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A silent film is a film without synchronized recorded sound. Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements or key lines of dialogue may, when necessary, be conveyed by the use of inter-title cards.
Wallace and Gromit is a British stop-motion animated comedy franchise created by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations. The main film series consists of four short films and one feature-length film, and has spawned numerous spin-offs and TV adaptations. The series centres on Wallace, a good-natured, eccentric, cheese-loving inventor, and Gromit, his loyal and intelligent anthropomorphic beagle. The first short film, A Grand Day Out, was finished and made public in 1989. Wallace was voiced by actor Peter Sallis until 2010 when he was succeeded by Ben Whitehead. While Wallace speaks very often, Gromit is largely silent and has no dialogue, communicating through facial expressions and body language.
Aardman Animations Limited is a British animation studio based in Bristol, England. It is known for films and television series made using stop-motion and clay animation techniques, particularly those featuring its plasticine characters from Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, and Morph. After some experimental computer-animated short films during the late 1990s, beginning with Owzat (1997), Aardman entered the computer animation market with Flushed Away (2006). As of February 2020, it had earned $1.1 billion worldwide, with an average $135.6 million per film.
Nicholas Wulstan Park is an English filmmaker and animator who created Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep, and Early Man. Park has been nominated for an Academy Award a total of six times and won four with Creature Comforts (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), A Close Shave (1995) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).
The National Science and Media Museum, located in Bradford, West Yorkshire, is part of the national Science Museum Group in the UK. The museum has seven floors of galleries with permanent exhibitions focusing on photography, television, animation, videogaming, the Internet and the scientific principles behind light and colour. It also hosts temporary exhibitions and maintains a collection of 3.5 million pieces in its research facility.
Silent Movie is a 1976 American satirical silent comedy film cowritten, directed by and starring Mel Brooks, released by 20th Century Fox in summer 1976. The ensemble cast includes Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman, Bernadette Peters and Sid Caesar, with cameos by Anne Bancroft, Liza Minnelli, Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Marcel Marceau and Paul Newman as themselves. The film was produced in the manner of a 20th-century silent film, with intertitles instead of spoken dialogue; the soundtrack consists almost entirely of accompanying music and sound effects. It is an affectionate parody of slapstick comedies, including those of Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett and Buster Keaton. The film satirizes the film industry, presenting the story of a film producer trying to obtain studio support to make a silent film in the 1970s.
The Wrong Trousers is a 1993 British stop-motion animated short film co-written and directed by Nick Park, featuring his characters Wallace and Gromit, and was produced by Aardman Animations in association with Wallace and Gromit Ltd., BBC Bristol, Lionheart Television and BBC Children's International. It is the second film featuring the eccentric inventor Wallace and his dog Gromit, following A Grand Day Out (1989). In the film, a villainous penguin, Feathers McGraw, posing as a lodger, recruits Wallace by using his techno-trousers to steal a diamond from the city museum.
David Robinson is an English film critic and author. He is a former film critic for both the Financial Times and The Times and wrote the official biography of Charlie Chaplin.
Flushed Away is a 2006 animated adventure comedy film directed by Sam Fell and David Bowers, produced by Cecil Kramer, David Sproxton, and Peter Lord, and written by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Chris Lloyd, Joe Keenan and Will Davies. It was the third and final DreamWorks Animation film co-produced with Aardman Features following Chicken Run (2000) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), and was the first Aardman project mostly made in CGI animation as opposed to starting with their usual stop-motion – this was because using water on plasticine models could damage them, and it was complex to render the effect in another way. The film stars the voices of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen, Shane Richie, Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis and Jean Reno. In the film, a pampered fancy rat named Roddy St. James (Jackman) is flushed down the toilet in his Kensington apartment by a sewer rat named Sid (Richie), and befriends a scavenger named Rita Malone (Winslet) in order to get back home while evading a sinister toad (McKellen) and his hench-rats.
Peter Duncan Fraser Lord CBE is an English animator, director, producer and co-founder of the Academy Award-winning Aardman Animations studio, an animation firm best known for its clay-animated films and shorts, particularly those featuring plasticine duo Wallace and Gromit. He also directed Chicken Run along with Nick Park from DreamWorks Animation, and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! from Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation which was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 85th Academy Awards.
Watershed opened in June 1982 as the United Kingdom's first dedicated media centre. Based in former warehouses on the harbourside at Bristol, it hosts three cinemas, a café/bar, events/conferencing spaces, the Pervasive Media Studio, and office spaces for administrative and creative staff. It occupies the former E and W sheds on Canon's Road at Saint Augustine's Reach, and underwent a major refurbishment in 2005. The building also hosts UWE eMedia Business Enterprises, Most of Watershed's facilities are situated on the second floor of two of the transit sheds. The conference spaces and cinemas are used by many public and private sector organisations and charities. Watershed employs the equivalent of over seventy full-time staff and has an annual turnover of approximately £3.8 million. As well as its own commercial income, Watershed Arts Trust is funded by national and regional arts funders.
Pierre Étaix was a French clown, comedian and filmmaker. Étaix made a series of short- and feature-length films, many of them co-written by influential screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. He won an Academy Award for best live action short film in 1963. Due to a legal dispute with a distribution company, his films were unavailable from the 1970s until 2009.
David Bowers is an English animator, storyboard artist, film director, screenwriter and voice actor.
Christopher Sadler is a British animator, director and writer. He is primarily known for his work on Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, Rex the Runt, Cracking Contraptions, Creature Comforts and Shaun the Sheep.
The Bristol Festival of Ideas is a project established in Bristol, England, which aims "to stimulate people’s minds and passions with an inspiring programme of discussion and debate". It was first set up in 2005, as part of the city's ultimately unsuccessful bid to become the European Capital of Culture for 2008, and continues to maintain a programme of debates and other events, including an annual festival each May.
Slapstick Festival is an annual comedy film festival in Bristol, United Kingdom. The festival, which was created in 2005 by Bristol Silents, screens silent, classic, and visual comedy films. The mission of the festival is to introduce these films to modern audiences and bring them to life for a new generation of viewers. Silent comedies are presented with musicians performing a score live, introductions by special guests, and various special events take place throughout the festival.
Sweet Disaster is a 1986 series of short films, made for Channel 4. It consists of "animated visions of the apocalypse", and includes films such as Babylon and Sweet Disaster. The series was conceived by producer David Hopkins. TheLostContinent explains "Hopkins scripted each of these films aside from the dialogue-free Dreamless Sleep". The films are fairly obscure; Nick Park noted that Babylon "hasn't really seen the light of day for a long time."
Down and Out is a 1977 short film created by Aardman Animations. It is part of the Animated Conversations series. In this short, creators David Sproxton and Peter Lord "applied the groundbreaking technique of using recorded conversations of real people as the basis for the script".
Wat’s Pig is a 1996 British stop-motion animated short film created by Aardman Animations and written and directed by Peter Lord. It is a tale of two brothers who are separated as babies only to reunite as adults during a war. It is told almost entirely non-verbally. It is based loosely on the story of The Prince and the Pauper.
Aardman Animations is an animation studio in Bristol, England that produces stop motion and computer-animated features, shorts, TV series and adverts.
References
- ↑ Bristol Silents celebrate 10 year Anniversary Archived 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine , South West Screen.
- 1 2 Return of Slapstick, BBC Bristol Entertainment.
- ↑ Bristol Silents Patron Paul McGann presents: Louise Brooks at 100, Watershed, Bristol.