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AARDMAN ANIMATION
“But Jeffrey is great on story, he’s good on pacing, knowing how you need to pace yourself and a film to work at 80 minutes, which is jolly hard to tell on animation, much more so than live action. The reason for that is that it’s much more difficult to re-cut it because you shoot very little coverage. So it’s much harder in post production to affect the pacing of a film, which is why you’re trying to assess it as you go along.
“Although we do a process which we call a fine cut at the end of this film, as far as most people are con- cerned we’re shooting accurate to the odd quarter of a second, and the wastage is as little as we can possibly make it. You have to be damn sure that you’re shooting the right couple of seconds when you do that.”
marketing officer. “We’ve had to build characters to last for 18 months on this film, so gone are the days of just a lump of plasticine. The hands and the arms and the heads are still made of plasticine, because they’re what give the character expression, but the bodies are moulded out of silicone. And inside the arm we have an arma- ture, or a free working skeleton. That’s to give the character durability and flexibility at the same time.”
In terms of character design the attention to detail is mind bogglingly minute. One character has 3,077 feathers on her bottom which have been hand “plucked” and touched up.
supervises the 28 units that are work- ing concurrently. An Aardman veteran, Riddett has seen many practical changes in equipment - and film stocks - during his time with the company.
“Technology has moved on,” he agrees, “and more and more equipment
as light-proof as they need to be.” This is also a problem in terms
of the film stock chosen for a stop motion animation such as this.
“The Fuji stock we’re using is rated at 125 ASA, but we use it at 100 ASA. We always like to saturate our neg, and unlike live action we tend to use long exposures. A quarter, half a second or sometimes two second exposures of each frame. Some of the stocks we tested weren’t as stable as we wanted, but the Fuji was. And they have to be, because some shots take place over three or four weeks, so that film is sitting in the camera for that amount of time under hot lights, and any instability will show up - especially on long exposures. We have to be very careful.”
Care is something that is quite obviously taken with every frame, and every component within that frame on a film like Chicken Run. Clare Thalmann insists, with a
Filming entirely at their newly acquired studios in Bristol, some way away from their main base which is continuing to make short films and commercials, Lord and Park have come up with a witty and enthralling story that looks set to capitalise on recent successes.
Chicken Run is set on a Yorkshire chicken farm in 1950, an austere atmosphere in which an ingenious plan is hatched (sorry) for the feath- ered residents to leave the farm, and avoid the clutches of the mean spirit- ed Farmer Mr Tweedy and his even meaner wife. A first rate voice cast that includes Mel Gibson, Julia Sawalha, Jane Horrocks and Miranda Richardson, together with the kind of painstaking model animation on which Aardman’s reputation is built, suggests that a big hit is in the offing for this poultry based, World War Two style escape movie.
But no-one at Aardman is getting carried away, not least because there is still much work to do before the film is finished. And it’s not all sexy, excit- ing stuff creating a movie like this, so much as the kind of rigorous attention to detail that makes for a seamless and vivid adventure on screen.
“The model making has moved on no end since the early days,” explains Clare Thalmann, Aardman’s
And for the farmer’s wife, Mrs Tweedy, a dress has been designed that subtly contains chicken’s feet - in spite of her hatred of the creatures - and which even extends to having chicken feet on her dress buttons.
Having started out with 12 ani- mators working on the different scenes, there are now 32 on board, some doing master shots, others doing close ups, others preparing complex blue screen sequences. So it’s necessary for there to be several versions of the characters, in two basic sizes. The optimum size is between nine and twelve inches, for ease of manipulation, although small- er ones exist for perspective shots and to maintain the proportions between human and chicken.
The camera department is over- seen by three directors of photogra- phy, headed by Dave Alex Riddett, who
has become available to us. On this
film it’s the first time we’ve been
able to afford to buy a vast amount
of uniform equipment. On the Wallace & Gromits we managed to get together maybe five Mitchell cameras, but the lenses, say, would all be slightly different.
“But on this we had over 25 Mitchells or conversions of Mitchell cameras. And they have total light- proofing, which in the past has been a problem for us. We’ve always used old cameras, and they’ve always been better in terms of the gate mecha- nism. Precision built cameras are bet- ter at taking one frame at a time, which is perfect for us, but in the past we’ve found they haven’t been
degree of understatement, that their work on this production is “a live action film, but in miniature.”
But it is somehow more than that. And with their next DreamWorks collaboration, a version of The Tortoise & The Hare, already in the pre-production stage, a new chapter in the Aardman success story is being written. Which is good news for British film, and for the time being, plasticine manufacturers.
“I don’t know if this is the only style of animation that Aardman will ever work in,” muses Peter Lord. “Emotionally and intellectually we’re very into experimenting with other things. We have no problem at all working on other styles, in theory.
“But every time, in practice, we go back to working in plasticine because it’s so expressive. Other peo- ple do beautiful 2D work, other peo- ple do beautiful CGI work. But this is what we do beautifully, and I don’t see any need to change it.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Chicken Run is originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photos clockwise from top: Peter Lord; Rocky in action in Chicken Run; scenes from Wallace & Gromit, Gromit in The Wrong Trousers (Moviestore Collection); Rex The Runt and above: Morph CHICKEN RUN © 1999 DREAMWORKS, PATHÉ IMAGE AND AARDMAN FEATURES LIMITED; WALLACE AND GROMIT © AARDMAN/W&G LTD 1989; MORPH © AARDMAN/MORPH LTD 1985; REX THE RUNT © AARDMAN/EGMONT/REX THE RUNT LTD 1991
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