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Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back. Any kind of object can thus be animated, but puppets with movable joints or plasticine figures are most commonly used. Puppets, models or clay figures built around an armature are used in model animation. Stop motion with live actors is often referred to as pixilation. Stop motion of flat materials such as paper, fabrics or photographs is usually called cutout animation.
Wallace & Gromit is a British stop-motion animated comedy franchise created by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations. It consists of four short films, two feature-length films 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 released 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. It is known for films and television series made using stop motion and clay animation techniques, particularly those featuring its plasticine characters from Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, 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 & 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).
Creature Comforts is a British adult stop-motion comedy mockumentary franchise originating in a 1989 British humorous animated short film of the same name. The film matched animated zoo animals with a soundtrack of people talking about their homes, making it appear as if the animals were being interviewed about their living conditions. It was created by Nick Park and Aardman Animations. The film later became the basis of a series of television advertisements for the electricity boards in the United Kingdom. In 2003, a television series in the same style was released. An American version of the series was also made. A sequel series, Things We Love, first aired on BBC One in 2024.
Claymation, sometimes called clay animation or plasticine animation, is one of many forms of stop-motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually plasticine clay.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a 2005 animated comedy film directed by Nick Park and Steve Box. It was produced, made and owned by DreamWorks Animation in collaboration with Aardman Animations. It was the second feature-length film by Aardman, after Chicken Run (2000) and the last DreamWorks Animation film distributed by its parent DreamWorks Pictures, as the studio spun off as an independent studio in 2004 until its acquisition by NBCUniversal in 2016. The film debuted in Sydney, Australia on 4 September 2005, before being released in theaters in the United States on 7 October 2005 and in the United Kingdom a week later on 14 October 2005.
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.
The animated documentary is a moving image form that combines animation and documentary. This form should not be confused with documentaries about movie and TV animation history that feature excerpts.
Animated Conversations is a series of short animated films by Aardman Animations.
Darkside is a 2013 philosophical comedy radio drama written by Tom Stoppard, produced and directed by James Robinson and based on the themes of Pink Floyd's 1973 progressive rock album The Dark Side of the Moon.
Gulp is a 2011 British animated short film by Aardman Animations working with Wieden + Kennedy and filmed on Nokia N8 smart phone, then Nokia's top-of-the-range. It is considered a spiritual successor to another Aardman short, Dot. Gulp was filmed "on the world’s largest stop-motion set". The film run-time is under two minutes, and is followed by a behind-the-scenes featurette. The co-directors were Will Studd and Sumo Science.
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."
Adam is a 1992 British stop-motion clay animated short film written, animated and directed by Peter Lord of Aardman Animations. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short and the BAFTA Film Award for Short Animation in 1992, and won two awards at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 1993. The film, which was distributed by Aardman, is based on the beginning of the Book of Genesis.
Going Equipped is an animated short film created by Aardman Animations. It was directed by Peter Lord.
Lip Synch is a series of five 1989-1990 short films made by Aardman Animations which used vox pops as inspiration for their subject matter. They were commissioned by Channel 4. Nick Park's contribution to the series was the film Creature Comforts, which later won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short of 1990. Channel 4 screened the films as part of their Four-Mations UK season in November 1990.
War Story is a 1989 animated short film created by Aardman Animations. It was directed by Peter Lord.
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".
Aardman Animations is an animation studio in Bristol, England that produces stop motion and computer-animated features, shorts, TV series and adverts.
References
- ↑ "Fly2help - Leading UK Aviation Charity - Lifting Horizons". Archived from the original on 10 January 2014. Retrieved 11 January 2014.
- ↑ "Aardman Animations - Aardman History".
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