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A TASTE OF
VEGGIEHORROR
Wallace & Gromit make their big screen
O
bow in The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, Aardman Animations’ long-awaited follow-up to Chicken Run. A report from the set
n a Friday afternoon in late May the mood at Aardman Animations’ Bristol based studio is cheerful. There are just a few weeks left until principal photogra- phy is finished on the
eagerly awaited follow up to Chicken Run, which marks the end of a marathon shoot that began nearly 90 weeks before.
And expectation is heightened all the more as this latest feature marks the big screen debut of Aardman’s undoubted star performers, Wallace and Gromit, in The Curse of the Were- Rabbit. Co-written and co-directed by Steve Box and Nick Park, it is an ambi- tious tale with attendant pressures on all concerned.
Dave Alex Riddett and Tristan Oliver share the lead cinematographer duties, overseeing four other lighting cameramen working across up to 32 sets, accruing a maximum of two min- utes finished footage between them per week. It’s a painstaking process that requires skill and precision, and a film stock that doesn’t degrade over the course of a shot that might take several weeks to complete.
For that reason Riddett and Oliver selected the Super F-125 8532 for the animation and live action ‘effects’ elements on the Super F-500
8572. The distinctive world in which Wallace & Gromit live might seem much larger than life - recognisable and at the same time not quite real - but both lead DPs insist that the lighting has to remain as naturalis- tic as possible.
“We do tend to work in a highly naturalistic style,” Oliver nods.
“We eschew the standard animation lighting, with big flat lights, the sort of thing you might see in Trumpton or Postman Pat. We light as if we’re lighting in the real world. It’s a very realistic look, except when it needs to be completely surreal.
“Then you can have fun with it.
I think Chicken Run was more hyper realistic in the way it was lit, because it was such a tremendously real envi- ronment. Wallace & Gromit obviously comes with a bit of history, which is down to the style that Dave and I established on The Wrong Trousers. It’s hard to define, but it’s a slightly warmer, more cosy look.”
“This one has got a hell of a lot more variety to it than Chicken Run
as well,” continues Riddett. “We’ve got Gothic horror in there, stormy nights, bright sunny days. And some expres- sionistic lighting.”
In this adventure, the keen but not entirely competent Wallace (voiced by the evergreen Peter Sallis) starts up a
humane pest control service to pro- tect the vegetable patches of his friends and neighbours in the run up to the Giant Vegetable Competition. ‘Anti-pesto’ is a great success until the arrival of a mysterious giant rabbit who strikes by night and lays waste to the prize fayre of local gardens.
Suddenly the contest organised by Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter) seems under threat and it is down to Wallace and his worldly wise dog Gromit to save the day before the scheming Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) steps in to take control of the situation.
“Nick describes it as a vegetarian horror movie,” chuckles Technical Director Tom Barnes. Of course the changes required for the feature film are many, requiring careful attention to pacing and of course design, for a film that takes familiar TV characters and blows them up to cinema scale.
“That means making sets bigger,” adds Tristan Oliver, “camera moves more complicated, adding more peo- ple in there and more environments. As soon as you add people and cam- era moves and bigger environments then the time it takes from the set coming in to the shot being done is stretched out massively.
“Not only are you looking for scale, but you’re looking at a screen which is infinitely less forgiving. A television is
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