat moves a greater distance in

each frame.

The bat has weight and is swinging in a big arc, so in 6 and 7 it is

moving farther than anything else. All his weight is pushing on to the
front foot, and his whole body is unwinding so that maximum force
and speed are brought to bear on the ball at stage 7. At 8, the power
which started in the hips and shoulders has now been transferred to
the bat which is almost pulling him round in his follow-through. In a
more 'cartoon/ version, his bat would carry on and get wrapped round
behind his head.
five animation and performance

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Running is notoriously difficult in model animation. Because the

movement is fast, the gaps between frames are large.This means that
although the effect is energetic, it is seldom smooth. Left:The tumbling
character demonstrates the effect of momentum. When he trips.

his feet stop moving but his head keeps going forward (4). In turn, his
tumbling body pulls his feet after him (6). When his head contacts the
ground, the feet - still full of energy - carry on past (7) until they finally
settle on the ground (8). If he was running faster, he would carry on
tumbling longer.

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Special Movement Effects

We are often asked how the Penguin got into the bottle in The Wrong
Trousers. _ In fact this was a relatively straightforward thing to do,
relying on a quick substitution of both character and bottle.The
sequence, illustrated below, begins with the empty milk bottle
wobbling and vibrating after Gromit has crashed into the cupboard.
Then it falls off the unit and Gromit catches it. Up till then we used an
ordinary model bottle. For the next frames we had a thin replacement
Penguin who is first seen entering the bottle before he becomes
inescapably jammed up to the neck inside it.This was a different
bottle, vacuum-formed and supplied in two halves. We pushed the
thin clay Penguin against the side of one half and then sealed him in,
hiding the join when we positioned the bottle to camera.

Another difficult part of this sequence was animating the Penguin

after he has been shot up in the air and then falls to earth against a
background of sky and clouds. Rather than try to show the Penguin in
motion against a fixed background, we photographed him on glass
with a parallel sky positioned behind him. In the following frames the
Penguin is largely still, though from time to time we altered the
position of his feet and the sack across his shoulder. The illusion of
falling comes mainly from the sky itself, which we moved from side to
side during a series of long exposures.This was a variant on the
blurred-wallpaper effect which occurs earlier in the train chase
(described on page 127).

Again, while shooting Adam, we had to go to great lengths of ingenuity

to show him running round the circumference of the world. For most
of the film, Adam stands on top of his globe, which was supported on
the end of a scaffolding pole.This was fixed through the far side of the
globe and so always remained out of shot.The pole also ran through a
hole in the night-sky picture which was our backdrop. For the running
sequence, it would have been incredibly painful to animate Adam by
holding him on strings and changing their position after each shot, so
we came up with another solution.

First we turned the globe-pole-sky unit on its side, through 90

degrees.Then we measured the circumference of the globe and cut a
circular hole in a large

The Penguin falls to earth in The Wrong Trousers. The illusion of

falling was mainly achieved by pulling the painted background from
side to side during a series of long exposures.
How the Penguin got into the bottle.This was a two-bottle and two-
Penguin trick. When the Penguin began entering the bottle, his body
was exchanged for a special thin Penguin.The receiving bottle was also
different - it came in two halves and was clamped round the Pe guin
between shots.

When Adam ran round the circumference of the globe, we shot him on
glass. With one hip and one shoulder resting against the glass, he was
far easier to animate than if we had tried somehow to suspend him on
wires.

sheet of glass which fitted exactly round the globe on a north-south

axis. So now, because everything was turned, we had the camera up in
the roof shooting downward. After that, it was relatively easy to film
Adam running round the world because he was lying with one
shoulder and one hip flat on the glass.

If you should try something like that yourself, there are two snags:
extra colour from the glass, and reflections. A sheet of glass may have
some colour in it. and this is likely to show up when you move from
the previous scene, which has no glass in it, into your with-glass scene,
and similarly when you move out of it into the next scene.To avoid
this, shoot a whole group of scenes with a sheet of glass in them,
whether they need it or not, and the transition will not show up.To
avoid picking up reflections thrown by the puppet lying on its side,
shoot directly at 90 degrees to the glass.There may still be some
reflection, but this should be minimal.

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Arnold, the bully figure from Stage Fright, and some of the
replacement mouths that helped to keep fame and fortune at a
distance in his career as an entertainer.

His short pointy teeth, allied to fierce eyes and alarming carroty hair,
give him a powerful expressive range. Think of this when deciding on
the kind of facial effects you want your character to produce.

Expressions and Gestures

Although we spend a lot of time on mouths, working with dope sheets

to synchronise speech and mouth movements (see pages 150-151), and
yet more time making this work by constantly sculpting and
resculpting mouths, or fitting replacement mouths, this part of the
face is by no means the most expressive. The mouth is of course
crucial to speech, but perhaps supplies only 5-10 per cent of a
character's performa-ce

Those moments that really make you believe that this clay person is
talking are all done with the eyes, eyebrows and gestures involving the
face - nods, nose-■ ng, stroking the cheek while thinking something
over, and so on. Bear in mind, too, that a character can be highly
expressive without speaking a single word. Gromit is a good example
of this: almost all his expressiveness comes from the way his eyes are
positioned. Many of our models' eyes are -^ace of glass beads with a
painted-on pupil, which has a hole at its centre.To move the eyes
around, and make them look up, down or sideways, the animator
irserts a cocktail stick into the hole in the pupil and swivels the eye to
the desired position. Eyebrows are used to enhance certain facial
expressions - surprise, for example - and eyelids, often made of fast-
cast resin, are added if the character is required to blink fall asleep or
wake up.

Hand and arm gestures are also important in their own right, whether
they involve touching the face or not.The amount they can be used will
naturally depend on the build of the character. As Nick Park found
while making Creature Comforts, not all animals are designed with the
kind of front paws that can be waved about expressively: 'It was fine
for the Jaguar and the Polar Bears. because they had these front legs
and paws, but some animals did not have anything I could work
with.The young Hippopotamus just had two cloven front hooves,
which he needed to support himself while sitting up, and the
Armadillo was even more limited. With the Bush Baby, it was enough
to have her clinging on to the branch to bring out her insecurity. I also
made her lift her glasses off, so people could see those two little timid
eyes beneath.'

^^ Clay faces and hands get dirty very quickly.The best way to clean
them is very gently to scrape off the top layer.The important thing is to
keep a constant balance between the tones of a model's face and any
separate pieces, such as mouths and eyelids, that you may fix to it.

The more you scrape away, the more you have to add new bits of clay,
and here too you can get differences in tone. Eventually, you reach a
stage where you cannot get the dirt out of the face, and then you have
to make a new one.
five animation and performance

Eyes, brows, eyelids and mouth are the main elements that we can
move to change a character's expression. Left-hand column: First the
animator works on the mouth with a modelling tool, widening it and
adding the characteristic dent in the cheek.

The eyes are turned by inserting a cocktail stick in the pre-drilled hole
at the centre of the pupil and swivelling the eye (in reality a glass bead)
to the required position.
Right hand column: Next the eyelids are pushed into place and
carefully modelled in to make sure that everything has the same skin
tone.The eyebrows are moved to create further expression. See how
much the character's expression has changed since the first frame.

47

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five animation and performance

practical animation

Nick Park and Steve Box prepare Wendolene for her next scene in A
Close Shave, matching gesture to storyboard.

Below is a chart of Wendolene sounds, each one pinpointing the

position of the mouth.

Opposite, below, is a sample dope sheet, which provides the animator

with an accurate map of the sounds a character will make, and how
many frames each one will occupy.This is matched, top, with the face
the audience sees while hearing the sounds on the soundtrack.

Lip Sync

We match voices to lip movements by a somewhat

ancient method which has become traditional in

the company. First, an editor marks all the syllables

on the magnetic tape of the dialogue recording.

Then he or she transfers all this to a bar chart, in

which each bar covers a second of film (or I ft of

35mm), so the animator can see exactly where each syllable starts and
finishes.

With the word 'Me', for example, the chart will show the 'M'-sound
lasting for

two frames, or whatever, and the longer'eeeee' sound lasting for nine
frames. If

there is pre-recorded music, as there might be for a film which is set

round a

tune or song, this will also be sketched in, to show where the beats fall,
or a

particular run of notes which are important for the animator's timing.

The chart goes to the animator, who then copies the information on to
a traditional animation dope sheet.There are 96 lines to a page, one
line for each frame, covering 4 seconds, and the lines run vertically
down the sheet. On the dope sheet you have more space to put other
information, and that is the essential difference. Instead of having just
a tiny gap per frame, as on the bar chart, here the animator has a
whole line.

Now you have your own personal map of the sounds, and the gaps
between them, and can begin to devise a performance for your
character. From listening to the sound, you know when the voice goes
up higher - which might indicate a questioning expression, with raised
eyebrows. In War Story, the old man says

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five animation and performance

to his interviewer,'I was out at the BAC, see, Pete?'You listen to that,
and try to work out when he should raise his eyebrows, or tilt his head.
Typically you listen over and over again, repeating it to yourself,
copying the accent and intonation, trying to sense the right moment
for the character to react. You can hear that he pauses after'BAC, so
you choose that as the moment.The dope sheet, meanwhile, tells you
the exact space between 'C and 'see' is I 8 frames.This is the essential
information you need both to plan ahead, and to animate.

How much an animator actually notes down on the dope sheet is a

matter of personal choice.You could write down every detail, but with
experience you tend to write less. Alongside our sample piece of
speech, you might mark in certain movements, e.g.'blink ... blink ...
starts to raise hand to face - I 8 frames (during that time, starts to tilt
head to left) ... tilts head to left - 12 frames'. And so on. Sometimes it
can be deadening to analyse a movement too closely, fragment by
fragment.Today I tend to write down just the key moments, where the
timing is essential, and leave the rest to inspiration when we shoot. On
the other hand, some gestures are so specific that it can be helpful to
note down all the separate movements, of hands, eyebrows, angle of
head, etc., to make sure you include them all and that they blend
together.

One important tip is to look ahead at all times. It is too easy to develop
a kind of tunnel vision with the frame you are working on, and then
you can forget to start another movement in time, or you find that
your character is out of pos'tion and cannot make the expressive move
you want him to.

As for marrying the sounds to lip movements, a character can either

have its own set of replacement mouths, each corresponding to a
particular sound or group of sounds, or you can decide to resculpt the
face itself each frame -what we call 'animating through'. Even with
replacement mouths, you still have to do a certain amount of
remodelling to clean up the face and sculpt in the new mouth so it fits
perfectly.

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A box of Wallace's mouths, showing some of the sounds and
expressions he can make with them, including the all-
important'relaxed' when he does not say anything at all or goes into
listening mode.

Talking Heads

The idea of making up a set of replacement mouths for a character was

conceived as a way of saving time. Because everything in animation
takes so long, any time-saving device is to be welcomed. In theory, it
should be quicker for the animator just to exchange one mouth for
another, model it in to make sure the joins do not show, and shoot the
next frame. Also, a replacement mouth has the advantage that it can
be used a number of times, whereas if you reanimate a fixed mouth
you lose that advantage. For all that, some animators still prefer the
old-fashioned way, finding it more satisfactory to work with a head
that remains a unified entity, and probably has less variation in skin
tone, than with something that always consists of two halves that have
to be constantly reunited.

Whichever way you choose, you have to be prepared to do a lot of

cleaning and remodelling. If you have a mouth which you will only
need for two or three frames, then this is not so important. But if it is a
mouth you are going to use when the face comes to rest, and will be
needed for a long sequence of frames, then you have to be sure that it
is clean and that it tones in with the face.

The best cleaning liquid for clay is water. You can try lighter fluid, but
this tends to strip away the whole surface of the face, leaving it sticky
and more difficult to handle. For the best results, use water and gently
scrape away at those parts you want to clean or remove.

- animation and performance

In this sequence. WaJlace's 'ee' mouth is taken off and the new mouth
which says o' is slid into place.The animator uses a modelling tool to
mask the join and smooth down the new face.
practical animation

making a film
Jx

practical animation

Morph, Chas and a keyboard -all the ingredients you need for a short
sharp conflict. When we began making Morph films for the 'Vision On'
series, our goal was to tell a story in under a minute - not a bad target
for anyone setting out in animation.

Thinking about a Script

Whole stones do not fall ready-made from the sky.The best ones
usually evolve slowly and take a huge amount of effort. Dave and I
learned our trade in storytelling when we made films for'Vision On'
and Take Hart'.Those early films were very short - no more than
sketches, really - but many of the same basic rules that we discovered
then, apply equally to much longer and more complicated stories.

A story is usually about something, meaning that there is more to the

story than simply what happens. Morph stories are usually about
sibling rivalry, jealousy, pomposity pricked - things like that. But the
seed from which the story grows may be very simple. It may be enough
to think of a single gag, an absurd situation, an animation idea that
you would love to try.

__. When we were writing sketches for Morph, we had the

freedom to choose any subject. For example, we might decide it would

be fun to animate him as if he were on ice. That is not a story, but it is
the seed from which the story grows. It is a situation that will be fun to
do and will challenge the character. Now we need to work out how to
simulate ice on Morph's table-top. He could invent an ice-making
machine, or receive one through the post, like Wile E Coyote, or we
could send him to the North Pole. Or we might decide that all this is
much too complicated. Instead, Morph's alter ego Chas has polished
the floor so hard that it becomes as slippery as ice. But Chas, being
incredibly lazy, would never have polished the floor voluntarily. So he
needs a reason that is funny and in character.The simplest reason is
good old malice. Chas has booby-trapped the floor, and now lies in
wait to watch the fun. Starting with an animation idea, a story is
already forming.

All this is the set-up for the main part of the story, in which Morph
tries to achieve something, and is constantly thwarted by the slippery
floor I am shy of giving rules, but we often found that you had to try
three variations on a predicament to make it effective. In this case,
discovering the slippery floor and falling over a few times is not
enough. You have to invent variations on him falling over Why does he
do it, how does he avoid it, what are the consequences? And while he is
falling over, while he is in conflict with Chas, we must not forget to
have visual fun with Morph skating around. Finally, we need a
punchline, an ending, a resolution. Knowing Morph, he eventually
discovers that Chas is responsible and takes some terrible kind of
revenge which leaves the audience with a feeling that justice has been
done.
fom ^.iM

Nick Park and I think chickens - devising the shape, look and
individual characteristics of the stars of their new feature film.

On a much bigger scale, the idea for Wat's Pig came during a holiday
in France. I was in the Dordogne, where you can see these huge
medieval castles standing in full view of one another I thought, how
difficult to have been a peasant in the middle of this lot, caught up in
the intrigues of warring barons who held the key to everything you did
in life.That was the starting-point. As we developed our plot, we
settled on one particular castle rather than have two facing each other.
Later came the idea of the twins who were separated by a thief who
stole one of them. After that began the real job of knocking it to

a complete story, which took months of work.

Story-writing is like solving a great puzzle made up of dozens of

elements. Think of Rubik's Cube. You twist the sides around to see if a
given combination will work, then you twist it again, and again, until it
comes out right. Along the way, you probably have to discard a few
things as well, and that can be the hardest part.

practical animation

Creating a Storyboard for Adam

With only one location, two characters and no dialogue,

Adam is a very simple film. Even so, storyboarding it was not

easy. At the ideas stage, I had come up with a dozen or

more situations that Adam would face - the effect of gravity,

loneliness, a temper tantrum, etc.The job was then to put

the sequences in the best order, so that the story unfolded

in the right way to an audience. I drew up each short sequence very

swiftly

and roughly - to capture the ideas in my head.Then, with hundreds of

scratchy

little drawings on separate sheets of paper, it was easy to shuffle them

around

to try out different ways of structuring the film.The storyboard

drawings did
not need to convey anything to anybody else about the look of the film.
What

they did convey to me was the spirit of each sequence, and also
whether or

not a gag was working.

So, along with body posture and facial expression, the most important
thing the storyboard told me was the size and shape of the shot. Is
loneliness conveyed better in a soulful close-up, or in a wide shot
which shows that there is nobody and nothing else around? Or both?
And in which order? It seems to me that such questions - half artistic
and half practical - are the main business of storyboarding.

Peter Lord, seen on the right animating his character Adam, planned
the film by drawing up the main sequences in a series of rough
sketches like those shown below. By shuffling these around, he was
able to organise the film's structure, and also check whether he had
captured the spirit of each individual sequence.
€)

Sj

Nick Park and Steve Box plan the scene where Gromit hides in a
cardboard box to spy on the Penguin, and carves out a viewing slot like
a pair of binoculars. On the wall, the storyboard shows the view from
inside the box and from the Penguin's vantage point. Right: Character
sketches by Nick Park.

Creating a Storyboard for The WrongTrousers

The storyboard can be a very exciting stage, the place where a film
starts to come to fruition after all the preliminary v/ork. Usually, one
drawn storyboard picture represents one event in a shot. Some shots
may contain two or three events, and if so we represent them all. We
prepare the storyboard piece by piece, or scene by scene, then pin the
sections on the wall to see how they fit together.The act of drawing the
frames really helps you to grasp the story and get it into your head.

six making a film

practical animation

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Nick Park:'This sequence in The Wrong Trousers was the first one we
storyboarded. Even before we started writing the script, I
storyboarded this whole

162

sequence - and we stuck with it. Sometimes scenes change a lot, either
when we shoot or in the cutting room, or they may be dropped
entirely, but we managed to

keep this one. It was edited down quite a lot, but the essence of the
storyboard is still there.'
^5 ^

*■

Skra-y

practical animation
6 - - -__2k,» ■

'^^0^p -'

^ /-^^ /- Gte/mr.'

Creating a Storyboard for A Close Shave

Nick Park:'We had less time to storyboard this film, so we tended to

skip events and represent the shot in just one frame. I roughed out
what we wanted and then Michael Salter, who was working with me,
drew up the frames more elaborately. With most films we do the
storyboard after the script has been written, so we already have a clear
view of what we are going to do. The storyboard helps us to refine that
view and put the words into a coherent visual form.'
The storyboard frames show Gromit flying in to attack Preston. In the
completed version, right, he then opens fire with the porridge gun
before Preston manages to get his paws on the propeller.

i-

■tipr

making a fil.

Wb:

practical animation

Characterisation - Morph

When Dave and I brought Morph into the BBC series Take Hart', he
was not much more than a human-shaped blob.The challenge for us
was to develop him into a fully-fledged character

Back in 'Vision On' days, we had created a group of little clay

characters, called the Gleebies, who ran round the tabletop and
created havoc, knocking over paint pots and stuff like that.The
producer liked them, and when he was preparing the Take Hart' series
he asked us to create a new character who could interact with the artist
Tony Hart, and who would apparently live in his studio. He also liked
the fact that our plasticine characters could change shape. So we made
a very simple terracotta-coloured figure who could instantly change
back into a lump of plasticine. Because he could metamorphose, we
called him Morph.The problem then was to find things for him to do.

Morph was a troublemaker from day one, and from that came his
personality. He was disrespectful of authority, viz Tony Hart, and
gradually, story by story, he acquired more and more characteristics.
In each episode we set him a problem to solve, and the way he reacted
to it gave him another dimension. We also decided to cut down on the
amount he changed shape, because that did not interest us as much as
his character.

six making a film

Soon he had a mass of distinctive traits: he was short-tempered, rather

pompous, a know-all and a show-off - all rather negative things, but
oddly enough they made him seem attractive. People could laugh
easily if he took a prat-fall, but he was clearly not all bad. He was full
of genuine enthusiasms, and these helped him ^^_ to grow. For
example, one day he appears wearing
jfcjfc, a beret and holding a palette and paint brush.

Obviously he fancies himself as a great artist. .--;.\., He flings himself

into his new role with

^B Hl ^ u § e ener §y- H' s paintings are pretty awful,

I?. ^B Wk but he strikes grand poses as if he is Van

*:'■■■, Gogh, and is insufferably pleased with

H .... U his work.

Then Chas arrived, Morph's alter-ego. One day Morph is carving a

statue of himself ^r from some pale-coloured material. He chips ^
away at the figure, which suddenly comes to

life and immediately starts a fight with him. Originally this was just a
story about a statue, then afterwards we thought,

On these pages Morph displays some of his many characteristics. On

the plus side, he is friendly and full of genuine enthusiasms. Less
positively, he is pompous and definitely likes to get his own way,
especially with Chas, the brother-figure he cannot stop arguing and
fighting with.

This is a

character, let's keep him in.This was excellent for us because a double-
act gives you so many more story possibilities. Like brothers, they
could not get away from each other, and because of this they were
constantly arguing, fighting and competing with each other.
We tried out some other characters too, like Folly (a tinfoil female)
and Gillespie (a big blue figure), but they were less successful because
they were invented to fit into an ongoing series, whereas Morph and
Chas had the luxury to evolve through a much longer creative process.
I'm sure it's made them much stronger as characters.

practical animation

The title frame of Creoture Comforts shows a professional tape

recorder. A voice says, 'Sound running. When you're ready'.This sets
up the film as a series of interviews, and conveys to the viewer that the
voices in the film are 'real'.

Characterisation - Creature Comforts

The action takes place in a zoo where the animal characters - a Jaguar,
a Gorilla, a Terrapin, three Polar Bears and others - talk about their
lives and how they are treated.The film won director Nick Park his first
Oscar. Here he discusses the characters and how he developed them.
'The idea came from what Pete and Dave were doing on 'Conversation
Pieces', using the voices of ordinary people on a pre-recorded
soundtrack. Rather than get other people to do all the sound
recording, I did half of it myself. Also, instead of eavesdropping on the
subjects, we interviewed them. In my mind I had the zoo theme
planned out, so in the interviews I tried to ask questions that would
produce the kind of answers that animals might make. I found a
Brazilian student living in Bristol, so I asked him not only what he
thought about zoos but also about the weather, the food and student
accommodation. He said a surprising amount of things which fitted
perfectly. Asked about the

food in his hall of residence, he said," ... and food that look more like
dog food

than food proper for wild animals. All right?"

'He was so good that later I was able to let the soundtrack dictate to
me what we should do when we filmed him as an animal. For some
reason he kept mentioning double-glazing: "Here you have everything
sorted out - double-glazing, your heating and everything, but you don't
have spocel" So I put a big glass window next to him to convey both
the glazing and the fact that it helped to shut him in.

'Once we had recorded a voice, I tried to match it to a particular

animal. People now say how well-suited the voices are to the animals,
but in fact i changed things round a lot. At one point I thought the
Brazilian could be a penguin rather than the Jaguar he became. My
theory is that you can make anything fit anything. What is most
important is how you do it.

'I found working with pre-recorded voices very refreshing. Although

the format might seem rigid, and the filming process very
straightforward, in fact it frees you up. Unlike a commercial, where
you have to tell a complete story in thirty seconds, here you have time
to let the voice give you ideas about how to animate and play with the
character, all within the discipline of a static, held frame.To me this
was liberating and very enjoyable to do.'
168

Each of the captive animals has a different view of what it is like to live
in a zoo. Clockwise, from top left:The anxious but not unhappy Bush
Baby - 'I know, whatever happens, they'll look after me'; Andrew the
young Polar Bear, who takes a precociously global view of things; the
Terrapins, reasonably comfortable but 'I can't actually get out and
about'; the Armadillos, contented in a downtrodden sort of way; the
young Hippopotamus who thinks that most of the cages are a bit
small, and the philosophical Gorilla. Below:The spokesperson for the
Birds, who reasons that animals in the zoo are better off than animals
in the circus because 'they can do their own thing'.
h

:,-<'

six making a film

Wallace and Gromit - an unlikely but unbeatable combination.

Wallace the loud one, the man in command, the eccentric inventor
whose machines are never totally under control. Gromit, quiet,
dependable, with much more sense than his master.

Characterisation -Wallace and Gromit

Nick Park has won two Oscars and one nomination for his films
featuring Wallace the inventor and Gromit, his dog. In chronological
order they are A Grand Day Out,The WrongTrousers and A Close
Shave. Here, he describes how Wallace and Gromit came into being
and how they have changed during the making of the three films.

'I sketched out my ideas for the characters way back in art school in
Sheffield. I resurrected them at film school, and then I had this other
idea about somebody - I did not know who - building a rocket in his
basement and going to the Moon. I went back to the earlier characters
to see if they could build the rocket. Gromit was then a cat, and I
changed him into a dog. A dog would be chunkier and larger, and
easier to work with in clay. I wrote a script, but this also changed a
great deal once we started shooting. Some of the restrictions of
working with clay started to dictate their characters.

'For example, Gromit originally had a voice, which we actually

recorded. He was also going to leap about a lot and do tricks. At first I
did not realise how difficult that would be to animate, but when we
came to shoot the first scene I began to rethink the whole character. In
this scene Wallace is sawing a door and Gromit is standing underneath
acting as a trestle (see page 76). Because he was stuck under there, all I
could move was his head, ears and eyebrows. So I did that, and then I
saw I could get such a lot of character from just those little
movements.This showed me that he did not need a stuck-on mouth as
well, so we dropped the whole idea of Gromit speaking. It made a
better contrast too, with Gromit now the quieter, more introverted
character and Wallace the louder more outgoing one.

1 find you can always make economy work for you, even if this is not at
first apparent. For instance, it can be harder not to move something
than it is to move it. Suppose you are shooting a character with a tail,
and now it is eight hours since you last moved it. In film-time this may
be only two seconds, but you can still get very impatient because you
have not moved it.You have to watch this, otherwise your tail will be
wiggling about the whole time and distracting the audience from the
main character.

As for the relationship between the two characters, this is still

evolving. I am not one of those people who feels he has to know
everything about his characters before shooting. People ask me
questions like "What would Wallace buy Gromit for Christmas?"This is
something I have never thought about, so I do not know the answer. I
have not got there yet. I almost feel that they have their own life, so"
really I would have to ask them about it.'

Early sketches by Nick Park of Wallace and (a very different) Gromit.

practical animation

War Story

An old man recounts his memories of the Second

World War - under the bombs in Bristol, when the

cupboard under the stairs doubled as a coalhouse

and an air-raid shelter - 'I sits on the coal, then in

comes 'er mother and sits on my lap, and my missus

sits on 'er mother's lap. My missus was expecting a

child at the moment, so I reckon I had about three of them on me.'

Humour

and nostalgia were key notes in our treatment of the main character

After'Conversation Pieces', Channel 4 commissioned a similar series

which we called 'Lip Synch'. We took the opportunity to try out new
directors and new styles. In War Story, we abandoned the formula of
recording conversations, and went instead for a recorded interview.
We talked to Peter Lawrence of Radio Bristol, and he recommended
this guy, Bill Perry, then probably in his seventies. Bill was a great
raconteur, and Peter had interviewed him several times for radio. As
usual, we decided not to meet him because we preferred to work in a
state of innocence, so we asked Peter to do the interview, and he came
back with two and a half hours of tape.

At the time I was quite tempted to do a serious piece, concentrating on

the darker side of Bill's war memories. He had worked at the BAC
aircraft factory

Images from the Home Front in the 1940s - a propeller aircraft at the
BAC aircraft factory, Bristol, and the coalman emptying his sacks into
the cupboard under the stairs.

six making a film

on the outskirts of Bristol when it was bombed, and I thought I could

make a faintly mournful, regretful film based on this side of his story.
But, at about that time, Id finished another film in the series, called
Going Equipped. This was a serious piece about a petty criminal and
the awful barren life he falls into. I liked the film, and still do, but
simply because it did not have any laughs in it, people had been
unsure how to react.This made me decide to go for a more light-
hearted take on the material we had for War Story.
There was plenty of material to choose from, so we selected the bits we
liked and tried to arrange them in a coherent order. One of the
attractions was being able to mix scenes of the old man telling his
stories in the present with others showing him. acting them out as a
younger man.The most difficult part was the ending. Bill had a lot of
stories, but he never got to a really white-hot punchline with any of
them. Fortunately, while describing the after-effects of sitting on a
heap of coal with the other members of his family piled on top of him,
he says,'It was agony, Ivy, I was tattooed all over," which I believe is an
old radio catch-phrase.Then I had him clamp his pipe firmly between
his teeth with a loud "click", rather like Eric Morecambe used to do,
waggle his eyebrows -and that was it.That was our ending. Not the
world's best, perhaps, but it is quite a good example of how to bring
your film to a pleasing end when the action or dialogue does not
provide you with an obvious choice.

A happy ending - simply achieved with a click of National Health teeth

on pipe, a grin and a quick waggle of the eyebrows.

practical animation
Three characters in search of showbiz success - timorous Tiny, the
dog-juggling music-hall star, devious Daphne and ruthless Arnold, full
of cunning and frustrated rage. The story of their conflicts had to be
put across in only eleven minutes, so every gesture and movement had
to carry a special meaning.

Characterisation - Stage Fright

The story relates the sad decline ofTiny, the hero, from his days as a
dog-juggling music-hall star to the present day. He is persecuted at
every turn by Arnold, a manipulative bully, and although he receives
occasional solace from Daphne, who says she will stick by him, she has
her own interests very much at heart. Steve Box, the film's director,
explains how he developed his characters.

'I get the motivation for my characters from the script. I had been
thinking about the story for about two years, then I wrote Stage Fright
over an intensive six-month period. This gave me a much better idea
of the characters and how they would act in the film. I think most of us
in animation do it this way round, rather than making a funny-looking
model and then wondering what to do with it.

'Characters are really defined by the film they are in. I cannot imagine
the characters of Stage Fright being in anything else; they are in their
own world. The main theme is ambition, and the story shows the trials
and tribulations of people who try to make their living as performers -
and also dream of stardom or at least, in Arnold's case, enough money
to help him forget his mediocrity. The film portrays a lot of negative
emotions and the mood is fairly dark. All three characters want to
succeed in show business, but none of them goes about it in the right
way.

making a film

Tiny is a casualty of trends in entertainment. His art is constantly

being rejected and he becomes very reclusive, trapped in a decaying
theatre and himself deteriorating as the building around him falls to
bits. I made this come out in his appearance and gestures. He is often
hunched and very short, only about half the size of Arnold who towers
over him. While Tiny trembles, his arms raised in fear, Arnold is full of
frustrated rage at his own lack of talent, and to match his violent
behaviour he has alarming jagged hair and fierce teeth.

'Daphne is ambitious too. From the way they talk, it seems she and
Tiny once worked together as performers, but then she double-crossed
him to get her feet under the table with Arnold, seeing him as her
ticket to a career in the silent movies. Actually, I think she is quite a
nasty piece of work, with her big blue hair and lovely silk dress with
bows on it - very artificial, and superficial too.

Although the film lasts for only eleven minutes, the animation process
allows you to get in a ton of information and suggestions about the
characters.There is not time to show everything, but you can drop a lot
of hints with something as small as a single gesture. Ours is a very
condensed kind of film-making.'

practical animation

Characterisation - Rex the Runt

Rex is the leader of a gang of four dogs who look more like gingerbread
people with doggy ears.They live together, go on fantastic adventures,
and are the conception of Richard Goleszowski, who explains how he
sees them.

'I wanted the atmosphere of a flat-share between four characters in

their early twenties, in that stage after college and before
marriage.They all have their own identities and special quirks, but I
try not to make them too predictable or type-cast, as you get in a
traditional sitcom. I also like the fact that they can have childish,
pastry cut-out figures and well-formed personalities at the same time.
Rex is the self-appointed leader, which occasionally annoys the others.
Bad Bob, who wears an eye patch and carries a gun, might seem to be
a stereotype villain but he is not; this is just the way he looks. Wendy is
Rex's part-time love interest, though both can get jealous if one of
them fancies someone else.The fourth character, Vince, is either a
complete idiot or a genius.

'No matter how surreal the adventure - voyaging through Vince's body
in a submarine or deflating their own planet - there is always a
contrast between the weird things they do and what they talk
about.Their worries always come back to the most ordinary everyday
things such as "Did you turn the iron off?"

'Unlike most puppets, Rex and his mates have flattened bodies, though
the world around them is more or less normal. Having two-
dimensional characters existing in a three-dimensional space allows us
to produce reasonably good animation without having to deal with all
the problems of gravity. We shoot the scenes both in conventional 3-D
sets and with the characters placed on an

Front row, left to right: Rex,Vince. Back row: Bad Bob, Wendy.

six making a film

Rex and friends in Adventures on Telly Part Three, in which the gang
stumble on a branch of Poultry Pantry, the interstellar fast-food chain.

angled sheet of glass, behind which we can put photographic

backgrounds or add live action using the green-screen process.This
makes for quicker and cheaper shooting. In the process we make a lot
of collages, and these help to bring the characters more into contact
with the human world.This way you can have a nice multi-media shot
of, say, plasticine dogs in a toy car- weaving about in traffic on a real,
filmed motorway.

To me Rex the Runt is first of all a comedy show.The fact that we do it

by animation is not the biggest part of it. We work quickly on several
sets and I leave the animators space to make decisions about what
props should loe .ike and what a character is going to do. Although the
results may sometimes be a little rough at the edges, I do not mind
that. We get a lot of continuity mistakes as well, but I also think they
are quite funny and encourage them. Big Bob's eye patch can jump
from one eye to the other in the same scene, but no-one seems to
notice.To me that is fun; a happy accident. What matters is that the
films have humour pace and energy - like a good comedy show.'

practical animation

Characterisation - Pib and Pog

This film is a highly knockabout version of a children's TV show. It

features two bulbous characters, Pib and Pog, who do increasingly
violent and nasty things to each other and the slightly nannyish voice
of the female presenter; who mostly pretends that everything is all
right really. She is never seen. At the end, Pib and Pog are revealed as
two old luwie actors who probably perform these hooligan roles on a
regular basis.The film was written and directed by Peter Peake, who
describes his approach.

'I saw Pib and Pog as a couple of animated characters playing a part
and giving the cameras what they want to see, which is a very stylised
kind ofTom and Jerry violence. As characters they are equals, each as
bad as the other Neither is prepared to back down, which is reason
enough for the violence to escalate all the time, starting with childish
squabbling and finishing with a cannon which they point at each other
in mounting panic before it blows up and blasts the pair of them off
the stage.

'In a way, Pib and Pog inflict violence on each other like Laurel and
Hardy used to do. One of them just stands there and waits while the
other one plots a new trick, then comes up and smacks him.There is a
dreadful inevitability about what is going to happen next. It is certainly
going to be violent; the only question in the audience's mind is what
form it will take. One of my problems, in portraying this kind of
inevitable violence, was to keep the interest going. I tried to do this not
only by making each assault nastier than the one before, but also by
devising unexpected bits as well, like the bed of nails which Pog
rapidly produces while Pib is still gleefully bouncing up in the air after
his latest triumph. Next moment, he is impaled and helpless, and the
initiative has passed back to Pog.

'Against this grim war of attrition you have the voice of the patronising
presenter who is continually telling the imaginary child audience what
fun Pib and Pog are having. I think both these aspects are still true of
children's television programmes, where you can see acts of quite
horrific violence on film, the after-effects of which are quickly soothed
away by a presenter who almost seems to have no idea about what the
kids at home have really been watching.

Welcome to the cosy teatime world of Pib and Pog.'Hello Pib, hello
Pog,' cries the off-screen presenter.'What have you been up to?'

Now let the mayhem begin. Oh look, Pog's head is jammed in a

bucket.A moment later he emerges with his face missing.'Why,' coos
the presenter,'it's concentrated sulphuric acid!'

Now Pib saws Pog in half. Pog responds by trapping Pib on a bed of
nails. What fun they're having!

After the show, the actors say goodbye.'What a dreadful ham,' says the
Pog luwie, after electrocuting his partner.

making a film

ft

4
A

There is a further jab at the ccsy world of the TV studio when Pib and
Pog fall back to earth again after the cannon blast and sing their cutesy
little signature tune. As a final punchline, perhaps a reminder that
violence is always around us, or at least an affirmation that the two
actors are just as bac e

roles they play, the luwies amble off-stage mouthing compliments to

eac other, then one electrocutes the other with his parting handshake.'

practical animation
Editing

Helen Garrard has edited many films for Aardman. Here she explains
her role.

'My first task on a film is to supervise the soundtrack. I am given a

storyboard, and a script if there is dialogue in the film, and then I go to
the dialogue recording. At Aardman, which is famous for its closely
synchronised dialogue, we record the dialogue before any filming takes
place. We come back with all the dialogue, choose the best takes and
edit them down to a final version. It can be spaced out later, if
necessary, but the essence of it is there. We then break down the
dialogue phonetically and mark this on a series of charts.The
animators work very closely to these when they match the movements
of the characters to what they say. From the charts they can see the
position of the mouth on each frame.
'While shooting is going on, the film is loosely edited in its longest
form by the assistant editor, who sees the material as it arrives each
day. When a sizeable chunk or scene is ready, I cut it together more
closely, but still in quite a loose way so that, when we come to the final
edit, we have still got plenty of flexibility with the footage.

That is how we work with celluloid film. Methods are changing now
with the new digital computerised editing system (AVID). When film
is transferred on to one of the new machines, the editor has many
more options to choose from. This is the way we will probably go in the
future.

'Once the whole film has been shot, I sit with the director and we go
through

Capturing the right mood for title-sequence lettering: a theatrical type

for Stage Fright, and a rough-edged thriller style for The Wrong
Trousers.

six making a film

everything in detail. We trim it down, tighten it up, pace it, and maybe
even move scenes around.This takes about two weeks for a 30-minute
feature film. After that we start planning out the soundtrack in greater
detail, including the sound effects and the music. Once the cut is
complete, the composer can start composing to pictures.

The various sounds are 'laid', in separate tracks.There may be a lot of

them -on A Close Shave we had 26 tracks for the scenes with Preston
after he has become a robot. While this is going on, we are also dealing
with the optical houses who supply optical effects, titles and credit
sequences.Then we p. II everything together. We take all the
soundtracks and the music into a special sound studio where they mix
it all together and balance everything out.Then I send the lab a
template on celluloid of the final cut (the 'cutting copy'), and they cut
the negative according to that template. Once that is done, they
produce a print that the lighting cameraman checks for colour balance,
and from there we move to the final print.'

practical animation
At the mixing desk for the final mix, when all the sound components
are brought together and balanced out.

Sound

Adrian Rhodes is a specialist sound editor, or sound mixer. He has

been responsible for the sound on a large number of live-action films
as well as Aardman productions. Here he discusses his role.

'My job is to create sounds rather than to record them. I am not

usually involved in the dialogue recording, but come in after about half
the film has been shot and edited into a rough cut. At this stage I go
through the material with the editor and the director, and then I can
start to build up the sound effects that will be needed.

Take the lorry in A Close Shave. In the beginning, I want to get the
concept right, so I work on assembling appropriate lorry sounds that
can be stretched or edited down later when filming is completed. I
supply all the sounds needed in the film, not just the big ones like
lorries or aircraft but also every footstep, rustle, or the noise that
someone makes when they put their glasses down on a table.These
little sounds are called foley or footstep sounds, and making them is
specialised and highly skilled work. I work with a foley artist, who
comes into the studio and acts out or makes up the sounds - walking
along to the action pictures, for example, to provide the sound of
footsteps. On the studio floor
there is a panel of different surfaces - paving stone, floorboard, tarmac
surface, etc. - which he can walk or run on to get the right sound.

'With animated films, one of the important things to remember is that

real sounds, ie those directly imitated from life, can often seem out of
place or unsuitable. If you want an exterior sound of tweeting birds,
for example, it is probably not a good idea to record real birds in a
garden.This is because the characters in the film are not real but clay
creatures living in their own fantasy world, and so the sound of real
tweeting birds may not sit well on the film. For the Penguin's feet in
The Wrong Trousers, it would have been a mistake to record a real
penguin flapping about. Instead, we got the foley artist to do it, and his
solution was very simple: he just slapped his hands on his thighs to the
rhythm of the walk.

'One of our most complex scenes, from the sound point of view, was in
the cellar in A Close Shave,

5 ■ making a film

after Preston the dog had turned into a robot.The

Preston sounds alone took up more than twenty

different tracks, with different sound combinations

for his head movements, feet, the roar and so on.

Also in that sequence there were several other

elements - the conveyor belt, the machine that

chews up the robot, the sheep, etc. What you can

then do is focus on one particular element, building

up the robot, for example, until you have got him

working, and then you can mix all his separate

tracks down to something more manageable, put

them on one side and then focus on the sheep,

and do the same for that character.This is what we

call the premixing stage, where all the sounds are assembled and then
mixed

together so that, when we come to the final mix, all the sound
components of

the film have been reduced to the three strands of sound, dialogue and
music.

For the final mix we go into a big studio and all sit there together - the

director editor sound editor and composer - and work through

everything until

we get the balance that we think is right.

'I would encourage anyone starting out to make films to try and get in
as much sound as possible. Sound brings a film to life, and even the
tiniest details can play a part in this, helping to make your film better
and more believable.'

Music

Julian Nott composes music for film and television productions. He

has written the music for several Aardman films, and here describes
how he works.
The composer can come in at various times, depending on the kind of
film and the preferences of the director. In animated films, the music
may be needed first if the film is dependent on a song which has to be
written before anything else can be done. In more story-led films, I
prefer to come in at the end when the editing is finished and I can
write music to the pictures.

This means you probably do not have much time, perhaps three or foui
.eeks for a 30-minute Wallace and Gromit film, but at least I can be as
certain as possible that the film will not be changed. If someone
decides to change the cut, the composer often has to start work all over
again.There is always the temptation to try desperately hard to change
what you have already written to fit the new cut, but this never really
works and so it means starting afresh.

practical animation

Julian Nott's sketch for the beginning of the motorbike chase in A

Close Shave. Sketches such as this go to the orchestrator who works
out the orchestration in detail and prepares the parts for the
musicians.

'On most occasions I see rushes on a big screen, and when the film is
finished I get a videotape to work from. At this time I have a meeting
with the director, and he or she tells me what in general they are
hoping to do with the music, and then we go through the film in more
detail to decide where the cues should start and end.

1 take away the video, which has a time-code on it.This is a computer

code which is on one of the audio channels of the tape. I can then lock
all my computers and machines and instruments on to this time-code
and write the music very specifically to each second of the film.

'When I have written a certain amount, I demo it to the director

Nowadays we have a lot of technology to help us, and even at this stage
we can demo an orchestral score, using synthesisers which can make
an accurate representation of the real instrument. Once the composer
gets the final OK, he really has to work fast. With an orchestral score
there is not time for him to do the

orchestration and the parts copying for all the members of the
orchestra. On A Close Shave, for instance, we had some 65 musicians
in the orchestra and about 25 cues.That means providing the
musicians with 1625 sheets, all of which have to be written out for a
particular instrument.To cope with this, I sketch out the music and
bring in an orchestrator; and he does the detailed orchestration for
me. When the parts come back, someone books a studio and arranges
for the musicians to come in.

'Many film directors and producers feel quite overwhelmed when they
hear the music being played for the first time against their pictures by
a full orchestra. It is such a powerful sound. Once we are recording, it
is very difficult for the director to make changes. In animated films,
people do not have the kind of budget where you can waste time and
keep 65 musicians hanging around while you change the music. When
all the music is recorded, we mix it and then it goes off to be track-laid
against the pictures.The composer may or may not be involved with
this, but he will probably go to the final mix, where all the sounds and
music are balanced and the film is then ready to go to the final print.'

k/TTl

A high-point from the motorbike chase in A Close Shove, which is

accompanied by suitably heroic martial music.
six making a film
USEFUL INFORMATION List of Suppliers

The following notes and addresses are intended as a general guide to

the kind of suppliers who can help you with fiIm-making equipment,
rather than as a comprehensive list. Check your Yellow Pages for
further information, and look out for good modelmaking and art
supply stores in your area. v

Cameras

The best sources for 8mm and 16mm cine cameras are secondhand
dealers or camera stores which have a second-hand cabinet. Always be
sure the camera has a single-frame capacity. For video cameras,
consult your local stockists for information on the latest developments
in video cameras with an animation facility

Camera Maker

Fries Engineering Inc 8743 Shirley Avenue Northndge California CA9

I 324 tel 818 998 5400 fax 818 998 7553

Filmstock

Dr Rawstock (ALCP)

6916 Santa Monica Blvd. SLA

Hollywood

California CA90038

tel 310 441 4646

213 960 1781

fax 310 441 46 48

Film Stock Centre Blanx 70 Wardour St London WIV3HP tel 0171 494
2244 fax 0171 287 2040
Fuji Photo Film (UK) Ltd Fuji Film House 125 Finchley Road London
NW3 6JH tel 0171 586 5900 fax 0171 722 4259

Fuji Photo Film (USA) Inc 555Taxter Road, Elmsford New York NY
10523 tel 201 5072500 fax 914 7898514

llford Imaging (UK) Ltd Town Lane Mobberley, Knutsford Cheshire

WA16 7jL tel 01565 684000 fax 01565 873035

Iford Imaging Inc

West 70 Century Road

Paramus

New jersey 07653

tel 201 2656000

fax 201 2650894

Kodak Ltd

Professional Motion Imaging

Station Rd, Hemel Hempstead

Herts HP I IJU

tel 01442 261 122

fax 01442 844458

Eastman Kodak Corporation 6700 Santa Monica Boulevard PO Box

38939 Hollywood

California 90038-1203 tel 213 464 6131 fax 213 464 5886
www.kodak.com/go motion
and at:

360W35thSt

New York NY 1001-2727

tel 212 631 3450

fax 212 631 3470

4 Concourse Parkway

Suite 300

Atlanta, Georgia 30328-5379

tel 770 522 6843

fax 770 522 6845

Oppenheimer Camera Inc

2645 N Mississippi Ave

Portland

Oregon Or 97227

tel 503 287 8666

fax 503 287 9 165

Processing Laboratories

Background Engineers Inc

I I 33 Flower St

Glendale
California CA9 1201

tel 818 500 0454

818 432 0454

fax 818 500 891 3C

Colour Film Services 10 Wadsworth Rd Penvale, Greenford Middlesex

UB6 7JX tel 0181 998 2731 fax 0181 997 8738

Cruse & Company Inc 7000 Romame St Hollywood California

CA90038 tel 213 851 8814

Metrocolor London Ltd 91-96 Gillespie Rd London N5 I LS tel 0171

226 4422 fax 0171 359 2353

Rank Film Laboratories North Orbital Rd Denham, Uxbndge

Middlesex UB9 5HQ tel 01895 832323 fax 01 895 832446

Soho Images 71 Dean St London WIV5HB tel 0171 437 0831 fax 0171
734 9471

Technicolor Film Services Ltd Bath Rd, West Drayton Middlesex UB7
0DB tel 0181 759 5432 fax 0181 799 6270

Todd,-AO Filmatic Horley Crescent London NWI 8NT tel 0171 284
7900 fax 0171 284 1018

Lighting and Sound Equipment

Stage Electrics Partnership Ltd (incorporating SLX Ltd, Sound

Dept,Theatre Direct Ltd and Theatre Vision Ltd) at:

Victoria Rd, Avonmouth Bristol BSI I 9DB tel 01 17 982 7282 fax 01 17
982 2180

SLX Ltd
Victoria Rd, Avonmouth Bristol BSI I 9DB tel 01 17 982 6260 fax 01 17
982 7778

Sound Dept Blacklands Way Abingdon Industrial Estate Abingdon,

Oxon OX 14 I DY tel 01235 555622 fax 01235 536654

Theatre Direct Ltd Kirkwood Road Kings Hedges Cambridge CB4 2PH
tel 01223 423010 fax 01223 425010

Theatre Vision Ltd Westpomt Industrial Estate Penarth Rd, Cardiff

CFI 7JQ tel 01222 701212 fax 01 222 701070

Action Lighting 46 Kansas Avenue Salford. Manchester M5 2GL

tel 0161 876 0576 fax 01 61 876 05 17

Hansard Vision 6056 W Jefferson Blvd Los Angeles California CA9001

6 tel 310 840 5660 818 780 2156 fax 310 840 5662

Introvision International Inc 101 I N Fuller Ave Los Angeles California

CA90046 tel 213 851 9262 fax 21 3 85 I I 649

Christopher Nibley

Cinematography

I 2718 Valley Spring Lane

Studio City

California CA9 I 604

tel 818 509 1613

fax 818 509 0625

Preferred Electrical 18 Lettice St, Fulham London SW6 4EH 0171 731
0805 fax 0171 731 0623
Valiant Lamps 20 Lettice St, Fulham London SW6 4EH tel 0171 736 81
15 fax 0171 731 3339

Modelmaking Equipment

This covers a broad area. The main components are modelling clays,
silicones, foam latex, polyurethanes, resins, release agants. paints,
inks, glues, metalwork and engineering supplies. Some of these can be
obtained at local modelmaking and art supply stores. For some of the
more specialist items we goto:

Armatures and ball-and-socket joints to order

John Wright Modelmaking

Workshop I

Bristol Craft and Design Centre

6 Leonard Lane

Bristol BS I I EA

tel/faxOII7 927 2854

Aluminium wire for simple armatures and prototypes

HC Rowland & Co Rowland House Delamere Rd, Cheshunt Herts EN8

9SP tel 01992 627377 fax 01992 6281 I I

K & S Trade equipment

Chart international Chart House, Station Road East Preston,

Littlehampton West Sussex. BN I 6 5AG tel 01903 773170 fax 01903
782152

Plasters and silicones

South Western Industrial Plasters The Old Dairy Hawk St. Bromham
Chippenham, Wilts SN 15 2HU tel 01 380 850616

American modelling clay

Van Aken International 9157 Rochester Court Rancho Cucamonga

California 9 1729 tel 909 980 2001 fax 909 980 2333

Filmography

KEY

Series titles in quotes

Film titles in italics

D/A = Direction/Animation

D = Direction

A = Animation

PA = Primary Animation

Short Films 1978

Animated Conversations' Confessions of a Foyer Girl Down and Out

D/A Peter Lord & David Sproxton, 5 mm

1981-83

'The Amazing Adventures

of Morph'

26 episodes

D/A Peter Lord & David

Sproxton
5 mm

'Conversation Pieces'

On Probation

Sales Pitch

Palmy Days

Early Bird

Late Edition

D/A Peter Lord & David

Sproxton, 5 mm

1986

Babylon

D/A Peter Lord & David

Sproxton

14 mm 30 sec

1989

'Lip Synch'

Next

D/A Barry Purves

Idem

D/A Richard Goleszowski

Going Equipped

D/A Peter Lord

Creature Comforts

D/A Nick Park

War Story

D/A Peter Lord,

5 mm each

A Grand Day Out* D/A Nick Park, 23 mm *Produced by the National

Film

6 Television School and finished with the help of Aardman Animations

Lifting the Blues

D David Sproxton, 52 min

1990-91

Rex the Runt - How Dinosaurs

Became Extinct

D/A Richard Goleszowski, 2 min

1991

Rex the Runt - Dreams

D/A Richard Goleszowski. 2 mm

Adam

D/A Peter Lord, 6 mm

1992

Never Say Pink Furry Die D/A Louise Spraggon, 12 min Loves Me ...
Loves Me Not D/A Jeff Newitt, 8 mm

1993

The Wrong Trousers

D Nick Park

A Nick Park & Steve Box, 29 r

Not Without My Handbag D/A Boris Kossmehl. I 2 mm

1994

Pib & Pog

D/A Peter Peake. 6 mm

1995

A Close Shove

D Nick Park

A Nick Park, Steve Box, Peter

Peake.

Lloyd Price. Gary Cureton

Ian Whitlock, Sergio Delfmo,

29 mm

1996

D/A Sam Fell, 5 min

Wots Pig

D Peter Lord

A Peter Lord, Sam Fell, Mike

Booth, I I mm

1997

Stage Fright D Steve Box

A Steve Box, Jason Spencer-Galsworthy

Gary Cureton, Lloyd Price, Dave Osmand, I I mm

Owzat

D/A Mark Brierley, 4 mm 45 sec

1998

Hum Drum

D/A Peter Peake. 7 mm

Al Dente

D/A Mark Brierley, 2 mm

Angry Kid X3

D/A Darren Walsh, I min each

'Rex the Runt'

I 3 episodes

D Richard Goleszowski
A Sergio Delfmo,

Dave Osmand,

Chris Sadler. Nick Upton,

Guest Frame Sam Fell

PA Grant White, 10 mm

Pop Promos 1986

Sledgehammer

D Stephen Johnson

A Peter Lord, Nick Park.

Richard Goleszowski

Brothers Quay,

4 mm 30 sec approx

1987

Barefootm'

D/A Richard Goleszowski,

2 mm 30 sec

My Baby Just Cares For Me D/A Peter Lord, 3 mm approx

1988

Harvest For The World D/A (Aardman sequence) David Sproxton,

Peter Lord, Richard Goleszowski, 4 mm approx

1996
Never In Your Wildest Dreams D Bill Mather PA Paul Smith, Oily
Reid. Sergio Delfmo. 3 mm 57 sec

1998

Viva Forever

D Steve Box

A Steve Box. Darren Robbie,

Seamus Malone, 4 mm 10 sec

Public Information Films

HIV/AIDS

D David Sproxton, Steve Box

A Steve Box

Commercials 1982 - 1998

Films completed for the following clients/products: Access, Ace Bars,

Airwick, American Express Travel, Angel Delight, Anston, Bitza Pizza.
Bonduelle. Bowyers Sausages, Britannia Building Society, Burger
King, Cadbury's, Capri-Sun, Central Office of Information, Chevron.
Chewits, Colgate, Compact Games, Cook Electric, Crunchie, Cuprmol.
Daewoo, Dishwash Electric, Domestos, Ducros, Duracell, Duvivier,
Electricity Board, Enterprise Computers Finches, Fnsps, Gaymers
Cider, Grolsch, Guinness, Hamlet, Hunters Crisps, Isseo, Jelmoli.
Jordans Crunchy Bars, KP Kelloggs, Laban Jellybabies. Lego, Les
Autos, Upton, Little Caesars, London Zoo, Lurpak, Lyles Golden Syrup
McVities Pizza, Manchester Evening News, Maynards Meccano, Meule
d'Or, Mita, Nerds, Nestle, Oberlm, Perrier, Polo. Purina Gravy,
Quavers Quickbrew Rabobank, Ready-Brek, Rice Krispies, Ruffles,
SMC. St Ivel, Savlon, Scotch Videotape, Scottish Health Education
Group, Shower Electric, Smarties, Starburst.Tann's, Terence Higgms
Trust,Toppas.Total Heating, Tnmspoon.Tumbledry Electric. Wagon
Wheels. Walkers French Fries, Weetabix, Weetos

89

Bibliography

Archer, Steve. Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius (McFarland & Co

Inc. Jefferson, North Carolina) 1993

Bendazzi, Gannalberto, Cartoons: One hundred years of cinema

animation (John Libbey, London) 1994

Canemaker, John, Winsor McCoy: His Life and Art (Abbeville Press
(New York, NY) 1987 Crafton, Donald, Emile Cohl, Caricature and
Film (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) 1990

ibid, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928 (MIT Press,

Cambridge, Mass) 1982 Edera, Bruno & (ed) Halas, John, Full Length
Animated Feature Films (Focal Press, London) 1977 Fnerson, Michael,
Clay Animation: American Highlights 1908 to the Present (Twayne
Publishers / Simon & Schuster Macmillan, New York, NY) 1994

Halas, John, Masters of Animation (BBC Books, London) 1987 Halas,

John & Manvell, Roger, The Technique of Film Animation (Focal
Press, London) 1968 Harryhausen, Ray, Film Fantasy Scrapbook
(Titan Books London) 1989

Hickman, Gail Morgan, The Films of George Pal (AS Barnes and Co
Inc, South Brunswick, NJ) 1977 Holliss, Richard & Sibley, Brian The
Disney Studio Story (Octopus, London / Crown, New York, NY) 1988

Holman, L Bruce, Puppet Animation in the Cinema (AS Barnes and Co

Inc. South Brunswick, NJ) 1975 Home, Anna, Into the Box of Delights:
A History of Children's Television (BBC Books, London) 1993

Home, Maurice (eo), The World Encyclopedia 'f Cartoons (Chelsea

House Publishers, New York, NY) 1980

Martin, Leona Beatrice & Martin, Francois, Ladislas Storewitch (|ICA

Diffusion, Bibliography 2 Annecy) 1991 Pilling, Jayne (ed), Starewicn
1882-1965 (Film House, Edinburgh) 1983 Robinson, David, George
Melies: Father of Film Fantasy (Museum of the Moving Image,
London) 1993 Sibley, Brian (ed), Wallace & Gromit Storyboard
Collection:A Close Shave (BBC Worldwide Publishing Ltd, London)
1997 Thomas, Bob, Walt Disney the Art

of Animation (Golden Press, New York, NY) 1958 Thompson, Frank,

Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas: The Film, The Art. The
Vision (Hyperion, New York, NY) 1993

Picture Acknowledgments

Our grateful thanks to the

following for permission to

reproduce illustrations:

AB Productions: 38 (courtesy of

the BBC)

Bare Boards Productions: 55

BFI:20©DACS 1998,21.24,25,

26t, 26b Condor-

Hessisches/SGR/Film Four, 28t C4,

28b, 39b, 46

Columbia: 47 (courtesy of Kobal)

CM Dixon: 16

Mary Evans Picture Library: 17t &

b, I 8t & b, 19t

Janie Fitzgerald/Axisimages: I I I b

Kratny Film Prague (tel.

420.2.32.67091.1 54): 27 (courtesy

of Kobal), 32

Pearson International: 38t

Philips, Eindhoven: 29t

Photofest: 22. 29b. 30. 3 It & b. 36,

37. 40, 48, 50t

RKO/Warner/Time: 44 & 45

(courtesy of Kobal)

SC4/BBC/Chnstmas Films Russia:

34.35

Touchstone/Burton/Di Novi: 41 &

43 (courtesy of Kobal)

Viacom: 50b (courtesy of Kobal)

Thanks to the following for permission to reproduce images from

advertising commercials/ pop promos:

APL/Hasbro (Burger King) Mr Potato Head® is a trademark of

Hasbro, Inc. ®Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
BMP/DDB Needham Ltd (Lurpak,'Love Story') Channel Four,
Children & Young People's programmes. Dilly Gent/Parlophone
Records ('Never in Your Wildest Dreams') Greys/Starburst Fruits
(Starburst) M&M Mars, ®Mars Incorporated 1996 Reproduced with
permission. Tate & Lyle Sugars (Golden Syrup) J. Walter
Thompson/Nestle Rowntree (Polo)

'Sledgehammer' appears courtesy of Peter Gabriel and Virgin Records

Ltd (Sledgehammer) Young & Rubican/Chevron (Chevron)

Page numbers in italics refer to picture captions.

Aardman Animations 9-13, 51 -61 Aardman cartoon (Lord and

Sproxton) / 0. I I -12 Academy nominations and Awards

9,54,56,57,60, 168, 171 Achilles (Purves) 55, 56 acting out parts 81 ,

130, / 30 Adam (Lord) 9, 15,60,90, 134-5,

142-3, 144-5, 145, 158, 158 Adventures of Mark Twain, The

(Vinton) 49-50, 50 Adventures ofTwizzle.The'

(Anderson) 37 advertising see commercials Aesop's Fables' (Terry) 23

Alice (Svankmajer) 26, 27-8 Alice in Wonderland (Bunin) 39, 40
Anderson, Gerry 36 Andy Pandy 35 Animals and the Brigands, The

(Trnka) 32 Animated Conversations'

(Aardman) 52,53 Animated Grouch Chasers.The'

(Barre) 22-3 Animated Matches.The (Cohl) 24-5 armatures 15, 81, 90,
90,91, 94,

96,97,98,98.99, 100 Armstrong,Todd 46, 47 AVID (editing system)

180

Babylon (Aardman) 58 back light 73, 74, 75 backgrounds 23, 127 ball,
bouncing 80. 87 Barbera, Hanna 9 Barre, Raoul 22-3 Bass, Jules 40
Beautiful Leukanida, The
(Starewich) 25 Beda, Galina 35, 35 Beetlejuice (Burton) 41 beginning a
film 79 Bergen, Edgar 35 Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot

Men 36 Blackton, J Stuart 22, 23 blue-screen process 127, 127 blurred

images 127, /27 'Bobby Bump' (Hurd) 23 Box, Steve / 5, 59-60, 150,
160,

174-5 box-projectors 19-20 Brambley Hedge (Cosgrove

Hall) 40 Bray, JR 23 Brough, Peter 35 Bunin. Lou 39, 40 Burger King

commercials 60, I 12 Burton. Tim 40-1,40,43

Cob/net of Jan Svankmajer, The: Prague's Alchemist of Film (Brothers

Quay) 28

'Camberwick Green' (Murray) 38 camera obscura 17 Cameraman's

Revenge, The

(Starewich) 25 cameras 64-6

motion control 66, 70

tripods see tripods

video 66

video assist 70-1 Capnno, Ivo 35

eel animation 10. I 1-12,32-3,47 chalk animation 9-10, I 1, 22. 22

Channel 4 logo sequence 82 Chaplin, Charlie 24, 25 characterisation
166-79 Chevron commercial 57, I 12-13.

112 Chicken Run (Lord and Park) 60-1,

157 Chimney Sweep, The (Trnka) 32-3 Chiodo, Stephen 41 Christmas

Films 34, 35, 35 Christmas Gift, A (Vinton) 49 Cinderella (Cooper) 24
cine film 64-5, 66 Cinematographe 20-2 'Clangers,The' 38 Clash of the
Titans, The
(Harryhausen) 46 clay animation II, 15, 23, 42-61

2-D figures 102, 102, 103, 176

cleaning 80, 146, 152

hands 91, 91,98, 101. I 16, 146

heads 98

joints 90, 90

modelmaking 90-1

simple techniques 78-81

see also armatures; figures;

modelmaking Gaymation 49 Claymation Christmas Celebration, A

(Vinton and Gatz) 49 Clokey, Art 47-9, 48 Close Shave, A (Park)

54,55,59,

74,75,92-5.93-4,96, 104, 105,

122, 125, 125, 127, 150. 164,

164, 171, 171. 181, 182-3. 184 Closed Mondays (Vinton and

Gardiner) 49 Clutterbuck, Graham 38 Cohl, Emile 22, 24-5 coloured

lighting 72. 75, 75 colouring models 101. I 16 Comet Quest (Vinton)
49-50, 50 commercials 24, 29, 50, 50, 54, 57-

8,57.58,87,87, 112-13 computer animation 66 computer imagery 16, 23

computerised editing 180 Confessions of a Foyer Girl

(Aardman) 52 'Conversation Pieces' (Aardman)

52,52,53-4,53, 168 Cook, Luis 60

Cooper, Arthur Melbourne 23-4 Cooper, Menan C 45 Cosgrove, Brian
38 Cosgrove Hall 38-40. 54

Crandall, Roland 46 'Crapston Villas' (Kennedy) 59 Creation (Vinton

and Gatz) 49 Creature Comforts (Park) 57, 108.

146, / 48, 168, 168 cut-outs 10. 27

Danot, Serge 38, 38. 5 I Delgardo, Marcel 45 Demon (Kawamoto) 34

Destination Moon (Pal) 31 Devil on Springs, The (Trnka) 32-3 digital
cameras 66 digital frame store 71 Dimensions of Dialogue

(Svankmajer) 28 Dinky Doodle 23 Dinosaur (Vinton) 49 Dinosaurs

(Goleszowski) 59 Dioptres 65

Disney studio 40-2, 47, 51. 52-3 Disney, Walt 9, 23, 61 Dojoji
(Kawamoto) 34 dope sheets / 50 double exposures (impositions)

124-5 double-frame animation (doubles;

twos) 64, 65, 79, 79

substitution 87, 134-5 Dowling, Patrick 10-11 drawn animation 15,

19,22-3,

22,23

model animation compared

16-17 Dreams (Goleszowski) 59 Dreams ofToyland (Cooper) 24, 24

Edison,Thomas 19, 21

editing 180-1

Edward Sassorhands (Burton) 41

Emperor's Nightingale, The (Trnka)

33.34 ending a film 79 Evans, Mortimer 19 exaggeration 87, / 30, I 37
Execution of Mary Queen of Scots,

The 21 eyes 146, /47

fabric models 15

facial expression 146, (46-9, 150,

152, 152. 153. 158 Fall of the House ofilsher.The

(Svankmajer) 27-8 Fantasmagone (Cohl) 22 Faust (Svankmajer) 27,

28 feet 98, 99, 132 Felix the Cat 23 Fell, Sam 60 fibreglass 91 figures

2-D 102, 102, 103, 176

evolution, character 96

focus of interest 91,91

size, consistency of 90, 91

wire-based 91, 9/

see also armatures; clay

animation; modelmaking

fill light 72-3, 74, 75

Filmfair 38

Fimo I 16

'Fireball XL5' (Anderson) 37

Firman, Pater 38

Fisherman and the Little Fish, The

(Ptushko) 28-9 fishing wire 98 Fleischer, Dave 23 Fleischer Max 46
foam see latex foam footplates 98, 99

'Four Feather Falls' (Anderson) 37 Fox Talbot, William Henry 17 fps

(frames per second 64 Frankenweeme (Burton) 41 Fresnel lenses 72
Friese-Greene, William 19 furniture 109

Gabriel. Peter Sledgehammer video

58.58 Gardiner Bob 49 Garrard, Helen 180-1 Gatz, Joan 49 Geesmk,

Joop 31 Gertie the Trained Dinosaur

(McCay)

22,23 gestures 146-53 Gibson, EB 45 Gilliam,Terry 5 I

Gingerbread Cottage, The (Pojar) 33 glass, angled, shooting on 102,

102.

176-7 glue, epoxy-resin 95 gobos 72, 72 Godzilla 10

Gogs (Morris and Mort) 59 Going Equipped (Lord) 57, 73,

148, 173 Golden Syrup commercial 87, 87 Goleszowski, Richard 54-5,

56, 59,

61. 176-7 Good Soldier Schweik, The (Trnka)

33 Grand Day Out, A (Park) 54, 54, 96,

lib. 171 Grandpa Planted a Beet (Trnka) 32 Great Cognito. The

(Vinton) 49 Greeks, ancient lb, 17 Gromit lib. 124. 142-3. 146, 148.

IbO. Ib2. 164

construction 96, 96-7

see also Wallace and Gromit Gross, Yoram 35 Gumby (Clokey) 47-9,
48
Halas and Manvell, The Technique of

Film Animation 52 Hall, Mark 38 Hand, The (Trnka) 32,33 hands 91,
9/. 98, 101. I 16, 146 hanging figures 98 Hansel and Gretel
(Harryhausen) 31 Harryhausen. Ray 31, 3 /, 45-6. 46,

47,51,57-8 Hart,Tony 51, I 66

Harvey, Laurence 3 1

Haunted Hotel, The (Blackton and

Smith) 23 headlamps 71,75 Heat Electric commercials 57 Henson, Jim

35 history of animation 15-61 holds 130-1

Horner William George 18 House of Flame (Kawamoto) 34 'Howdy

Doody' (Smith) 35, 36 Humorous Phases of Funny Faces

(Blackton) 22. 22 Humpty Dumpty Circus, The

(Blackton and Smith) 23 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The

(Disney) 53 Hurd. Earl 23

Idem (Goleszowski) 55. 56. 59, 73 impositions see double exposures

Jabberwocky (Svankmajer) 27-8 James and the Giant Peach (Selick)

42 Jason and the Argonauts

(Harryhausen) 46,47,51,57 Jasper series (Pal) 31 John Henry and the

Inky Poo (Pal)

31 Johnson, Steve 58 Joseph the Dreamer (Gross) 35

Kawamoto, Kihachiro 34, 53 Keaton. Buster 42, 45 Kennedy, Sarah

Ann 59 key light 72. 75 Kmetoscope 21 King Kong (Cooper) 45, 45
Knobs in Space (Riddett and Cook) 60
Lantz, Walter 23 LastTnckThe (Svankmajer) 27 latex foam 15,95.98

casting 98, 100, 101, 116

colouring 101 Lawrence, Pater 172 lenses 65 lighting 72-5

Limoland (Aardman) 70, 7 / line animation see drawn

animation Lion and the Song, The (Pojar) 33 hp sync technique 150-1.
150, 180 lip Synch' (Aardman) 55-7, 56, 58,

172 Little Golden Key, The (Ptushko) 29 Little Nemo in Slumberland

(McCay) 22 Little Prince, The (Vinton) 49 Uttle Red Riding Hood

(Harryhausen) 3 I live-action

and animation compared 16

used with animation 45-6 45,

47,50,53, 124 Lord, Peter 9-1 3, 9, / 3. 15, 16-17.

90

18.46,51-61.5/. 156, 157, 158 Love in Black and White

(Starewich) 24, 25 Loves Me ... Loves Me Not

(Aardman) 12,91.91. 134-5 Lucanus Cervus (Starewich) 24-5 Luce,

Ralph 47

Lumiere, Auguste and Louis 20-1 Lurpak Butterman 57-8.58, 127

McCay,Winsor22, 23

macro setting 65

Magic Clock, The (Starewich) 24

Magic Lamp, The (Pal) 29

'Magic Roundabout,The' (Danot)

38, 38. 51 Marey. Etienne-Jules 19 Martin the Cobbler (Vinton) 49

Mascot The (Starewich) 26-7 Matches-An Appeal (Cooper) 24 mattes
125

maxi-plast rubber 94-5 May. Virginia 45 Melies. Georges 20-2, 20, 25

Mesmer Otto 23 /Midsummer Night's Dream, A

(Trnka) 33 Milliput I 16 Milo 66 Mix.Tom 24 model animation

15.20.23-61

drawn animation compared

16-17

video assist 70-1 Modelling Board 104 modelmaking

2-D figures 102. 102. 103

basic principles 90-1

joints 90. 90

size, consistency of 90, 90

see also clay animation; figures Mono Usa Descending a Staircase

(Gatz) 49 Monsters of the Post (May) 45 'Monty Python's Flying

Circus' 5 I Morph (Aardman) 5 1, 5 1, 68. 69.

79.81. 90. 116, I2G. 156. 156.

166-7, 167 Morris, Demiol 59 Mort, Michael 59 Mother Goose Stories

(Harryhausen) 31 motion control 66, 70 moulds

for latex foam 98, 100. 101

plaster 98, 100, 101, I 16

press 102. 103

rubber 102. 103

silicone I 16 mouths 146-53, 180 movement 130-45

acceleration and deceleration

137

anticipation 136

high-speed 126-7, 127

model mobility 98

special effects 144-5 Muat, Maria 35

Muffin the Mule 35

'Muppet Show,The' 35

Murray, Gordon 38

music 183-4

Muybndge, Eadweard 17-18, / 7

New Gulliver, The (Ptushko) 28, 28 Newitt. Jeff 12 Next (Purves) 55-6,
55 Nightmare Before Chnstmas.A

(Burton) 41, 4 1.43 No Credit (Tregillus and Luce) 47 Noah's Ark

(Cooper) 24 Noah's Ark (Disney) 40 Nocturne artificialia (Brothers

Quay) 28 Noddy (Cosgrove Hall) 39 Not Without My Handbag

(Aardman) 120 Nott Julian 183-4

Oake Doke (Cosgrove Hall) 39-40 object animation 15, 27, 57, 82-5.

81

substitution 87. 87 0'Bnen.Willis42.45, 45.46 Old Czech Legends

(Trnka) 33 On Probation (Aardman) 52, 52 One Too Many (Pojar) 33
ones see single-frame animation 'Operavox' series 35 optical toys 18-
19. 18 Oscars see Academy Awards 'Out of the Inkwell' (Fleischer) 23.

46 outdoor and landscape sets I 10-

I I, 110, III

Pal. George 29-32, 29, 30. 31.

40,87 Palmy Days (Aardman) 53-4, 125 pans 66

Pantomimes Lummeuses 19 Pans, Dr John Ayrton 18 Park, l\kk 9,

13.54-5,54.57,60-1,

130. 150. 157, 160. 162. 163,

168, 171 Pastrone. Giovanni 24 Peake. Peter 59, 178-9 Perry, Bill 172-3
persistence of vision 15, 64 Phenakistiscope 18, 18 photography 17-18
Pib and Pog (Peake) 59. 142-3.

148. 178-9, 178 Pickford, Mary 24 Pinchdiffe Grand Pnx. The

(Capnno) 35 Pit and the Pendulum, The

(Svankmajer) 28 pixillation I 1, 28, 82 Plastazote 94-5 Plasticine I

1,42,51,78, 100.

I 16, 136

see also clay animation Plateau, Joseph 18, 18 Pocahontas (Disney) 53

Poet's Life, A (Kawamoto) 34
•Pogles'Wood'38 Pojar, Bretislav 33 Polo commercials 58. I 12,

112, 113 Pop (Fell) 60 poses 130-1 Postgate. Oliver 38 'Postman Pat' 38
Praxinoscope 18. 19 Preston 74,75, 104. 104. 164 Proem (Tregillus and
Luce) 47 profile spots 72 projectors 64 props 109, 116, //6-22 Ptushko,
Alexander 28, 28 Punch and Judy 35 puppet animation 15. 22, 23, 27,

28-42,61 'Puppetoons' 29-31. 30 Purves, Barry 54-6. 55

Quay, Stephen and Timothy 28, 28,58

ram 124. 125

resin, cast 94-5, 96. 97, I 16

Return to Oz (Disney) 50

'Rex the Runt' (Goleszowski) 59,

61. 102, 102. 103. 118. 120.

176-7, 176, /77 Reynaud, Emile 19, / 9, 20 Rhodes, Adrian 182-3

Riddett Dave 60 Rigoletto (Purves) 55. 56 Rip Van Winkle (Vinton) 49

S4C35

So/es Pitch (Aardman) 53, 53

Sallis, Peter 54

Salter, Michael 164

Screen Play (Purves) 55. 56

scripts and stories 156-7. 180

Sculpy I 16

Selick,Henry4l-2
'Sesame Street' 35

set design and construction 108-

15. 116 7th Voyage ofSmbad. The

(Harryhausen) 46 shadows 72-3. 73, 74. 75 'Shakespeare.The

Animated Tales'

34.35 sheep, construction 92-5. 94-5 Ship of the Ether.The (Pal) 29, 29
Smbad the Sailor (Pal) 29 single-frame animator (singles;

ones) 65 Smallfirms 38 Smith, Albert E 23 Smith, Bob 36 Snow White

and the Seven Dwarfs

(Disney) 61 Softimage computer software 66 Sokolov, Stanislav 34, 35

Song of the Prairie (Trnka) 33 sound 182-4

editing 180-1

lip sync 150-1, 150, 180

synchronised 47 special effects 124-7

i novement effects 144-5 split screen 125 Sproxton, Dave 9-13. 15, 46,
51 -

61,51. 156 stability 98. 99 Stage Fnght (Box) 59-60. 9/, I 14,

114, 118. 146. 148. 174-5,

/74, 180 Starewich, Ladislaw (Ladislas

Starevitch) 24-7. 25, 26, 35. 38 Steamboat Willie (Disney) 47

Stereoscope 18 still frames 79 'Stingray' (Anderson) 37 stop motion
(stop action) 21 -2,

23-5.32,38,41,66 Story of King Midas, The

(Harryhausen) 31 Story ofRapunzel, The

(Harryhausen) 31 storyboards 98, 150, 158-65. 158-

65, 180 Street of Crocodiles (Brothers

Quay) 28. 28 studios and studio equipment

68-70 substitution method 30, 87, 87,

134-5 Sullivan, Pat 23 sunlight imitating 75 'Supercar' (Anderson) 37

Svankmajer, Jan 26, 27, 27 Symposium on Popular Songs. A

(Disney) 40

Take Hart' (Aardman) 156, 166

Tale of the Fox, The (Starewich) 26

Terry, Paul 23

Testament' series 35, 35

Thaumatrope 18

Theatre Optique 19, /9.20

3-D animation see model

animation Three Ages, The (Keaton) 42, 45 three-quarter rear key

light 73 'Thunderbirds' (Anderson) 37 tilts 66

Time Machine, The (Pal) 31 time-lapse video captures 66 timing

movements and frames 79 Tom Thumb (Pal) 32 Torchy the Battery
Boy'

(Anderson) 37 Town Rat Country Rat (Starewich)

26.26 Toy Story (Disney) 66 Toymaker's Dream, The

(Cooper) 24 Trash 10 trees 109

Tregillus, Leonard 47 tripods 64, 65. 66, 68, 69 Trnka, Jiri 32-4,32
Truckers (Cosgrove Hall) 40 'Trumpton' (Murray) 38 Tubby the Tuba
(Pal) 29-30, 29

Tulips Shall Grow (Pal) 30 2-D animation

angled glass, shooting on 102,

102, 176-7

see also drawn animation twos see double-frame animation

video assist 70-1

video cameras 66

Vincent (Burton) 40-1, 40

Vinton,Will49-5l,50

'Vision On'(Aardman) 10-12, 15.

51. 51, 68, 156. 166 Voyage to the Moon (Melies)

20-2, 20

Wallace and Gromit 54, 54, 90, 96. 109-10, 109. 116. 117, 134-5. 137.
142-3. 152-3. 162,

171, 171

War and the Dream ofMomi, The

(Pastrone) 24 War Story (Lord) 57, 150-1, 172-3,

172, I 73
War of the Worlds. The (Pal) 31 water, special effects 124. 125, 125
Wat's Pig (Lord) (3,60,73,98-

101, I 10-1 I, 110. III. 134-5,

157 When World's Collide (Pal) 3 I wide-angle lenses 65 Wind in the

Willows. The (Cosgrove

Hall) 38-9, 39. 54 wire-based figures 91, 9 1. 94 Wombles.The' 38,51

Wonderful World of the Brothers

Gnmm.The (Pal) 31.32 Wood, Ivor 38

Wooden Athletes (Cooper) 24 wooden figures 91 Woodentops 35

Woody Woodpecker 23 Wright John 104, 122 Wrong Trousers. The
(Park) / 5, 54,

59,73, 118. 120. 122. 124. 125,

125, 127. 127. 130. 134-5, 137.

144, 144, 160, 160, 162, 171, 181

Zoetrope 18. 19 zoom lens 65

UMiiliN

No I,.^3^?.03??8 139.7

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