Wallace & Gromit creators mark 50 years with spook-tacular new Shaun The Sheep movie

BRISTOL, Britain – Crochet hook in hand, the animator slightly raises the eyelid of a clay model sheep in a film-making technique as old as cinema, perfected over five decades by Aardman Animations.

In the basement of the Bristol-based company – whose beloved characters such as Wallace and Gromit have won it four Oscars – designers have been working for the past 3½ years on the latest adventure in their Shaun The Sheep series.

Shaun The Sheep: The Beast Of Mossy Bottom is the third full-length film starring the mischievous, savvy sheep, due to be released on Sept 18 in British cinemas.

This time, Shaun and his flock have to work together to save Halloween from a fur-raising creature terrorising their farm’s pumpkin patch.

The film marks the 50th anniversary of Aardman, founded in Bristol in 1976 by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, who went to school together and used to make models on a kitchen table.

In the dim light of Aardman’s basement, about 40 small rooms with a blue background have been set up, with curtains concealing puppet-size scenes from the film.

One curtain opens to reveal Mossy Bottom farm and its autumnal colours, another a mad science lab, while behind yet another is a black and red fishing boat.

In the world of sophisticated digitalised animations and computer graphics, Aardman stands out for its painstaking handcrafted “stop-motion” technique, which dates back to the late 19th century.

“Our aim as animators is to make people think these puppets are alive,” said animation director Claire Rolls. “Nowadays, there’s not a lot of places in the world doing stop-motion animation.”

‘Spare arms and ears’

In a docklands scene, Rolls, who joined the company in 1998, was working with team member Ed Jackson to set up camera shots. The sheep, wearing yellow rain jackets, are trying to attract the attention of a crew of sailors, Rolls said.

The animator gets down to work, eyes fixed on a screen that alternates between the shot he is preparing and the previous frame.

To create the illusion of movement, he raises one sheep’s head, lowers another’s legs and clicks the camera once the shot is ready.

After two days of this patient, exacting work, he will have filmed about two seconds of footage, each second made up of 24 frames.

The complete film is made up of more than 100,000 of these painstakingly created stop-motion frames.

The creatures that populate the studio’s productions are created upstairs, in the puppet department.

After first appearing in Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave (1995), Shaun has become one of the studio’s icons. He is now the hero of a television series shown in 170 countries, as well as two previous films, and has attracted a huge social media following.

Amid a jumble of drawings and materials, Kate Anderson, the head of the puppet department, pulls out a box filled with interchangeable parts – a mouth closed, a jaw dropped or rounded in an “O” of surprise.

Such parts help animators to illustrate different “sounds and expressions” for Bitzer, the long-suffering sheepdog.

The puppet-makers “stick with clay for really expressive areas of the puppet, like the face”, said Anderson, even if sometimes, silicone is used to make the characters’ bodies.

That material is more resistant when applied to a metal frame, she said, with the figures nailed in place to avoid any continuity errors. “Because animators are touching puppets all day long, they do break quite easily,” she said. “We always know that we need to have a big stock of spare sheep arms and ears.”

‘Quirky, fun’

Co-director Steve Cox said: “The animation is like a live performance.” It is different from computer-generated images and two-dimensional ones as “you can’t really go back and change things once you’ve done it”.

Filming is done in silence and sound added later, but that does not stop its “very British” humour, kind of “quirky and fun”, from shining through.

“We do use digital effects in our films, but they’re an embellishment” to the hand-crafted work, said producer Richard Beek.

Artificial intelligence has not been used for this latest Shaun movie, he added.

Aardman’s playful, imaginative clay figures are instantly recognisable, from the pumpkins to Shaun’s mad-scientist glasses.

The release of Disney’s Toy Story in 1995 caused concern, as with AI, that “we’re going to make films now on computers” and there would no longer be any place for stop-motion.

“But what’s happened is, we’ve continued to make films,” Beek said. “The whole world changes around us, but there’s lots of things that stay the same at Aardman – and maybe that’s partly what people like... there’s a familiarity to it.” AFP