“We always believe that to get the characters and story right is the critical thing”
The world’s Number One studio when it comes to stop motion animation. The studio which has a record tally of four Oscars to its credit is now working on its first complete CGI animated feature Flushed Away at DreamWorks Animation SKG. Aardman Animations’ Executive Chairman David Sproxton who along with Peter Lord was one of the studio’s founders, visited India recently for FICCI Frames 2006 where he gave a Master Class on the making of an animated movie.
Animation ‘xpress Editor Anand Gurnani got a a good forty five minutes of the Award Winning Producer’s time where he along with Indian Stop Motion Animation Maestro Vaibhav Kumaresh interviewed Sproxton on topics like audiences, characters, story telling, creativity, motivation, aspirations and DreamWorks.
Excerpts…
What’s the most fun thing about Animation?
Creating imaginary worlds and telling crazy stories.
What’s the Aardman formula for success?
I don’t think there is a formula as such other than trying to make excellent work. Attention to detail is important to us but fundamentally it’s down to characters and scripts. If the creativity is good enough, the business takes care of itself.
Kids are very discriminating nowadays. There are a lot of businesses related to kid’s products in animation, but one has to always remember that kids connect to characters. And we always believe that to get the characters and story right is the critical thing. It’s not wise to think you can produce a great animation series or film just because there are character toys already on the market. The audience wants to believe in characters and so they need to be well written and if an audience takes to them they will express their love for them by buying related products.
Peter Lord, David Sproxton and Nick Park. The three pillars of Aardman Animations. How do you split duties?
Pete’s very story driven, he is much more focused on the feature animation side. I’m less involved in features on a day to day basis so I can be a bit more objective. I come from a cameraman, production side. When there were just the two of us, Pete animated and I did all of the rest.
My role is more of an executive producer. So I have an overview of a lot of what we do as well ensuring that we have the right technical approach for production. I’m not very attached to any single project until later on when in the features dept. I will get involved in the post production side, editing and audio.
Nick is encouraged just to come up with great ideas and help our creative teams come up with great things, especially gags. At the moment he’s still recovering from Curse of the Were Rabbit but will be back in the studio in a week or two.
How do you keep the creativity alive even after being so many years in the field?
We work at it!
We are also always looking for new talent and new opportunities. Things move fast in this business and keeping our creative people inspired is the key.
How do you ensure that you are surrounded by the best people and that they are inspired?
You just go for the best everywhere. We have been very fortunate to have such a talented team. A lot of our people have worked with each other before. You want the people to understand what their role is in the team. And of course we do train people to high levels. Also they want to produce great work for themselves and their peers.
Aardman Animations’ David Sproxton at the Animation ‘xpress booth “They (DreamWorks) believe in the ability of animated movies to have impact and they understand distribution too, which is key to getting movies out into the world”
A good amount of our ideas come from our in house people. They come up with interesting characters. Of course, they aren’t necessarily writers so we tie them up with writers. Monkey, Duck and Stoat was created in this fashion. They are stylized 3 Dimensional characters and we are trying to develop stories around them. We sent the characters out to six writers asking them what they could do with the characters.
Another show, Shaun the Sheep (10minutesx26episodes) is directed by three of our animators. It’s all silent movie stuff, no dialogue, nor voice over. Such stuff is quite difficult to write for. Golly is supervising and even Nick’s very happy with it.
Aardman Animations is one of the world’s leading animation studios. Being at the top, what are your aspirations looking forward?
Our understanding of story is getting better and sharper. The aspiration is to keep on getting better at whatever we do. Features take a lot of time to make (close to 4-5 years). We are doing more developments on more projects and that’s the hardest bit.
Stop Frame and CG, varying mediums, varying experience. Your comments?
Stop Frame is a very expressive medium. Especially when using clay, which is almost infinitely expressive. This brings real life to the characters. The excitement of doing Stop Motion has to be experienced to be understood. It is quiet a spontaneous, very slow continuous performance. You can’t do keys and then do the in-betweens, you have to animate in a progressive way from one frame to the next, rather like an actor or performer, except much more slowly.
One of our key animators suddenly got nervous on the first day of the Chicken Run shoot and disappeared. He had locked himself a way in order to “psych” himself up for the first real shot. Like a performer who has done many rehearsals but still gets first night nerves.
The joy of doing stop motion is in getting in all the detail and the challenge is to get all that into the lens. In CG you intend to work in a vacuum but in stop motion everything runs much like live action. It is a live process manifest on the set. In CG the spontaneity is lost sometimes.
In Stop Motion like in Live Action, the writing has to be much tighter and finalized. Once the shot is in the can it’s very difficult to make changes without a complete re-shoot.
In CG due to everything being in separate processes where things can always be tweaked until finally rendered, there is a tendency to constantly make creative changes, right down to the wire, because those changes can be implemented quite easily. So the writing may not get locked so soon as in Stop frame and I’m not sure this is a good thing.
Animated Discussions: David Sproxton & Vaibhav Kumaresh, “I believe that you should think for your home audience first. It’s what you know and what you understand”
Upcoming projects at Aardman Animations?
Flushed Away is our first CGI feature film and comes out this November. We are making it at DreamWorks in LA but with a number of our own people on the project. It’s looking great and I hope people enjoy it. We are also working on a number of other feature projects and a number of TV projects, including Shaun the Sheep, Chop Socky Chooks, and American versions of Creature Comforts alongside a couple of TV specials. So we are busy!
Comments on your relationship with DreamWorks?
One of the first things that Katzenberg told us when we met was, “If you are not passionate and don’t believe in your story don’t even start it” Jeffrey loves the creative side of it. We always wanted to do features and we had to tie up with a major studio. They (DreamWorks) believe in the ability of animated movies to have impact and they understand distribution too, which is key to getting movies out into the world.
DreamWorks has some fantastic people working for it and it is brilliant to be able to call on those skills for films we want to make.
Do you face a problem when it comes to getting your stories across to different continents?
Most of the time one is writing for the passion of one’s own beliefs. I believe that you should think for your home audience first. It’s what you know and what you understand.
We are comfortable in UK, Australia, Europe. We don’t relate to most of the US market very much in that there are cultural differences between the USA and UK which sometimes we don’t understand, although I think if a film has a strong story it should translate well into many countries.
In Wrong Trousers there was a scene where the penguin had a gun and I don’t think it would quite match in with the US sensibilities for the penguin to have a gun. Had that scene to be approved by a US commissioner I’m sure they would have changed it. We can’t make Hollywood movies. Wallace & Gromit is quite an English story yet very simple to follow. The fundamentals of it are absolutely universal. Because of who and what we are there is a lot of Englishness in it.Even the Japanese love Wallace & Gromit only because the characters are so English.
Flushed Away is interesting, characters are kind of English but it could be set in any big city. There was a debate with Dreamworks recently over a sequence, where the female character who is in love expresses her love in hints. Their perspective was why she doesn’t tell him right away. The Brits are much more subtle than that, the Americans aren’t!
During Were Rabbit, the American editor was brought in and he had 42 ideas for changes. A big note about the scene in the end when the bullet is hurling towards Wallace – that sequence is done in slow motion. The editor was wanting to ‘Speed it up guys’ and we said no. Gromit is a thinking character you cannot make that shot snappy. He didn’t see the subtleties in Gromit.
Have you seen any Indian animation?
Not much that I would point to, I wouldn’t be able to identify a studio. It would seem that very little Indian animation gets into the Animation festivals so it is hard to get to know the Indian animation culture. Though, I have seen stuff that was made in India (outsourced to India) on international TV.
The real hindrance is that you do not have your own market here in India. We are lucky that we have broadcasters like BBC and Channel 4, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, etc which commission animation on a regular basis and are screened around the world. The UK market for children’s animation is quite large.
Do you look to work with India?
We will be looking careful at what the opportunities are. The skill set in India is certainly growing fast and we would be crazy not to tap into that at some point.
Comments on training?
Aardman also teaches a lot. We are very involved in training and we have strategic links with Skillset, a body in the UK dealing with training in the film and TV industry,. Looking at all the modern skills we and some other companies came up with a curriculum for training animators. Skill Set was set up 4-5 years ago, and they will fund training programs.
Your message to aspiring animation film makers from across the world?
Watch as many movies as you can! Don’t get hung up about technology. Analyze what works and doesn’t in the films that you watch. Deconstruct them. Think about what makes the stories so compelling. It’s all about story telling.