Aardman’s Lord and Sproxton

April 2007

By Anna Carugati

What started as two adolescents dabbling in
animation as a hobby has turned into the Academy-Award-winning studio Aardman
Animations. Peter Lord and David Sproxton began their partnership in high
school, when they sold an animated 20-second cartoon starring a nerdy superhero
named Aardman to the BBC. Buoyed by this success, Lord and Sproxton formed
Aardman Animations in 1976 as a studio specializing in stop-motion clay
animation, and the rest, as they say, is history. Director Nick Park joined the
studio in 1985. His film Creature Comforts won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1990; then came
the Wallace & Gromit films,
two of which, The Wrong Trousers
and A Close Shave, won Oscars
as well. As the studio’s reputation grew, so did its range of work, branching
out to include television production and TV commercials. Chicken Run was the first of a five-picture arrangement with
DreamWorks SKG. Although that agreement has recently expired, Lord and Sproxton
continue to look for ways to expand the studio’s business and reputation, all
the while maintaining the boyish enthusiasm that got them started in the first
place.

TV KIDS: What kind of atmosphere do writers, producers, animators
and directors find when they come to work at Aardman?

LORD: Because of the way we have grown up, which is
really as independent filmmakers, we come from the tradition that the
writer/director/animator does everything. We’ve evolved from that, but those
are our roots. As a result, we do tend to have a lot of faith in the individual
vision, rather than the super-evolved, super-developed filmmaking technique. Of
course I have many people who would attack me if I didn’t put in a considerable
word for development as an important skill. But I think Dave and I both believe
in personal vision. So that’s what we are predisposed to look for. And the
prime example of that is Nick Park. He has it—whatever it is—he
just has it! You can help him and enhance [his work], and make it perhaps
slightly more efficient, but fundamentally he just has that magic thing that
one’s looking for. And that’s what we love.

There isn’t a dominant style to what we
do—there isn’t really; all [the projects] are very different. We do
feature films, television series, commercials and 30-second [clips] for mobile
phones. And across that vast range, what all the projects have in
common—although the look and style and tone is very different—is
the director’s vision.

So I hope this is a good place to work for creative
people and for producers, too. When we do a new project, we do quite a lot of
formal structured development, but we always say very simply, somebody’s got to
love this. Someone has really got to carry it emotionally.

TV KIDS: How do you foster creativity within your team? Do
you allow them that individual vision and to go with what they feel?

LORD: We try to. We try to set up teams—teams are
very important. Our instinct is to empower creative people, rather than
producing a film by committee, which is an awful approach. You have to find the
best people and if they’re not there at the top of a production it will never
succeed.

How do we foster creativity? It’s tricky, but
sometimes you have to let people fail. It’s not nice when it happens, but
occasionally you have the wrong people at the wrong place. It’s a funny
business, our animation studio, because in my observation of the big American
animation studios, a lot of their creative talent comes through from the story
department, as they call it. And we don’t. Historically we haven’t exactly had
a story department, so it makes it more difficult for us to spot the big
creative talent. We do lots of searches for talent from different bases. I was
just reading a whole bunch of submissions for a mobile-phone-content
competition [we held], and 20 people inside the company have put in pitches.
That’s a very small format, but at least it’s a way of trying to discern who in
the company has that magic talent.

TV KIDS: It’s a good feeling when you find it?

LORD: Lovely feeling, and lovely when you know. You look
at ten submissions and think, that’s quite interesting, and that’s good here,
and we could make this work. But then you get one and you say, Ah! that’s
really special and personal.

TV KIDS: How much influence have major animated motion
pictures—their styles and special effect—had on tele­vision
animation? Is there a trickle-down effect?

LORD: I’m sure there is because of the explosion of CG
production. Particularly in that world, I’m sure it has had a considerable
trickle-down effect, which is entirely understandable—why wouldn’t the
people making TV series look at some of these great feature films?

When I see kids’ movies, I am often impressed by
the scope and the ambition—equally often I am appalled! But quite often
in manga-style movies or action-adventure for older children, they have quite
spectacular effects and surprising scale and ambition, which no one would have
dared to do 20 years ago. Now it’s very healthy; the technology has made the
business much more democratic.

TV KIDS: What projects are you working on?

LORD: I can’t tell you much about the feature films. I
can only say that we are aspiring to do another CG film. Even though we’ve
ended our agreement with DreamWorks, we are still very keen to keep doing
features. We’ve got one stop-frame animation film, but I can’t talk about it
because we are waiting for the first draft of a script. So it’s early days, but
it’s a lovely project. And beyond that we’ve got two more lurking in the wings,
waiting for their chance to strike! And a couple of CG projects as well. There
is more in development than ever before, which is lucky and a really nice
feeling.

Among the TV series, there is Shaun the Sheep, which recently premiered, and that is a real gem.
They are seven-minute episodes, but they are difficult, because they are
silent. There is no dialogue and that gives you really quite big story
challenges. But, talk of the trickle- down effect, interestingly, Shaun the
Sheep has benefited from the
trickle-down effect of stop-frame feature- film technology. It’s much, much
cheaper to make Shaun the Sheep
than a film like Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and of course it’s less ambitious. But in terms of
the look and the composition of the individual shots, it’s very beautiful with
a lot of the same skills brought to bear as in the feature film. And we’re
doing a CG children’s series called Chop Socky Chooks, and two more kids’ series: Planet Sketch and Purple and Brown.

TV KIDS: How do you decide which animation style is most
appropriate for a given project?

SPROXTON: Sometimes it’s economics. For example, Chop
Socky Chooks and Planet Sketch are ­co-productions. They are CG and they are being made
in Canada under our direction. They are very different projects. One is a
sketch show: it’s got characters and is quite fast moving and the design of it
basically says this is CG. The other one, Chop Socky, is very design-led, but it’s on a kids’-TV budget.
The guy who came up with it was an animator on Chicken Run and he has a very CG mind-set. They both work very
well. Wallace & Gromit will
be stop frame forever because that’s where they came from. Shaun the Sheep is stop frame because it came out of Wallace
& Gromit. And then you are
into Purple and Brown, which is
a very simple idea. They are basic blobs of plasticine, blobs of clay, it
doesn’t get simpler than that, and you could do it in CG but the actual joy of
it is that it’s globs of plasticine doing stuff.

TV KIDS: Since you ended your agreement with DreamWorks,
would you consider partnering with another studio, or is it best to remain
independent?

LORD: We are seriously considering partnering with ­another
studio. There are many advantages for a studio like ours in teaming up with a
big studio, and there are many advantages to retaining our independence, so
it’s all about a balancing act. A big studio will recognize that as well,
though—that they’ll get the best out of us when we retain our creative
independence.

TV KIDS: How hands-on are you still in the studio’s
projects?

SPROXTON: It varies; when it comes to Shaun the Sheep, I’m probably more hands-on than Pete in terms of
the editorial and the staff. He is more hands-on than I am, at this moment in
time, on the feature development side. We do quite different jobs; we come in
at different stages.

TV KIDS: Many animation studios feel they have to get bigger
in order to compete with the other studios. Is Aardman the size you want it to
be, or do you also feel that pull to make it even bigger?

SPROXTON: It’s gotten far, far too big and it’s hurtling out
of control! [Laughs] It’s an
interesting point. I think you may find over the next few years the reverse
will happen with the way technology is getting smarter and cheaper and faster.
We had a brainstorming session the other day about the CG process. And we asked
where are we going to be in 2012, five years from now. Wouldn’t it be great to
make a film with just 25 people? Wouldn’t that be a great idea? Which is sort
of what you could do in the old days of stop frame. That probably will never
actually quite happen, but I don’t think you will need 250 people in five or
ten years’ time. I think you’ll find that things will get smaller. The big
Hollywood studios came to CG at the point at which it was the most expensive
thing to do. The [software] was expensive; it was slow and cumbersome. Now, in
the second or third generation of CG, it’s cheaper, faster, smarter, and more
people are doing it. Several smaller outfits work with our commercials
division, but they are really quite small outfits and they do lovely work. I
think you’ll find there will be more small companies that have an individual
take and look, rather than the old days of it just being Disney and Warner
Bros.

TV KIDS: How did you first get involved in animation?

SPROXTON: We did some animation when we were 16, in high
school. But we watched [the Beatles’ animated film] Yellow Submarine and Terry Gilliam’s animation enough to be
intrigued. If you try animation you find it has a magical way of bringing
things to life. And stop frame has a magical quality. Once we tried it we were
hooked. We were lucky to get a break in TV when we were still in high
school.

We’ve been quite fortunate with our timing. [When
we started Aardman], animation in Britain had a lot of amateur and low-budget
stuff.

TV KIDS: What gives you most satisfaction from your work?

LORD: Other people. I get a lot of pleasure from the
work of other people, and every so often a bright star will rise to the
surface. The general ethos of the company is such that everyone has worked to
such an amazing level and produced something much better than I would have
predicted when we started this thing. So of course it’s hugely satisfying when
that happens.

SPROXTON: What strikes me is the creative process and
tracking an idea out of the air and trying to make it work. The thing that has
always surprised me during the last few years, as we have done more children’s
work and TV work, has been taking a simple idea and saying, great idea, but we
want 26 half hours of it. And then actually finding the writers and working
with them and creating a body of work around what is actually a very simple
idea. Shaun the Sheep is a very
good example. There are 40 seven-minute episodes based around a flock of sheep
on a farm, and there is no dialogue, and you ask, “How the hell are you going
to do that?” and you find that you can and you do.