Aardman studios

Aardman Studios

How Do They Create Animations?

Aardman studios are an English national treasure; they specialize in stop motion animation. They have made some vastly successful movies and programs, which include: Wallace and Gromit, Morph, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run, to just name a few.

The animation industry in the UK has a great tradition of Stop Frame, or Stop Motion (may also be known as Puppet, Model or Clay) animation. Studios like Aardman, have made some vastly successful movies and programs, which include: Wallace and Gromit, Morph, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run, to just name a few.

As the most potentially time consuming form of animation, stop motion requires enormous amounts of patience and dedication, Wallace & Gromit in ‘The Curse of the Were-Rabbit’, was made in Aardman’s studios. It is all filmed using stop motion, this technique of filming animation which is very popular, it is a very tedious and time consuming technique, but when its done correctly it gives a great look to the film. And there are a huge variety of tasks and activities that go into making a piece of stop motion animation. This is reflected in the wide range of job roles available.

Job Roles

Animators

Aarman’s animators would have proven high-level experience because of the prestigious Aardman studios. They are always pushing the boundaries of the art form; they have an exceptional sense of various acting and performance styles. The animator’s job is to be an artist, an artist that gives a story through the movement of the characters, and also the movement of the camera and the way the footage has been shot.

Assistant Animators

The film productions demand artists who demonstrate animation, model making and sculpting skills to serve as assistants on feature film projects. Knowledge of photography is also a useful skill to an assistant animator, because they can give help and advice to the animators to get lots of different opinions on they way they film the shot. That’s what an assistant animator would be used for, their advice and knowledge on the way the footage gets filmed.

Storyboard Artists

An Aardman storyboard artist should be able to effectively communicate emotions and feeling through character design, staging and interesting enthusiastic storytelling. A Storyboard artist would be creating storyboards through, character design and rough example model sheets as well as personal sketches, these are the building blocks to convey a story. Traditional skills such as life drawing, sculpture, painting and photography also assist a storyboard artist because all these skills involve using some sort of creative intellect to start with a blank canvas and making a interesting story for a stop motion animation film.

Layout Artists

Layout artists are those who run all the mise-en-scene, this is everything that appears before the camera and its arrangment - composition, sets, probs, actors, costumes, and lighting. A cinematographer’s eye and an understanding of film-making are vastly helpful for this job role; this is because they will be dealing with the visual aspect to film-making. At Aardman studios there is a huge art department for making big background landscapes; they look at architectural designs to make realistic models for the film set.

There are lots of the same puppet armatures used for different scenes within Aardman studios productions, for example: Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-rabbit, for the main villain in the film the Were-Rabbit they built a skeleton like structure and then used lots of different materials on a number of the Were-Rabbit puppets made, in scenes where the character would talk or howl they used flexible and malleable materials to move the mouth. Aardman studios set a high quality level of stop motion animation that’s why there world renowned, but this is only because all of the sectors work hard and in sync with each other, in which creates a successful production. 

Robert Welland