Owzat | |
---|---|
Directed by | Mark Brierley David Sproxton |
Written by | Mark Brierley |
Produced by | Peter Lord David Sproxton Dave Throssell |
Cinematography | Mark Brierley |
Edited by | Richard Atherton |
Production companies | Aardman Animations TJFX |
Release date |
|
Running time | 4 minutes, 50 seconds |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Owzat is a 1997 CGI [1] short film created by Aardman Animations. [2] [3] The title is a shortened form of "How's that?", the traditional call used to request rulings from an umpire during a game of cricket.
Teams of ghosts and skeletons gather in a church graveyard for a midnight game of cricket under a full moon. One skeleton batsman repeatedly hits the ball into the gravestones and monuments, damaging them and irritating the ghosts' bowler. After one hit flies into the belfry, striking the bell and sending it crashing to the ground, the ghosts confront the batsman with photographs of the damage he has caused. He ignores these and dares the ghosts to continue the game. When the next ball is bowled, the batsman knocks it into the weather vane mounted atop the belfry; it ricochets into the sky and shatters the moon as if it were a light bulb, leaving the graveyard in total darkness.
The film's delivery format was Betacam SP. [4] The CGI animating and modelling was done using Softimage 3D. [5]
The film was shown at the 1998 International Film Festival Rotterdam under the theme "exploding cinema", [6] and the 1998 Holland International Film Festival under the theme "Nieuwe media". [7]
On IMDb, Owzat received a rating of 5.3/10 from 105 users. [8]
Stop motion is an animated filmmaking and special effects 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.
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. Between 2000 and 2006, Aardman partnered with DreamWorks Animation.
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