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The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit
“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.”
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so small you can almost get away with murder. Our models are nine inches high,soifyoudoacloseuponahead you’re taking something that’s an inch and a quarter tall and you’re blowing it up to 30 feet tall. So the level of fin- ish on the puppets and on the sets is that much greater.”
Not that Aardman’s claymation style is seeking to emulate the clinical qualities of CGI, as Oscar and BAFTA winning Nick Park and his team made a conscious decision that the hand made look must be maintained. The finger- prints of those who made it remain, quite literally, a part of the film.
“Nick and Steve were very keen to bring back the fingerprinty style,” notes Barnes, “not to sculpt the plasticine characters to perfection. Obviously you have to reach a compro- mise between having everything look hand-made and hand sculpted and still keeping up production quality to make it on the big screen. This is a slightly stylised world, certainly not photo-real- istic though there are elements of it.”
“But bits of it are extraordinarily accurate,” continues Tristan Oliver. “The vehicles are millimetre perfect scale replicas of proper vehicles. These are totally surreal characters living in a hyper real world in some instances, and sometimes that world collapses and they go off into something that’s utterly bizarre. But the bricks on the houses are individu- ally made, and the drainpipes and the cars and the road surfaces are all absolutely right. But then you’ll get a machine that peels grapes.”
Combining the traditional stop- motion style with live elements proved a major challenge for all concerned, par- ticularly as stop motion is constrained by physical reality in a way that most other types of animation are not.
So while Wallace & Gromit pursue their mysterious foe on fog bound nights, the production team had to find a way to recreate this as well as introducing ele- ments of fire and rain into the story.
“In this sort of animation you can’t normally do running water,” Oliver explains. “You can’t do fire and you can’t do rain or fog. They have their own pace, and you can’t stop them. But this film has a huge amount of night time fog. That’s why we
chose the Super F- 500. We shot the animation on clear sets and then shut the sets down and pumped them full of fog. We then shot live action plates and put the two together.
“So we then had animation backed by fog, and because we had a hole where the animation was we laid CG fog elements over the front. As the charac- ters walked away from the camera there was a varying density of diffusion over them as they went deeper into it.
“Getting that cracked was tremen- dously enjoyable because we didn’t know if we could do it. The level of involvement of the people at MPC has been pretty full on on this job. What we have achieved with them are some pretty remarkable things. They’ve been incredibly helpful.”
Another key element in this style of animation is motion control, ensuring a fluidity and consistency of movement that is essential for the production values of the finished film.
“I’d estimate that about 75% of shots have elements of motion control,” says Tom Barnes. “Anything like a simple focus pull, or a tiny pan or tilt or track all has to be done by motion control. It can’t usually be done manually because it has to be repeatable. Generally we have to shoot background plates for all those shots, just in case anything needs repairing afterwards, or if there are any problems.”
It’s been a long, arduous journey getting to this point in the production, but all concerned seem confident that they have something special.
“When you suddenly realise the project you’ve been working away on with a couple of hundred people in a studio in Bristol is about to become
something enormous it’s very exciting,” nods Barnes. “ It’s a great moment. It’s lovely when the film begins to gather momentum and have a life of its own.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit
was originated on 35mm Super F-125 8532 and Super F-500 8572
Photo main: Wallace getting ready for some action in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
18 • Exposure • The Magazine • Fujifilm Motion Picture