Nick Park at the TV Kids Festival

Four-time Oscar winner Nick Park, a co-director at Aardman, spoke at the TV Kids Festival this morning about his journey as an animator and the enduring appeal of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep.

Park said he’s been interested in animation since he was a teen in his keynote conversation with TV Kids’ Anna Carugati, which you can watch in its entirety here. He developed the characters of Wallace and Gromit while at film school and finished the short, A Grand Day Out, at Aardman.

“I absorb everything. I loved stop-motion animation, live action, comedy, cartoons like The Adventures of Tintin. They were all influences. I always draw from my childhood and what I loved as a kid. When I got the idea for A Grand Day Out, which is, this guy builds a rocket in his basement, it was like an amalgamation of all these things I loved, and it was a story I wanted to tell.”

Carugati asked Park about the universal appeal of Shaun the Sheep, who first appeared in the third Wallace and Gromit short, A Close Shave. “He was cute-looking and innocent and turns into a bit of a hero as well. Also, he can be quite cool.”

On working with characters that don’t speak, Park said, “With Gromit, it helps to have Wallace being able to speak. He’s the agent of chaos in Gromit’s world. We are very much seeing Gromit react to Wallace’s stupidity. When we’re storyboarding, it all hinges on Gromit’s story and how he reacts to anything. The audience sees everything through his eyes. Shaun doesn’t have the luxury of any dialogue. He did in A Close Shave, but since he’s had his own series, my colleague Richard Starzak, who set up that series and directed it, he and the team decided no dialogue would make it far more international to sell overseas, which has worked very well. But it means the storytelling has to be very crisp. The visual storytelling. That is always a challenge.”

There is a philosophy at Aardman “that you should be able to follow the story without dialogue at all, even if there is dialogue.”

In discussing the stop-motion animation process, Park said, “The good animators do have an actor deep down inside them. The best animators tend to be good actors. Not all—a lot are very shy people! I do like getting in front of the video camera and acting out what I’m after. I often do that as a way of directing. I will become Gromit. It’s a good way of conveying exactly what you want to the animators.”

On keeping Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep fresh with new stories, Park said, “In the case of Wallace and Gromit, because they don’t have a regular series, they are every now and then, we very much wait for a new idea to come. I’m often just waiting for those lightning strikes. I have a lot of ideas, but it’s which ones make the story, which ones have legs and lend themselves to that story you want to tell. Because Shaun has had his own series for quite a while now, we’ve needed more stories. We have brought in writing teams. I’ve contributed a couple of story ideas. There are over 100 episodes. I’m constantly coming up with more stuff as well.”

Park is currently working on a new Chicken Run movie for Netflix, 20 years since the first film in the franchise. “It picks up shortly after the last film when Rocky and Ginger and the chickens had found their paradise and freedom on this private island. They’re living the perfect life. They have a daughter called Molly. They discover something quite sinister going on close by, which threatens all chicken-kind, and they need to do a rescue mission. This time they’re breaking in.”

Park works across the creative process—writing, producing and directing. Asked what he enjoys most, he said, “It’s a difficult one to be precise because I love the whole process and the satisfaction of thinking up ideas and then seeing it realized on-screen. To have that privilege is incredible. I do love storyboarding. It’s the bit that starts making it real, how you’re going to tell the story. Taking it from the page to the visual, how it will be constructed and executed on-screen. You tend to throw in a lot of ideas and play with ideas.”