Behind The Scenes On ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’: A Look At The Stop Motion Process At Aardman Animations
The prospect of creating a stop motion film is daunting, to say the least. The process of taking a photo, altering a scene slightly, then taking another photo, over and over can almost make the medium seem pointlessly complicated for a filmmaker… and yet, there is something about the handcrafted aesthetic of a stop motion film that can’t be matched by anything digital. And that special something is where Aardman Animations has made their mark.
In their first big film outing since 2008’s A Matter of Loaf and Death, the iconic duo from Aardman Animations return for Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Gromit becomes concerned that Wallace is becoming too dependent on his inventions, and his fears are proven right when Wallace’s new “Smart Gnome” Norbot seems to develop a mind of its own.
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In anticipation of the film, Deadline was given a tour of Aardman Animations studio and a behind-the-scenes look at the incredible process of bringing the handcrafted, stop motion picture to life. Although directors Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham were unable to attend the tour, they were able to provide some insight to the inner workings of the film afterwards.
The tour begins with a stop in the puppet department, led by puppet designer Anne King. Here, we are introduced to the process of creating the puppets out of both silicone and clay. “The clay takes quite a long time to sculpt,” says King, “so if the animators on the studio floor have to do a big shot with Gromit walking across a set on all fours, getting it all looking perfect is actually very time consuming. So, we developed this silicone puppet so the animators can actually get a lot of movement out of it without going through all the sculpting.” However, since the silicone isn’t expressive like clay, they can’t use full silicone puppets for the stop motion. “With the clay, you can sculpt it to anything you want basically, so a lot of the hands and faces are of clay just to get that expressiveness.”
Even though silicone can’t be altered once cast, Park says the advancements in the technology have helped to maintain their handmade aesthetic. “The heart of our whole ethos is to keep everything handmade and keep the clay quality of it all, with the fingerprints and everything, which is the key to keeping the charm and the authenticity.”
Our next stop is with cinematographer Dave Alex Riddett, who has a set from the film already set up for us, filled with Norbots. As the person in charge of lighting and capturing the image of a scene, it’s impressive how Riddett is able to incorporate effects into the film using theatrical methods, rather than digital enhancements. “You can’t just stick in any old effect, like real flames or real water. Sometimes it’s too realistic and it doesn’t marry into this world nicely,” he says. “We still use effects which are basic theatrical effects, like water effects and fire effects.” The example he demonstrates is by putting patterns on a jam jar to create an altered effect on the light passing through it.
With a set this large, and with as many Norbot puppets as we can see, Riddett also describes how the animators would approach the scene. “The animator actually animated the right side [of the set], then came back and animated the middle bit, and then animated the left-hand side.” This way, the animator wouldn’t need to keep track of more than seven characters at any given time, and the three sides could be spliced together in editing.
“That was better for the animators,” adds Crossingham. “To be able to concentrate on one group, rather than animating everything and then taking the frame and doing the same thing all over again. It would’ve driven them crazy.”
After watching the fully animated sequence ourselves, we are ushered towards our next stop to speak with Will Becher, the supervising animator. Where King showed us how the puppets themselves were made, Becher shows us the individual pieces that need to be swapped out for every small motion or piece of dialogue. “All of the dialogue is broken down in advance and recorded before we get to animate the shot, and then we’ll literally have a shot go through frame by frame, swapping the mouth over onto the puppet,” he says. Every blink, hand gesture and slight facial expression needs to be accounted for. “The animators are trying to do five seconds a week, is the target.”
For characters like Gromit, or Feathers McGraw who returns for the film, their animations present a different set of problems. Although the animators don’t need to worry about matching mouths to dialogues for the silent characters, they need to be able to communicate in incredibly expressive ways. “We don’t talk to them about animation, we talk to them about performance,” says Crossingham. “Gromit has a very expressive brow, but he also has shoulders. Sometimes it’s just a case of dropping the shoulders and making him look exasperated.”
“It’s not just about movement, it’s about how to make the audience believe that this is a living, breathing character that has a soul,” adds Park. “That’s the real challenge.”
“And then some of the hardest things for the animators were the closeups and the performances required from Feathers,” says Crossingham. “He’s such a simple graphic presence. Anything you do with him, you see it.”
“It’s really the art of the minimal, how to do very little, but get an enormous amount out of a very small, nuanced movement,” says Park. “Do we make him blink? A blink might be too much, but let the music and the camera move to tell the audience there’s something going on in his mind.”
We end our tour with the production designer Matt Perry, who walks us through a few remaining sets before they are taken down as production on the film is wrapping up. One of the most interesting is a submarine set, which is built to be taken apart and filmed in pieces. “Essentially, we are doing a shot that pulls out from Feathers, who’s going to be sat on his chair right at the back all the way out [to the front] where there’s a bunch of Norbots on a pool table,” says Perry. “There’s no way an animator can get to animate over there.” Instead, they remove pieces of the set, animate Feathers in the back, then put the pieces back one at a time to animate them. “This all happens like three months before they even shoot anything, so we have to know absolutely everything ahead of time.”
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl will be available on Netflix on January 3, 2025, and will be broadcast on BBC on Christmas.
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