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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 comedy franchise created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. The 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 silent yet loyal and intelligent anthropomorphic beagle. The first short film, A Grand Day Out, was finished and made public in 1989. Wallace was voiced by actors Peter Sallis and Ben Whitehead. Gromit is largely silent and has no dialogue, communicating through facial expressions and body language.
Aardman Animations, Ltd. is a British animation studio based in Bristol, England. It is known for films made using stop-motion and clay animation techniques, particularly those featuring its plasticine characters 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 $134.7 million per film. Aardman's films have been consistently very well received, and their stop-motion films are among the highest-grossing produced, with their 2000 debut, Chicken Run, being their top-grossing film, as well as the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time.
Nicholas Wulstan Park is a British animator who created Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run and Shaun the Sheep. 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 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, and in 2003, a television series in the same style was released. An American version of the series was also made.
Clay animation or claymation, sometimes 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 stop-motion animated supernatural comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and Aardman Animations. United International Pictures distributed the film in the United Kingdom, and it is the last DreamWorks Animation film to be distributed by DreamWorks Pictures in the United States, when the studio would spin off as an independent studio until being acquired by Universal Pictures in 2016. It was directed by Nick Park and Steve Box as the second feature-length film by Aardman, after Chicken Run (2000). The film premiered in Sydney, Australia on September 4, 2005, before being released in cinemas in the United States on 7 October 2005 and in the United Kingdom a week later on October 14, 2005.
Flushed Away is a 2006 computer-animated adventure comedy film directed by David Bowers and Sam Fell, 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 Animations following Chicken Run (2000) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), and was the first Aardman project completely made in CGI animation as opposed to their usual stop-motion. The film stars the voices of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Shane Richie, Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis, Ian McKellen and Jean Reno. In the film, a pampered pet mouse named Roddy St. James is flushed down the toilet in his British apartment by a sewer rat named Sid, and befriends a scavenger named Rita Malone in order to get back home while evading a sinister toad and his hench-rats.
Peter 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 The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! which was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 85th Academy Awards.
A Matter of Loaf and Death is a 2008 British stop-motion animated short film produced by Aardman Animations, created by Nick Park, and is the fourth short to star his characters Wallace and Gromit, the first one since A Close Shave in 1995.
Not to 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.
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 6-minute 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 equivalent award at BAFTA in 1992, and won two awards at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 1993. It is based on the beginning of the Book of Genesis. It was distributed by Aardman Animations.
Going Equipped is an animated short film created by Aardman Animations. It was directed by Peter Lord.
War Story is a 1989 animated short film created by Aardman Animations. It was directed by Peter Lord.
Sales Pitch is a 1983 animated short film created by Aardman Animations. It is one of five films released as part of the Conversation Pieces series. The film was directed and animated by Peter Lord and David Sproxton.
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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