Aardman

Aardman Studios'

Peter Lord

As we all know Aardman studios is the company responsible for wonders of the animation world such as morph and Wallace and gromit. Peter Lord, the co founder of the studio gave us this talk!

How the studio works

Here are a few bullet points as to various things Peter told us about the studio and the workings of it all the way from the start:

"Everyone is making it up as we go along"

The name Aardman came from the first animation that they did, it was a cell animation (very rudimentary) but the start of Aardman. the team combined two words: aardvark and superman - aardvark being a word that they liked, and superman being what their first animation resembled. the first animation was rudimentary, and they were doing what other big studios were doing at the time such as Disney! so after seeing an american plasticine animation they decided to pursuit this media.

"There are very few new ideas out there!!"

so the company started on Morph in 1976, which put them in a very good position.

but one of the problems that they faced was that they could only see what they had animated until they processed the film so they were animating blind. and morph also didn't have an armature so there was unavoidable swaying in the character.

As the company progressed they went on to feature length films. this is where Peter starting going into what areas the studio needed after progressing so much

5 Areas/Departments of crew

Feature film crew

TV adverts crew

Small games crew

TV shows

Rights department - making money off of others

he went onto saying that each area of crew take it in turns to take the strain of the current project, as in any other company.

"make it as good as it can be for the money"

He told us that it is very labour heavy which in turn makes it very expensive to run these projects.

Aardman, we found out, were doing a lot of TV commercials to make ends meet, which they found very good to fill the time.

and nowadays the product sellers will tell you what to do, when Aardman was just starting out, any animation company would tell the seller what to do due to it being a new concept.

another problem that they encountered was that of materials. when morph was first created they were using a plasticine from Harvads, it was called Harvads original terracotta plasticine. which sadly went out of production, so they had to formulate their own version of the stuff as it was much easier to work with and animate.

this is something that I can relate to. as price of materials is so expensive such as foam latex, I want to see if there is any way I can create my own material to achieve similar effects.